I posted a really stupid trading bot that made stupid non-sense trades that wouldn't have worked in real life like buying a stock and selling it for a penny higher minutes later like a market maker. It got me an interview and I got the job.
Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
271–280 of 538 posts
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#272In the early 2000s in college I wrote a basic terrain renderer in C++ and OpenGL. It randomly generated some textured terrain, and had some basic features like you could move the camera and look around. Nothing super impressive.
A few months later I landed a 16-month internship on a team writing an OpenGL ES driver. There were 160 applicants, but the hiring manager said I was the only applicant who had actually played around with OpenGL.
It was a great job and I learned a ton.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#273I got my first (and current) mobile developer job after building a budgeting/personal-finance app that synced with my bank account using Plaid.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a developers perspective youre right, most of us here probably wouldnt be able to keep up with the amount of work it takes to thrive at apple, sure. Im looking at it from a future employers view, who sees "Apple", has an iPhone, and immediately has an idea in his head about what kind of developer you are, even if its completely inaccurate- Its all marketing. But also, immediately assuming youre not gonna make it…
Apple recruiters have the professionalism and organizational skills of a shady manual labor staffing firm. 5 1-hour rounds, low-balled, and treated with what felt like an ad-hoc process. Wasn't impressed with the people, nor the caliber of engineering talent. The same is true of Microsoft (Azure specifically), Google, and Amazon. Only two "traditional" big tech companies of any note for having sharp people and all-ar…
I can’t really trust anything else you say with the absoluteness which you claim Meta is better vibes than the rest.
Sure, your experience is probably true, but it’s anecdotal and the sweeping generalizations you’re making on limited datapoints makes things untrustworthy
Second, you’re assuming money is mutually exclusive from all else at those companies. You admit not being able to get in, which makes this the equivalent of “money can’t buy happiness” from someone who never had money to know first hand that they wouldn’t be happy
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#275I created an online fan forum for The X-Files back in 1993 on the Delphi vax-based network as the web was starting to emerge. I created ASCII art of logos and stuff since it was a text-based menu-driven system. Newscorp bought the company and their marketing managers started asking me to create ASCII art for them. It turned out my fan forum was the biggest on the service with 25,000 members (that was a lot back then.…
That's a rad story!!! I want to believe! What are you working on now? Are you still a huge x files fan?
Technically I've been unemployed for 9 years. When I say I can't get a job to save my life, I mean that literally. Today I'm looking for a full time job as a manager of software product design and development or production in other industries and burning through my retirement savings.
I do some software design and development on the side to try and keep up with all the changing tech but nothing I can invest a lot of time in if it's not going to earn me a living wage. I taught myself technical analysis and watch a stock chart all day between sending out resumes and teach people online what I know about reading stock charts and how the markets actually work to try and keep people from losing money unnecessarily. It makes me feel useful and keeps me a active as a coach and mentor.
I'm still a fan of the show. It was innovative and we wouldn't have Vince Gilligan and Breaking Bad let alone mythologies and serials the way we do now if it wasn't for The X-Files.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#276When I was fresh out of college I semi-obsessively started answering StackOverflow questions about HTML Canvas, which was still new enough to not have a lot of coverage. At one point I answered over 10% of all canvas questions ever asked. I also blogged a few tutorials. This made Pearson email me for a book offer (HTML5 Unleashed, 2013, almost no one read it as I had no fame, but last amazon review: "Still relevant i…
I got a job from stackoverflow posts too, it was a company whose entire strategy was hiring "Developer Evangelists" which I had never heard of before. I tried to internalize that silly name but really the company's product just wasn't in a place to "evangelize" anyway so it didn't work for very long. I hated that job, I excluded it on my resume.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#277A 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…
So, respective teams from those two companies (or even other companies for that matter) are actively searching GH for any mods to their work?
if you use the right hashtags for the right "latest thing", VCs are actively on github
I added a discord link and they joined that too and just watch and lurk, its a weird world
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of people love being contrarian in theory. If it happened to you for real, no chance youre gonna say no to that
Move to California, go back to an office for 60 hours a week, sign my life away and swear to secrecy about my thrilling position on some compiler team? Yeah I think could say no to that.
> thrilling position on some compiler team
What’s wrong with compilers?
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#279This project was a Show HN and I had a few people reach out to me after, ended up taking a position as a founding engineer at a YC company in SF (2013).
It's an alternate program editor that breaks source into tiles around grammatical boundaries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tztmgCcZaM4
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#280None