181–190 of 538 posts
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 NetEn…
At my first 2 professional game industry jobs the people interviewing me had been players of a halflife source engine mod I was heavily involved in authoring. I think that was probably the major thing that got me in the industry.
Very good question. I don't have a degree so the way that I use to demonstrate my skills is all due to public projects. I'll show you the main projects that really landed me my first tech jobs. Granted, they weren't very good and have many engineering problems. I was still learning at the time but here they are: 1. https://github.com/robertsdotpm/pyp2p - This was an attempt to make a peer-to-peer networking library i…
Around 2008/2009 I was working in a public relations position, and web development was still just a hobby for me. My boss owned a pro volleyball team, one of my responsibilities was managing an online community for fans. Every time we needed changes to the community forums, we had to hire external devs who were very slow and very expensive. So I explained my boss that I could code and asked if I could just do the cha…
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.
wow just a immediate offer?
It went to the front page of Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8315616). At the time I was a student in Spain doing coding just for fun, so any job-related opportunity would be slim and with really bad pay (I had actually already worked a bit as a dev for a pittance).
Someone contacted me and offered some really fun freelancing projects for what at the time seemed like an absurdly ridiculous large amount of money, so much that I got a great designer friend involved and split the money so the project would be even better.
I learned many things from that and as my curiosity pumped me to keep learning. I read about cases of people making 500k+/year as "normal" devs (meaning, not managers, and also not famous). Most of my Spanish peers didn't even believe that existed at the time, and thought I was crazy believing those "obviously fake" blog posts. But I've been working for USA companies basically since then, and couldn't be happier/wouldn't look back.
SSLPing would check TLS servers like SSLlabs does, but way faster and would repeat the test every day and email you alerts. Got to 700 users, and impressed a few hiring managers. SSLPing's shutdown made the HN front page in 2021!
SSLBoard would scrape all Certificate Transparency logs and collect and index all certificates in real time. I got my last job thanks to it.
I even refused an incredible acqui-hire offer from a US company. I thought I'd rather work on my project alone... I should probably have said yes.
I've started working on SSLBoard again, and I'm moving SSLPing to a serverless architecture, because I have nothing left to show recruiters, only stories to tell...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I read the parent comment to mean he declined the offer, not that he didn't receive it