[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
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Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
I'm curious to see what projects members of this community have
worked on that contributed to them getting a job. What's the
project? How did it help you land a job? Did the project itself
get you the job or did it help in the interview process? Was the
project work related to the job at all?
Author : jessehorne
Score : 27 points
Date : 2023-12-03 22:16 UTC (43 minutes ago)
| doublemint2203 wrote:
| Working on cubesat club for my university. Helped me get 2nd
| round internship interview @ Mr. Beast studios. not sure if this
| counts since internship + haven't got job yet, but I think it
| played a big role in helping me advance.
| askonomm wrote:
| I created a system-agnostic router[1], a Markdown parser[2] and a
| WYSIWYG editor[3] in Clojure/ClojureScript that definitely helped
| me get Clojure gigs. I was told in the interview process on
| multiple occasions that my open source work stood out from the
| competition.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/askonomm/ruuter
|
| [2]: https://github.com/askonomm/clarktown
|
| [3]: https://github.com/askonomm/blocko
| gavinhoward wrote:
| https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/bc
|
| It got me a C programming job that had nothing to do with the
| side project.
|
| I would say that it only helped me in the interview process, but
| it did so in two ways:
|
| * I could actually answer C-related questions on top of the more
| generic questions.
|
| * It showed that I had skill in C.
| nadermx wrote:
| Not a job I took. But when I launched
| https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover I got offered a high
| level position in a a photo company via my email which at the
| time was on my GitHub profile.
| movedx wrote:
| Not a side project, per say, but I answered questions on my local
| Linux User Group almost daily. After applying for a job and not
| hearing back, I got a request to come in for an interview weeks
| afterwards. Long story short, the boss told me he saw my
| responses on the mailing list and it turns out I knew more than
| the RHCEs and CCNAs walking into his interviews.
|
| That landed me my first job ever in IT as a Junior NetEng and
| eventually a Linux SysAd.
| cableshaft wrote:
| This game I made and released on iPhone way back in the day
| directly led to me getting my first full-time job making mobile
| apps for a startup as the Lead Developer. I showed it during my
| interview.
|
| It's no longer on the App Store as there's just been too many big
| changes I couldn't keep up with on that codebase. I'm working on
| a followup right now for Steam that I'd like to port to mobile
| afterwards.
|
| Gameplay video: https://youtu.be/uy08ohBLGhE
| excitednumber wrote:
| I've learned an unbelievable amount trying to systematically
| invest on my own.
|
| All of what I have learned is levered in my career and I've
| utilized that knowledge during all interviews.
| jessehorne wrote:
| Care to elaborate? Never had the money to invest but have
| dabbled with some very basic auto trading algos. Long story
| short, before I learned any math related to gambling, I didn't
| understand why martingale can't work in gambling or investment.
| Now I do. :P
| takkatakka wrote:
| It was my half hearted attempt at factorio with Clojure:
| https://github.com/pyrrhic/learning-clojure-factorio-clone
|
| It mostly just showed that I had a genuine interest in
| programming, and served as a talking point (why Clojure, my
| experience with it, etc). The project wasn't related to the job
| at all.
| jessehorne wrote:
| I've put a lot of hours into factorio. This is amazing. I
| genuinely love the art style in the gif.
| darajava wrote:
| https://audiodiary.ai is a flutter app i'm building atm and it's
| helped me get a few contracts. not really a side project and tbh
| i think it turns some people off
| thibaut_barrere wrote:
| I started https://github.com/thbar/kiba#kiba-etl to scratch my
| own itch & be able to write properly structured ETL jobs in Ruby.
| It was a blank-slate rewrite of something larger
| (activewarehouse-etl) which I could not maintain anymore.
|
| This landed me not strictly a job, but long term consulting gigs
| with a number of companies in EU, UK & US.
|
| The job was directly related to the project: companies wanted the
| expertise of data engineering & ETL, often with Kiba directly,
| but also in general.
|
| This "side project" was totally worth it :-)
| louisstow wrote:
| I built an early HTML5 game engine in 2010 called CraftyJS when
| Facebook games were starting to become big. The project itself
| got me the job at a gaming startup and an offer at Zynga.
| delduca wrote:
| 15 years ago I wrote a game engine[1], and on my first interview
| of my life I presented the code and got the offer!
|
| 1 - https://github.com/skhaz/wintermoon
| xena wrote:
| My blog https://xeiaso.net (source code:
| https://github.com/Xe/site) and the stuff I've written for it
| ended up doing several things to help me get employed over the
| years:
|
| 1. Letting me have a place to write to get better at writing,
| which makes it easier to do my in DevRel.
|
| 2. Lets me talk about all of the interesting projects I work on
| (eg: an AI novel writing experiment
| https://xeiaso.net/videos/2023/ai-hackathon/) that people
| regularly find interesting. This gets people interested in
| wanting to employ me, which ends up working up well for me in the
| long run.
|
| Do side projects, but write about what you did and what you
| learned.
| jessehorne wrote:
| I've heard from many that writing can help build credibility
| for hiring purposes. I have committed myself to writing at
| least something on all future projects because of this. Thanks
| for the tip.
|
| p.s your use of "Technophilosopher" and "chaos magician" to
| describe yourself is incredible
| flakes wrote:
| Not really a side project, but I used to be a lot more active on
| stackoverflow. A recruiter reached out to me through the job
| board that stackexchange used to host. Been with the job for
| about 5 years now.
|
| Pretty lame that they discontinued that job board. It was a lot
| nicer experience than using linkedin.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > Pretty lame that they discontinued that job board.
|
| I used to hire people straight off of SO. Sometimes skipping
| the usual process of they has solid answers to the types of
| questions we's ask - went straight for culture fit.
|
| I think instead of blaming ai and other esoteric reasons for
| SO'a downfall leadership should look into the damage cancelling
| the job board has done. People helping others at least had the
| incentive of being given a job. Now there's no point really.
| sodality2 wrote:
| My most recent post about my side project [0] got me some
| freelancing work as well as an internship for this summer.
| Project was related to both of them! Unbelievably grateful for
| the opportunities it's given me.
|
| I've got thoughts about the ability for side projects to directly
| demonstrate not just proficiency, but passion, which is very
| important in undergrad when looking for opportunities. Might end
| up writing a blog post about it.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38252566
| jantypas2 wrote:
| Well, a very long time ago, in a company funded far far away (and
| since defeated by the empire), I had the "joy" of working with
| Sendmail. For you youngsters, back then, back when we had dial
| telephones (tell us more Grandpa!), there were multiple "mail
| networks", not just this fancy Internet you kids have. Sendmail
| was a mail processor that could not only arrange to send and
| receive mail, but it could translate addressing between the
| different networks (ARPA, Bitnet, CSNET, UUCP, etc.) The problem
| was, reading a sendmail config file was something like reading
| assembly code except you weren't allowed to by vowels. It was
| nearly all symbols -- executable line noise. I got tired of
| working with it - so I wrote my own sendmail compiler/de-compiler
| of sorts just to work in English prose. Got me my job at Sun.
| echelon wrote:
| I was planning to go into grad school for computational biology,
| but an early Square engineer saw me playing with the thing I'd
| built on the side of a Waffle House at 2 or 3 AM [1,2].
|
| We exchanged numbers, and after six or so months of talking to
| me, they convinced me to join them instead. I got in early and
| had a really good exit. Completely changed the course of my life.
|
| My other passion (apart from biology) was film. I've made a lot
| of indie films over the last decade, but I always focused on film
| tech - volumetric video, mocap, etc. I'm currently building a
| startup in that space that started as one of my side projects.
| We're doing really well!
|
| Side projects have _always_ led to inflection points in my life.
| They have more pull than anything else, and they lead me down
| interesting problem gradients.
|
| I'll get back to biology one day. I have some ideas there, too.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/5XTi-jf-ans
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/x034jVB1avs
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Oh my, this called for me.
|
| I did a side-project related to Second Life in 2007, and it
| landed me a job at Amazon Web Services in 2008.
|
| I narrated the story back then, and replicated it on Medium [0].
|
| I don't want to brag or anything, but please trust me if I tell
| you that this is a good story to read.
|
| [0]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-
| com-...
| iamthepieman wrote:
| [delayed]
| zulban wrote:
| My AI sandbox game https://www.chesscraft.ca helped me get a
| great transfer within government to an AI prototyping team at
| Environment Canada. The job is a bit of a unicorn because it's
| full remote with tons of freedom.
| stpn wrote:
| A long time ago sonos didn't support apple airplay.
|
| I did some protocol reversing and wrote a small program that
| pretended to be an airplay speaker to pipe audio to a sonos
| speaker (archive: https://github.com/stephen/airsonos)
|
| I ended up getting recruiting messages from both the airplay team
| at apple and some folks from sonos. I didn't end up taking either
| offer, but it was also an interesting talking point when
| interviewing for the job I did take.
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