I purchased Dell's original Project Sputnik XPS 13 to be my daily driver and was dismayed at how awful the touchpad was. I couldn't disable tap-to-click, palm detection was terrible, you get the idea. I fixed it so it was bearable to use, upstreamed my patches, and ultimately got a job at Canonical thanks to the connections I made in the process.
Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
131–140 of 538 posts
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am genuinely unsure if this is a parody comment. I am assuming that you are fairly green behind the ears? The thing about Big Tech companies is that they hire lots of developers. That’s in large part makes them Big Tech. “Having Apple on your CV” is not as prestigious as you’re making out. It doesn’t mean you have The Knowledge that makes you a ‘10x developer’ or whatever anywhere you work. In fact, it could mean t…
From a developers perspective youre right, most of us here probably wouldnt be able to keep up with the amount of work it takes to thrive at apple, sure. Im looking at it from a future employers view, who sees "Apple", has an iPhone, and immediately has an idea in his head about what kind of developer you are, even if its completely inaccurate- Its all marketing. But also, immediately assuming youre not gonna make it…
Apple recruiters have the professionalism and organizational skills of a shady manual labor staffing firm. 5 1-hour rounds, low-balled, and treated with what felt like an ad-hoc process. Wasn't impressed with the people, nor the caliber of engineering talent.
The same is true of Microsoft (Azure specifically), Google, and Amazon.
Only two "traditional" big tech companies of any note for having sharp people and all-around good vibes are Meta and Netflix. Otherwise, I'd rather go with a unicorn like Snowflake or Databricks, which feels more what software engineering was like in the aughts: exploratory, pioneering, actually building things that people haven't before, rather than gluing stuff together or being drowned in the machinations of some incompetent director.
I wouldn't make it at Apple, because I would get pissed off and quit. There's more to life than money. I don't want to work with people that see "FAANG" (or use "staffed by ex-FAANG" in their recruiting pitch) and think it's a good signal to be presenting.
Putting in a stint at any of these lower end tech companies would cost me intangibles that I'm not willing to give up at this stage of my life. Namely, my sanity, spiritual well-being, and fulfillment with life.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#133Way back when the Nintendo Wii was brand new and hard to find, I wrote a script to scrape Target.com for store inventory and notify me if a nearby store restocked. A few years after that I revamped it to check on inventory for newly released iPad models. I put the code up on GitHub [1] and the CTO for a company that had large-scale store inventory checking as part of their product emailed me out of the blue after see…
Why did you turn it down then regret that? I don’t hear that often, that’s why I’m curious
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#134A 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 in…
I remember seeing this published when I worked at Sonos. In fact, I might have been the one who put it on the Slack channel.
It was a cool project at a time when a lot of people were saying it was insurmountable to make us AirPlay compatible.
Sorry you didn’t get the job. I hope you didn’t lose much sleep over it. I left in 2020. I wouldn’t say you’re missing much any more.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#135My business partner and I built AsUnit in ~2004. [0]
The first fully functional Unit Test framework for ActionScript. It was great fun and helped get my career off the ground.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#136Halfmoon: https://www.gethalfmoon.com
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#137Not 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 NetEn…
> Not a side project, per say
I'd disagree with that. Community building is every bit as much work, and arguably often more impactful than just putting up yet another OSS repo on github.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#138I co-authored a smart contract compiler that landed me two different jobs.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#139I stopped maintaining a popular JavaScript beautifier/diff/analysis tool 4 years ago that won me several jobs.
Since then I have been working on a file streaming application. Its side items in that project that have been winning me jobs lately, primarily anything to do with full duplex socket streaming and browser test automation.
As a JavaScript developer took me months this year how to sell my experience and skills from my side projects. As a JavaScript/TypeScript developer you can do the same shit everybody else does, which is put text on screen using a giant framework. If that is the kind of employment you are looking for be prepared to degrade yourself to working with newbs that have high insecurity, low self-esteem, and spend all their time talking about how awesome they are. Its all marketing all the time, no original application code, and outsourcing everything to some external tool. As a developer you are a commodity product to hire/fire just like public is to social media. This line of work no longer interested me, so I spent months unemployed figuring this out.
Instead your alternative as a JavaScript/TypeScript developer is niche skills, which is in higher demand than it sounds. It seems almost nobody can figure out test automation in the browser. Having application architecture skills is a huge plus, which typically means Java/C# and HTTP session management with something like Spring, but if you can demonstrate a more generalized approach to application architecture you have a skill that you can adapt to a bunch of different things. It also helps having things like a security clearance and security certifications. There are a huge number of cleared developer jobs that recruiters cannot fill.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#140I made a hobby of writing intro posts on deep technical topics, from DNS to concurrency to cutting cloud cost. From 2009 ish onwards all my gigs have been at least helped if not initiated by someone reading a post and saying "we should talk to this guy".
Not a magic spell. I had been writing for almost ten years prior before anyone noticed, and only a fraction get any play.