Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

The thing which caught the interest of one of my interviewers was a side project I had creating tools to be more effective at playing Travian.

Travian did something interesting, in that each server instance would dump a single database table nightly for players to ingest and tinker with.

I wrote a script which would grab the file, de-MySQL it to get it to run on SQLEXPRESS, and then execute some stored procedures to extract some insights out of the data. Then, I had some Asp.Net pages which would let you do interesting stuff with it: Find inactive accounts, Track someone's alliance history, a few other things. I had half a dozen tools for different things, mostly I focused on building stuff which nobody had thought of yet, and made the tools only available to people in my alliance.

All this was on the roadmap to start building a bot to play the game for me. That turned out to be a lot more work, and I ended up losing interest in the game in the interim.

We only spent about 10 minutes or so talking about it, but still, it was 10 minutes of followup questions. I feel pretty strongly this, and one other anecdote is what got me hired. (The other anecdote was writing a really dumb hotfix out of a decompiled java class to fix Novell eDirectory support for one of my prior company's products - in protest of our engineering group not finding the effort worthwhile)

https://youryoure.com/?its

Early 2000s, I wanted to work only on and for the Internet. I did my “e-Commerce” course and others, but I was hoping from interview to interview without success. In one particular interview, I was waiting with a few others and started tinkering with an open computer in front of me. Adobe Photoshop had an easter egg where you press some key combination to show the splash screen with a sunset scene (or something like that). I morphed a few images together with that, and it turned out good enough that the boss walking in noticed, “Did you do that?”

That’s how I got my 2nd job in an Internet Media company while applying to be an ASP programmer; I ended up working with the Multimedia team, was challenged to work with Macromedia Flash, and wrote a lot of ActionScript.

I wrote quite a bit of the front-end video decoder for VONGO (a streaming service from STARZ), built a few employee tools for Disney, worked as one of the Creative Directors of Razorfish, etc. None of them through official channels or resume submissions. So, I have an ardent respect and soft-corner heart for anyone I interview and have a side project(s). I love listening to their stories about their side project, hobbies, and open-source contributions/work.