[gregrata]

As many have said, don't treat them as side projects. They were apps or products you were working on - if they were at all "real" (e.g., had users or customers) than it was a startup you were trying to get off the ground (a lot of startups are bootstrapped that way).

I've done a lot of this in the past - I built a platform and apps for consumer-focused location aware in the early 2000's, and another app that ended up with around 12 million users.

When I interviewed at Microsoft Research, we barely talked about my "day job" (fairly straightforward C#/.NET enterprise stuff). They ended up focusing on the side stuff - because it was just me doing the design/architecture/coding/company, it was innovative, it was interesting - and I was super passionate about it.