No, you're not nuts. Side projects are exactly part of what I'm looking for. If the applicant is not coding in their free time, they become less interesting to me than the ones who are. When you're among triple-to-quadruple-digit numbers of applicants, that kind of thing is really important.
I like to see examples of the code an applicant is currently working with. Even gists are great. I don't expect everyone to have a GitHub account or be extensive users of it, but if you're applying for a tech job it's an easy way to demonstrate your understanding of concepts. As an example, in my case, seeing a custom jQuery plugin in there which makes good use of advanced patterns is an immediate turn-on.
> Put that skills section at the top. You know, before your extra-curricular activities.
I used to feel this way too, but I now find that a person's extra-curricular activities are more indicative of who someone is that some list of "skills", which in turn determines how well they'll do working for me.
Yes, but I consider that to be something that's secondary to the skillset. I don't care as much if we could be best buddies, I'd rather know immediately that they can actually do the job. Second round of filtering looks more at those details, but for first impressions I consider skills more important.
It may be that I'm thinking more of post-resume impressions. I _assume_ the skills are there at that point. You're probably right about skills being listed first on the resume itself.
The few people who hired me so far didn't give a hoot about my actual skills - what I always hear is "We can teach you what you don't know, but if you're not fitting in our team/company culture, we have a problem." Given that so far I didn't have to hire someone (but was present and asked about my opinion in/after a few interviews) I usually follow that idea - what good does an absolute "code ninja" do if he's a pain in the ass to work with?
All well and good, and probably a reality in some circumstances. If a team has the time and resources to teach some guy who happened to enjoy digital home music production a full set of pattern-based jQuery coding techniques, then that rule holds absolutely true. It's still secondary to me, and not only because I hate training new people.
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