How do you balance this on the resume. I got plenty of cool project ideas, but outside of entry level, it just seems odd to list them on the resume (which I presume is the only way they’ll be seen by anyone giving the consensus on LinkedIn and personal sites). o feel it’d just look weird when you have projects and skills that seemingly have no relevance to your work experience especially when applying to roles that are mid level or senior.

It seems that a lot of things are just no possible to learn on the side as well. For example, doing anything at a large scale. That could be HPC stuff or just designing and building systems that need to handle high throughput without slowing or failing. I can’t afford to have the sort of projects that would allow me to learn those things.

The exception I can imagine is working on high visibility OSS projects and is a huge time sink and might as well be a second job.

Too negative an outlook, imho. You do the research and add the keywords, maybe project to your resume. If grilled you say I have some experience but am not an expert.

Also, you’d be surprised how much you can get done on a modern PC with vms or containers, it isn’t the nineties or aughts any longer. We used to run a full vfx company on what amounts to a single souped $10k PC today.

Or, rent a heavy-duty cloud vm for $100 a month, small investment but clock ticking will get you motivated.