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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?

#141

Post by fipar »

binwiederhier wrote: post #124
fipar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

Oh, definitely, I meant things better than my project had become available. MySQL still has a long way to go in terms of friendly HA, and I’m not sure it will ever get to the level of something like cockroachdb. There’s plenty of room for improvements in that area, just not through something like what I was doing (mostly shell scripts).

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

#142

Post by cobertos »

I made and maintained a geo-based chat app for a friend/client (https://hihey.org, though they took it offline for now I believe). I used Matrix as the basis for it and started putting that on my resumes after finding it fun to work with and experience.

I got a couple of reach outs based on having that keyword on my profile alone on YC's job board and on LinkedIn that led to some paid consulting.

Not as life changing as some of the other answers but I'm amazed when this sort of thing even happens

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

#143

Post by johnwheeler »

binwiederhier wrote: post #121

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 IR…

Awesome story! Thank you

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

#145

Post by fipar »

solarkraft wrote: post #123
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?

Considering I was (unknowingly) very obviously infringing their trademark (X for MySQL was OK, MySQL-X was not), yeah, I felt the whole thing was handled in a good way.

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

#146

Post by logtempo »

doublemint2203 wrote: post #2

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.

Did a similar thing. I did a cubesat internship at some university (different from where I was), which played a role in getting a master and then an other internship at a lab working on a part of a scientific satellite to study Jupiter's moons (launched in 2023!).

And so on. It's crazy how pushing a series of little things can put you on the right path, especially early on life.

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

#147

Post by lewi »

After working for a while at a marketing/digital shop, the topic of crypto came up over a work lunch one day. I fell down the rabbit hole and found a nascent project with some interesting stuff on the tech side.

I saw they had a bounty program for a mobile app, I built an app alpha & claimed the bounty. The foundation running the project saw this and reached out. 6 years, 3 countries & a few wild rides later, I can't thank the guy who was crapping on crypto enough.

Edit: check out some crypto bounties here: https://bountycaster.xyz/

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

#148

Post by patrickkidger »

I wrote a JAX-based neural network library (Equinox [1]) and numerical differential equation solving library (Diffrax [2]).

At the time I was just exploring some new research ideas in numerics -- and frankly, procrastinating from writing up my PhD thesis!

But then one of the teams at Google starting using them, so they offered me a job to keep developing them for their needs. Plus I'd get to work in biotech, which was a big interest of mine. This was a clear dream job offer, so I accepted.

Since then both have grown steadily in popularity (~2.6k GitHub stars) and now see pretty widespread use! I've since started writing several other JAX libraries and we've turned this into a bit of a foundation for a JAX sciML ecosystem.

[1] https://github.com/patrick-kidger/equinox

[2] https://github.com/patrick-kidger/diffrax

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

#149

Post by CM30 »

Weirdly enough, my gaming website seemingly had an effect on getting me a few of my previous roles. For the most part that was because it showed I could code HTML/CSS/JavaScript when starting out all those years ago, but saying I interviewed celebrities and folks with a lot of experience in their industry helped a lot too.

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

#150

Post by turbocon »

aristus wrote: post #140

I 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.

Link?
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