I don't think there was one particular project, but in general the hobby code I showcased on my blog. I know my interviewer in 2012 checked my blog and asked about the hobby games I was building, for example. I recently used the same blog as a way to show a few examples of my personal technical writing in another process. Overall I think that blog contributed to me getting hired twice.
Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
21–30 of 32 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#22I made a projection mapping app for macOS, later expanded to iOS and that eventually got me a job as an iOS developer.
Then in that job, I expanded on another personal project I saw had application in the company, and now I work on that full time with a full team.
Before I was really struggling to get hired, I worked with a somewhat obscure language for an obscure application, noone in the software industry knew anything about it and it was incredibly hard to get interviews. I'd got sick of the whole thing anyway, so just decided to expand some little personal coding experiments into a full app
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#23I created a handful of application around water engineering/modelling [1], plus an open source library to run the simulations in javascript [2].
A water utility in Spain spun off a start up to create a similar web based water modelling application and they used my open source library.
They approached me and I joined them and have been able to maintain the open source library as part of my role.
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#24Five years back, my Della [0] project got me hired. It was a Secret Santa app built using Django. They also noticed Rockstar [1], a joke project, and I wasn't expecting anyone to bring it up. However, they liked how I was managing the issues and pull requests.
Also, I have two side projects which seem to get a lot of attention from other developers, and they have reached out to me to hire:
- fast sqlite inserts [2] - I am experimenting with inserting one billion rows as quickly as possible for a test database
- caskdb [3] - an educational project which teaches you to build a KV store from scratch
[0] - https://github.com/avinassh/della
[1] - https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#25This comment will probably be the least impressive of all - but early 2017 I paid someone random online $60 for a WordPress website (tech blog) he had made and didn't seem to care for. I bought it, learnt about HTML and CSS while editing and posting every week. And towards the end of 2017 when I graduated from undergrad and went back home, it was that project/experience with WordPress that landed me one of my most fun jobs I've ever had.
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#26https://sertae.com/knotwork - 3D jewellery design app I’ve created in 2012
In 2012 I had a hard time looking for a job in my trained engineering field, so I’ve decided to do something constructive with the spare time between interview calls and meetings. I took some new tech (back then) like WebGL, Canvas, Workers and combined them with 3D modeling, matrix math, 3D printing limitations. It was a lot of fun and I’ve learned a lot.
The day it went live on production I had this feeling “ok, it’s done, what now?”. SEO, social media, ads, all of them needed some time to kick in. I’ve added to the CV my fresh, new, software engineering experience and sent few of them for frontend developer positions. Got a job the very next day. Even now, when it is already dated, has a lot of technical debt or looks like coded by a 3 yr old, we did had a good laugh at the expense of my younger self, discussing how my craft has changed. It’s a great conversation starter, and a live example that you can deliver, however it looks like. I will refactor it one day. I hope.
Since then, during job seeking, no code assignment was ever needed.
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#27GitArena - https://github.com/mellowagain/gitarena
GitArena is a GitHub/Gitea/GitLab clone written in Async Rust using Tokio and Actix-Web on the backend and server-rendered HTML with htmx for interactivity.
I commented on the "Who wants to be hired?" thread of this month with this being my main portfolio show-off project. It worked and I have gotten already 2 job offers now.
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#28None, ever. I can’t recall anyone paying attention to my personal projects in a hiring situation. And when hiring people I pay almost no attention to personal projects unless I’m hiring a green junior. Companies hire people who can add business value and work as a team member and part of the larger organization. Personal projects don’t communicate that.
Uh, I absolutely look at interviewee's personal projects, especially if they are using technology directly related to what I'm looking for. Also especially when they are literally a creator/maintainer of one of the open source libraries my team is using. You can very often hear interesting stories of how the person solved unique, challenging problems. To ignore the products of an interviewee's personally-driven effor…
An actual maintainer of an open source project that has users would get my attention, but that's not what I call a "personal project." There's a big difference between someone's work on a useful open-source project and their personal to-do list app or social network for people who own ferrets.
If a candidate had a personal or side project that solved a unique and challenging problem I would look at it. When I have seen personal projects they look like programing class assignments or riffs on a language/framework tutorial.
When interviewing I am always most interested in how the candidate will fit into the team and organization, and if they understand the difference between adding value to the business and playing with technology for its own sake. The last time this came up in an interview the candidate had some Raspberry Pi/Arduino code they were proud of, probably fun but not relevant to the job, and so far removed from the business domain that I couldn't judge how relevant it might be.
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, I absolutely look at interviewee's personal projects, especially if they are using technology directly related to what I'm looking for. Also especially when they are literally a creator/maintainer of one of the open source libraries my team is using. You can very often hear interesting stories of how the person solved unique, challenging problems. To ignore the products of an interviewee's personally-driven effor…
Checking out their projects (if they have any and volunteer them) is fine. Just as long as we don't expect them to have said projects. I can see the argument for a candidate seeking their first job in IT needing to distinguish themselves from the rest of the crowd and how a couple of well-executed projects can help with that. However, it's unfair to expect that any candidate must have projects, especially if they're…
I agree. I don't have any side/personal projects to show because I don't write code for fun. Because the code I write is almost always owned by an employer or client I have to get their permission to show snippets, and rely on describing the problem and how I contributed to solving it.
Code samples are easy to plagiarize so I always ask candidates who have code samples to explain the code, walk me through it. It's disappointing to see how often candidates can't do that, either because they don't actually understand the code or didn't even write it themselves.
Re: Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
#30I run an Instagram meme bot that posts photo commits of frustrated developers from Github. My last interviewer asked me if I can guide him through an interesting project of mine and I showed him the project. He was very amused and I got an awesome offer the next day.
The bot: https://www.instagram.com/gitfuck/