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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?

#191

Post by jacknews »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #82
stpn wrote: post #27

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 in…

Sorry but this sounds like LARP, who the hell wouldnt jump on a job offer from apple? Even if it doesnt work out, having Apple on your resume wouldve been an insane career booster, telling people you got an offer from them but didnt take it sounds very unbelievable, atleast personally, I wouldnt have believed you

I have the one-time biggest computer company, I guess the Apple of it's time, on my CV, and was pretty good (still am, I think!). Currently out of work. Such things are not the panacea you make it seem.

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

#192

Post by tech234a »

cableshaft wrote: post #7

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:…

If you still have the IPA file for it, you should look into seeing if it runs on touchHLE [1], an emulator for early versions of iOS. They also have an app archive [2] if you'd like to give permission for them to preserve the game.

[1]: https://touchhle.org/

[2]: https://touchhle.org/app-archive/

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

#193

Post by andrethegiant »

dafelst wrote: post #110

Back in around 2004-2005, I was doing contracting work in Australia for a big retailer, maintaining one of their monolithic webapps that was built using C++, believe it or not. At that time, Ruby on Rails was the new hotness, and I was trying to learn that on the side. When MacOS released their "dashboard widgets" framework back around 2005ish, I wrote a widget for RubyDocs and released it, and it got quite popular.…

Dashboard widgets! I miss those — yes we still have widgets in macOS, but being able to author in HTML/JS/CSS really leveled the playing field in who could contribute. I made a widget called Gas that fetched local gas prices, and that got a bit popular too. Developing it led to my career in frontend and I’m sure didn’t hurt when I applied to (and landed) a job at Apple right out of college.

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

#194

Post by gomoboo »

I put this together during a long job search: https://tintalize.co/

For a given photo of a person, it will provide you with lip cosmetics that match those the person is wearing. My wife gave me the idea saying it would be cool to match what celebrities are wearing.

It definitely helped landing a job. My interviewer said it impressed him and that he had shared it around the company. Everyone called me the lipstick guy for a bit after joining. During the interview it helped to have a non-trivial software project to discuss.

Its only relation to my job is that it’s a Python web app based on Django. I don’t touch any of the computer vision aspects in my day to day.

Now that I’m in a position to hire I put a lot of weight on deployed and working projects. There’s no better way (outside verified career experience) to show you can back up your skill claims.

P.S. I built this years ago so wouldn’t be surprised if it has load-bearing issues. This blog post describes how it looks and works: https://blog.kyleingraham.com/2018/11/28/lip-colour-finder/

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

#195

Post by dicknuckle »

I was learning Docker as a curiosity, and trying NxFilter to satisfy my rage towards Advertisements around the same time. That led to me writing a Dockerfile to run NxFilter which led to teaching myself lots of things about automated build pipelines, adding flair and craft to a git repo, and offering best-effort support to random users on the Internet.

NxFilter ended up asking if I would be ok with being the official docker image and listed me on their website and in documentation.

I listed that on my resume for getting into DevOps fulltime and got the job. Now I work with people all over the US, Canada, and India.

I am job searching at the moment. While I adore 99% of the people I work with, the work itself isn't meaningful and I've survived 3 layoffs in 1.5 years. In my job preference list, it's currently only a few steps above HR/Payroll PAAS companies, just above Food/Dining/Beverage/Travel. I'd rather work on something that's improving people's quality of life, or solving the world's problems or making something more efficient for people outside of tech.

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

#196

Post by aaronmiler »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #83

I built https://foragoodstrftime.com ~10 years ago as I was sick of reading the docs for date formatting. It generally gets around 1000 users a day. Over the years, it's gotten me consulting gigs and the occasional job offer (amidst other projects). Today, it sends a decent chunk of the traffic and sign-ups to my startup, Wafris -> https://wafris.org OP's asking for a strategy with these, and the advice I'd offer is…

Just want to say thank you. I've used your site tons over the years, it's been a great resource

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

#197

Post by dcl »

In 2014, I managed to get a fairly good job at a large institutional bank, without a formal interview process because the person hiring (who would be my boss) liked a blog I had written on quant sports betting during my PhD.
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