about hobby projects
2026-02-26
Hobby projects are weird in this day and age, especially if their purpose is to showcase your enthusiasm and skillset to new employers. Software engineers often aren’t able to present prior work as it’s typically closed source. Hobby projects were a way to present that craftsmanship.
I say “were” as the effort needed to spin up a hobby project is going way down. Claude can write a Raft library or any other old idea for you in any language you want in no time. Do you need to understand anything to make that happen? Does it show that you learned anything in the process?
This makes me think that just having a repo with some code, good or bad code, is not really a signal of someone’s craftsmanship. What matters is the intent and process of how that code came to be.
But how would you present that?
my projects
I’ve now sorted my hobby projects into two categories:
- Something I want to have
- Something I want to learn
If I’m trying to learn, I need to use my own brain, which means no agents. If all I’m caring about is to build something specific, then I don’t mind using agents.
I’m going to add a section to my public projects’ README.md to indicate which kind of writing process it has been.
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