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Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

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Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#121

Post by binwiederhier »

I wrote a Dropbox-like file sync and share application called Syncany [1] as a side project back in 2014/2015. While it never made it out of alpha, it had gotten some traction, and looking back, I am still proud of the architecture and design (not so much of the code, hehe).

One day, a developer from this random company in Connecticut (I am German and lived in Germany at the time) reached out to me in my project's IRC channel, and asked if I wanted to interview. I did, and I got the job.

I moved to the UK, then to the US with my wife, and stayed with the company for 8 years. I got promoted from senior engineer to Sr. Principal Engineer and had an amazing time there. I now have a green card and live in CT with my 2 amazing children (with German and American citizenship).

I often think back about how much that project and that person who reached out to me changed my life. How different it would be if I hadn't worked on my side project, if it hadn't become semi-popular, or if he hadn't reached out. Butterfly effect at it's finest.

[1] https://www.syncany.org

Edit: Fun fact: Drew Houston (Dropbox CEO) emailed me at the time and wanted to hire me, but he didn't respond when I emailed him back. And even many years later when I applied at Dropbox they didn't want me, hehe.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#122

Post by monooso »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #97
KomoD wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who the hell wouldnt jump on a job offer from apple? Lots of people, including me.

Lots of people love being contrarian in theory. If it happened to you for real, no chance youre gonna say no to that

Not everyone shares your goals or values.

I've used Apple products for years and generally like them a lot as a company, but I have no interest in working for them or any other large US tech company.

The money is good, of course, but the quality of life sacrifices aren't worth it (for me).

That's not contrarianism. That's understanding what matters to me.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#123

Post by solarkraft »

fipar wrote: post #33

Back in 2002 I lost my job during a regional financial crisis (I’m from Uruguay). I was working at a bank (as a contractors) and some coworkers and I were working on a HA project for MySQL at the moment (to use it at work). Once I got laid off, I focused on it to the point that it became quite useful, and at some point, someone from Israel reached out with questions. I answered with a lot of delay, and when I explain…

> who were good about it and gave me a free 1 year subscription to Enterprise MySQL when I renamed the project

Sun really was good, huh?

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#124

Post by binwiederhier »

fipar wrote: post #37
fipar wrote: post #33

Back in 2002 I lost my job during a regional financial crisis (I’m from Uruguay). I was working at a bank (as a contractors) and some coworkers and I were working on a HA project for MySQL at the moment (to use it at work). Once I got laid off, I focused on it to the point that it became quite useful, and at some point, someone from Israel reached out with questions. I answered with a lot of delay, and when I explain…

I mean better things became available to manage HA in a MySQL deployment.

Having done a large scale MySQL deployment (700+ servers), I still find the HA landscape in MySQL land pretty sad. It's all very manual, nad it's very easy to screw up failovers. Even with Vitesse or Orchestrator or semi-sync ...

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#125

Post by rikafurude21 »

monooso wrote: post #122
rikafurude21 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people love being contrarian in theory. If it happened to you for real, no chance youre gonna say no to that

Not everyone shares your goals or values. I've used Apple products for years and generally like them a lot as a company, but I have no interest in working for them or any other large US tech company. The money is good, of course, but the quality of life sacrifices aren't worth it (for me). That's not contrarianism. That's understanding what matters to me.

fair enough

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#126

Post by akoboldfrying »

aleku wrote: post #113

In 2003/2004, during my undergrad, I observed a recurring trend in the university's IT department. They struggled to retain Unix/Linux engineers for more than three months, primarily due to two reasons: the university's remote location (apparently engineers loved the city life) and the local telecom companies' at the time hired anyone who could type "ls" on a Linux shell. Recognizing an opportunity, I began self-stud…

> eventually went to "ls" elsewhere

Poetic

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#127

Post by financypants »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #97
KomoD wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who the hell wouldnt jump on a job offer from apple? Lots of people, including me.

Lots of people love being contrarian in theory. If it happened to you for real, no chance youre gonna say no to that

Would you say the majority of people who claim to be contrarian aren’t actual contrarians, in your experience? I’m not sure you can infer this in general.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#128

Post by rbalicki »

It is unclear to me whether this "landed me a job", but in advance of working at big tech, I made a presentation about Smithy (www.smithy.rs), in which there was an engineer in the audience (employed at the same big tech co). I believe he lobbied for my candidacy with the hiring committee.

Secondly, before taking my most recent job (at Pinterest), I had just secured a conference talk about Isograph (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO65JJRqjuc). At both companies where I eventually got offers, I spent a good amount of interview time nerding about Isograph with the interviewers.

Ultimately, it's unclear if this tipped the balance in any case, but the side projects seemed helpful.

----

Previously, while interviewing at a previous place, I showed off a side project to the interviewers, ran into a bug, and deployed a fix in real time. I was later told that they had never seen that. I think I would've gotten that job anyway, though.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#129

Post by mgerdts »

I was active in various areas of OpenSolaris, contributing to design discussions, code, and code review. Most of this was in the intersection of zones, installation, and zfs. Some were just scratching an itch, like “manwhich”.

https://www.illumos.org/opensolaris/ARChive/PSARC/2007/688/m...

Once Oracle acquired Sun and hiring started, I was hired into the zones team. While interviewing I discussed my ongoing work on zfs dataset aliasing to virtualize the zfs dataset hierarchy in zones. After being hired I was able to get this feature prioritized to make it into Solaris 11.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#130

Post by KomoD »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #97
KomoD wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who the hell wouldnt jump on a job offer from apple? Lots of people, including me.

Lots of people love being contrarian in theory. If it happened to you for real, no chance youre gonna say no to that

> If it happened to you for real, no chance youre gonna say no to that

100% guarantee I would

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