I was early with Twitter and Facebook and became social media manager.
I organized webmondays and barcamps and became a event manager.
I blogged about the digital transformation and became a consultant for that.
Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
301–310 of 538 posts
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#302Back in 2002 I lost my job during a regional financial crisis (I’m from Uruguay). I was working at a bank (as a contractors) and some coworkers and I were working on a HA project for MySQL at the moment (to use it at work). Once I got laid off, I focused on it to the point that it became quite useful, and at some point, someone from Israel reached out with questions. I answered with a lot of delay, and when I explain…
Hola uruguayo. Los amo, nunca cambien. Abrazo grande.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember seeing this published when I worked at Sonos. In fact, I might have been the one who put it on the Slack channel. It was a cool project at a time when a lot of people were saying it was insurmountable to make us AirPlay compatible. Sorry you didn’t get the job. I hope you didn’t lose much sleep over it. I left in 2020. I wouldn’t say you’re missing much any more.
Why is that? I recently bought a Sonos after getting plenty of recommendations. Even though it sounds great, I hate that they dropped support for Google assistant. Also, the Sonos voice commands can't handle Spotify or YouTube music. Kind of sucks.
I see it as problematic as you. Have two Sonos five and two Sonos one and think about switching to another product more often. But now i‘ve already spent so much money...
However, what should be used instead? I would take the boxes from Apple, but, as far as I know, they are also quite limited (only AirPlay).
Another example of the fact that such things should rather be expanded with open standards.
From my point of view, the best strategy for Sonos would be to be as open as possible.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone is willing to uproot their life on a whim, even for a theoretically great job and a theoretically great company.
Im sure "uproot your life and dedicate it to Apple" isnt on the job description and apple is very flexible with this stuff. You think all 164,000 apple employees live in silicon valley?
Apple is definitely not “very flexible with this stuff”.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#305This game I made and released on iPhone way back in the day directly led to me getting my first full-time job making mobile apps for a startup as the Lead Developer. I showed it during my interview. It's no longer on the App Store as there's just been too many big changes I couldn't keep up with on that codebase. I'm working on a followup right now for Steam that I'd like to port to mobile afterwards. Gameplay video:…
If you still have the IPA file for it, you should look into seeing if it runs on touchHLE [1], an emulator for early versions of iOS. They also have an app archive [2] if you'd like to give permission for them to preserve the game. [1]: https://touchhle.org/ [2]: https://touchhle.org/app-archive/
Thanks for linking to this project. There are some old games on iOS that I was sad to see go so it's great to see a project like this bringing life back to them.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#306Earlier 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…
Snowflake? You mean the guys who spent 700 million to buy streamlit, a (worse than gradio) python front end.
They’re unicorns for being extremely stupid. I’ll give you that.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#307Voluntary commitment in Berlin Freifunk.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#308Early in the iOS days I wrote a car lease/loan payment app. Nothing fancy if you knew how to use a business calculator, but it quickly did all the calculations for lease/loan buying. The UI was so-so, but it worked and I had gotten some feedback it was useful. I had only built it for myself and then released it on the App Store b/c why not.
The app ended up referenced in a later interview I had and helped land a job doing mobile development. This was very early days of iOS development, so just navigating the mess of getting an app signed and uploaded was sometimes a challenge.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#309Back in 2014 I was tired of how awful the Mint app was and I wanted to make a banking app of my own (that I affectionately called Basil). The premise was that it would be like Mailbox (remember that flash in the pan email app?) but for finances. You’d swipe on every transaction to make sure they were categorized correctly. I even wired it up to my local bank’s very rudimentary API. It was beautifully designed (thanks…
How difficult was it to connect to banking API to get the transaction list?
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone on this site is a student with nothing on their resume.
Interesting projection, but to respond to your point: anyone could just put in a decade at Averagecorp inc. or even just hop around and throw together a decent resume. If a random OSS side project lands you an offer from apple thats gotta be jackpot level luck.
Not really. I have someone reach out every couple months because they saw something I worked on that relates to the technology that team is using. If you take a framework and do something cool with it, and the people who work on it find out about it (say, because someone spotted it on social media) they will often look to see if they can hire you. If you want to improve your chances, pick a technology few people are using and make something cool with that: there’s a lot of people who are experts on UIKit but very few who understand how AirPlay works. To get scouted for the former you have to be really, really interesting.