Sure it does! When I interview people, I tend to give a fair amount of weight in their side projects, because it's something they were actually interested in.
But that's not standard industry practice. Nobody looks at your Github - except maybe at the final stages of the process. In the meantime you have to get through a lot of filters.
Well, maybe my viewpoint isn't the most common. But I can at least say that it does matter to some companies / interviewers.
My resume has a link to my github and I specifically call out 3 or 4 projects. If you want your side projects to count in an interview, that's probably a good place to start - if nothing else, you can at least use them for buzzword bingo to get past HR ;)
Sure it does! When I interview people, I tend to give a fair amount of weight in their side projects, because it's something they were actually interested in.