I didn’t do side project. But, I went to college with this guy. We were in the same group projects for a while. At the end of a couple semesters and 1 before I graduated, he told me to forward him my resume for a job he referred me to. I did and got called for on-site round. At that time, the SDE interview didn’t involved phone screen. I don’t remember why. It could be that the company was only 400 people and private.
I showed up and did ok and passed the interview. Later on, I learned that this guy was the CEO of such company.
Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
211–220 of 538 posts
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#212I built an early HTML5 game engine in 2010 called CraftyJS when Facebook games were starting to become big. The project itself got me the job at a gaming startup and an offer at Zynga.
Nice! I used CraftyJS for my pet project!
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#213Hacking the firmware in Fuji cameras definitely impressed a few recruiters, and helped me get a position recently.
Any interesting things I could do with my X-T2?
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#214I made a theme for Obsidian linked below. As a result I got to know the founders, and helped design the 1.0 version of the app. This eventually led me to join the company as CEO. I had previously founded and run two startups, so that helped too. https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-minimal
Nice work. Huge Obsidian fan and use it every day to run my entire life.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#215I was working for a flash game hosting company that you probably remember if you were ever of age to care about flash games. We had like 30 different payment methods for buying in-game currency[1] and a good number of them had this stupid problem where if your browser timed out we charged you and then immediately forgot about it.
I wrote an essay[2] about it which turned into a book[3] which turned into consulting gigs. Gigs turned into full time jobs including a stint at Stripe. The book also earned mid-five-figures over time.
[1]: I'm convinced that one of them was straight up gift card fraud facilitation. You could buy in-game currency with retailer gift cards.
[2]: https://www.petekeen.net/design-for-failure-processing-payme...
[3]: https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments-launch-da..., the book links don't work any more :(
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#216In 2016, my second year at university, I was betting on the US elections. I'd collated multiple sources (FiveThirtyEight and a bunch of publications) to calculate each states swing and decided it would be a democratic sweep.
Unfortunately, I ended up losing a good portion of my savings I'd made developing websites over the years. I choose to take the night off to figure out how the make the best out of this situation, which ended up turning into TrumpTracker.
TrumpTracker [1] followed Donald Trump's Electoral Promises and kept the previous president-elect accountable for all actions and promises he made prior to his commencement. I deliberately open sourced [2] the project so that everyone could equally vote on whether a promise was comprised via GitHub issues. There was also a published iOS app for a bit.
Since I'd completed the project in 12 hours post election results it got picked up by the news cycle.
I enjoyed working on something at scale which collaborated with engineers, data scientists, and economists from all around the world, especially when the codebase was forked and used in other countries for their respective electives.
This project paved the way for a number of projects, as well as my current job, and also helped in securing my eventual O1.
[1] https://trumptracker.github.io/ [2] https://github.com/TrumpTracker/trumptracker.github.io
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#217This thread gives me a lot of hope and motivation thanks everyone for sharing there experiences.
I am glad it does, and I don't want to stop the motivation, but you are hearing the success stories. Most Github projects / side projects don't land jobs. That is why I think it is important to do them (if you choose to!) for other reasons too, like fun, charity, learning, or whatever.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#218My blog https://xeiaso.net (source code: https://github.com/Xe/site ) and the stuff I've written for it ended up doing several things to help me get employed over the years: 1. Letting me have a place to write to get better at writing, which makes it easier to do my job in DevRel. 2. Lets me talk about all of the interesting projects I work on (eg: an AI novel writing experiment https://xeiaso.net/videos/2023/ai-hack…
Stumbled on your blog the other day while trying to figure how to use tailwindcss with Go. Had seen other posts here and the. Also a tail scale fan. Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#219I 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 wa…
Hey, diffrax is cool by the way. I've used it to do some automatically differentiate through some ODEs for optimal experimental design. Great stuff.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#220I 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…
Amazing!