How to Put Side Projects on Your Resume (The Right Way)

Side Projects Are Underutilized Leverage

A compelling side project can outweigh 2 years of standard corporate experience in technical roles. A project you shipped, that users actually use, demonstrates initiative, technical judgment, and the ability to finish things.

When to Include Side Projects

Include if:

• •The project is relevant to the target role
• •It's deployed / live (not just a repo with 3 commits)
• •You can speak to specific technical decisions
• •It demonstrates a skill your work experience doesn't

Exclude if:

• •It's a tutorial clone with no original features
• •The repo is empty or has no README
• •It's completely unrelated

How to Format Side Projects

Create a Projects section:

`

RecipeAI - AI-powered recipe generator 2025 - Present

github.com/username/recipeai | recipeai.app

• •Built full-stack app using Next.js, OpenAI API, and Supabase
• •Implemented semantic search with pgvector -- 4M+ recipe embeddings indexed
• •1,200 monthly active users; 4.3-star App Store rating

`

The "Shipped" Test

Would you be embarrassed to demo this project in an interview? If yes -- polish it first or don't include it.

Making Projects Quantifiable

• •Users (sign-ups, monthly active)
• •GitHub stars
• •Performance metrics (latency, uptime)
• •App Store ratings

Types of Projects That Stand Out

Backend engineers: Distributed systems toy (mini-Redis, mini-Kafka), custom load balancer.

ML engineers: Fine-tuned model on a niche dataset, novel benchmark, open-source contribution to a major framework.

Frontend/full-stack: SaaS tool with paying users, browser extension with users.

Data engineers: ETL pipeline with real data, dbt project, open dataset analysis with published findings.

Add projects to your resume now