Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

It's very heartening to see all of the stories here.

I've put the last few years of my life into working on komorebi, a tiling window manager for Windows[1], https://notado.app, a content-first social bookmarking service, and https://kulli.sh, a "bring your own links" comment aggregator which shows you comments from hn, reddit, lobsters, lemmy etc. on an article all in one place.

Unfortunately I was laid off after 5 years with the same company last month, and nobody seems to care about any of these projects when it comes to recruiting. There are people who use them that have reached out to me very kindly offering to make referrals, but the job market and mainstream interview processes value LeetCode more than shipping real code these days.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

One of the members of the core team of our open-source library https://albumentations.ai/

It was not the only reason he was hired; it was a solid addition to his already good performance at the interviews.

Or at least that is what the hiring manager later said.

Overall be different and create fun to unique things on the web that get ppl's attention.. good or bad.

My first startup was a different idea and back in 2007 it was a very odd idea that received attention here (lots of hate ..some pretty vicious) and in various tech publications. I learned how to code and design during that time and I think both factors which I marketed when applying for jobs helped me more easily get my first few tech jobs.

Last time I was looking for a job way back in 2016, instead of just making a résumé, I made a free résumé builder. It got on the front page of HN and ProductHunt and got a decent amount of usage.

It's no longer live but here's the archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20160305001753/https://makerslat...

I considered trying to take it further but didn't really see a clear path to any kind of investment or monetization at the time, so I ended up just using it as my résumé. I interviewed at one company and got the job, so I guess it helped! It did get a good reaction in the few interviews I did at that company.

I wrote a generic kernel driver overlay for error correction for block devices on Linux (Winter 2017-18) for a student org at my university. Interned at NVIDIA on their Linux graphics driver in Summer 2019