djmill

I hike and backpack as much as I can.

It also helps that I built myself a side project to keep track of all of the trails I hike/camp, so this pushes me to find new places to explore and to add new trails to the site.

While hiking only works out certain muscles, it could be a nice way for you to change up your routine.

Very weird, now it works after reading this and re-checking.

Oddly enough I restarted Chrome and Firefox twice before posting the comment in hopes that it was just my machine. Thanks for the sanity check!

This site is great - and it looks like there are others out there too.

I use this for backpacking and astrophotography to figure out precipitation and cloud patterns (as to not waste a drive out). Very helpful!

Totally agree. It's great for fellow engineers to poke around on to make sure you aren't an idiot or aren't copying/pasting projects from the web, but you're right.. for the most part, no one cares about side projects when it comes to trying to snag a new job.

Good to know. Maybe I'll post again in a couple of months to see if I can snag more users.

Nice! Yeah definitely mixed results with Reddit, but it's great for free one-time advertising.

Another downside is you can't hit your audience more than once without being targeted a spammer, so I like to think of it as a free 'usertesting.com' outlet.

Yeah it's definitely mixed. Luckily I haven't had any negative feedback, it's been mostly positive and I've had some great suggestions as well. Downside is it takes a bit of time to post the same thing across subreddits, but it's free.

Reddit.

As an experiment I posted my side project in subreddits related to what the project's about. I went from ~15 registered users to 45 registered users in a couple of days. Google Analytics showed ~300 new users in 1 day and ~3000k page views within a couple of days.

Just by posting there and using Google Analytics for the most basic metrics, it boosted my site's ranking in google searches which helped. The numbers I got back are tiny, but it's fun to see new users still signing up and adding data to my project.

Onsite engineers for UAT and rapid bug fix turnaround. Most bugs reported from customers, during UAT, are fixed by the next morning for another round of testing. This is not always the case, but for most issues, we turn them around in less than 12 hours and the customer is blown away.

This happens ~4 times/year for major releases.

Very true

Yeah I'm currently at the 'next big project' and asked for a fair raise. I got a bonus and was told salary reviews will happen within a few months. The company reviews everyone at the same time... maybe they should reconsider if I go and find what I'm looking for.