This is as true outside of technical fields. I've been giving talks at Career Centers about communicating passion to find a job after college, and the thing that is most attractive to employers is creating something or communicating passion.
And Feross? Outstanding. In the next talk I give, you're in the spotlight. Congratulations!
Some people have told me to wrap my personal projects up as a "company" and say that I am employed by myself, basically list it as a job.
For example, I wrote a lot of C code in the 90's, but never "professionally" and so I periodically encounter recruiters whose brain just implodes at that concept. How could I possibly know C if I never did it for a paycheck? Is he lying? Talk about an insane world view.
I do pretty much the same thing at work and during the evenings but working on my own stuff, with me being the boss is just so much better for motivation that there is no comparison. I do perhaps twice as much during 4 hours in the evening than I do during my work day.
[1]Nothing matters more to employers than seeing that you actually have a passion for building things. There are a lot of people who have got certifications up to their eyes, but don't really care too much about tech.
There is a huge difference between the person that goes home and spends their nights working on a building cookie-baking-robot, or the next big social-networking website, and somebody that goes home and watches the TV.
I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with watching TV, just that having somebody who likes doing the type of work you're hiring them to do so much that they actually do it even when they don't have to is going to go a long way towards motivating them. It also means that they, typically, are good independent learners. I imagine that this is a hugely important trait in an industry where doing things that might seem kindof insane (like running a data-store that hasn't even reached a 1.0 release yet) is considered normal.
[1]Obviously, within reason. If you've got a passion for building things, but you think that a server is somebody that brings you food at a restaurant, you might not be well suited to a system administrator position.
(Or maybe this is all just wishful thinking. I love building things, but haven't yet gotten my dream job.)