Having a side project every now and then is beneficial in many ways. Recently I had such positive experience from some of my side projects that are more than five years old. My manager asked me "Hey do you have some node.js experience?" and it was such a good feeling to answer "yes".
As a reader of my blog, you may have noticed I'm primarily a .NET developer, but during my career and in my spare time, I tried various technologies. One of those is node.js and even though it's more than five years since I worked on it, I learned some concepts and still have the knowledge to work on a basic node.js app.
This moment felt like a reward for something I even forgot I did. Something I did out of curiosity and fun and never expected to get credits for it, especially this far in the future. It motivated me to write this post to remember myself that trying new stuff, going out of a comfort zone, learning something that interests you, some day may pay off.
Top comments (10)
Hey, its was awesome to know about your Experience. I'm trying to specialize in Nodejs to get a full time job role. can you recommend some projects or resources that I can Follow ? Truly Appreciate your Help!
Hi, thanks for reading my post. Unfortunately I don't have a recommendation to you that would be better than just searching the web. I'm not a Node.js developer so I don't have better resources or community to recommend.
To learn there are sites like Udemy or Pluralsight.
To find projects, go for some of your own interests, or search for open source Node.js projects on GitHub for example.
Good book to read is The comprehensive guide NodeJs by Rheinwerk computing.
What do you need to know about NodeJS? anything specific ?
I'm trying to get a job as a backend dev. specificially what skills/frameworks in backend for nodejs I need to learn for that, and what kind of projects should I build ?
I would say create API's, Full ecommerce backend, some sort of email backend for your portfolio, Also a project that has a authentication so then you can build a full authentication system with JWT etc. Web scrapers are good little first backend project.
u will need to just learn Nodejs in general and everything else will come in to play later. Start with a small project at first.
That's really a good approach. Thanks @shawn2208 !
Embracing side projects extends beyond immediate gains. The ability to respond affirmatively to a manager's query about Node.js expertise, cultivated over five years through a side project, exemplifies the timeless nature of learning. This showcases that delving into varied technologies out of curiosity, even if it seems unrelated to the current role, can serve as a reservoir of knowledge, enriching one's skill set in unexpected ways.
Side projects always pay off, in many ways 😉
I'm senior developer on a SASS project at my daytime job. Many of the technologies, utilities and migration paths we take, comes from things I developed experience with in my personal projects.
It's always good to be curious...