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Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

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Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#351

Post by aequitas »

I had been working on a Terraform provider[0] for a local hosting company in the weekends. Mostly to scratch my own itch in that I wanted my personal VPS and DNS to be IaC and get some practice in Go and Terraform. It got a little traction with some people using it and I won some nice prices for best project in the competition the hosting company put out after upgrading their API to REST. After the competition I was also able to get an account with no billing for testing purposes, which made developing and integration testing a whole lot easier. Before that I could only test on resources I paid for myself or ask them nicely to refund if I made a mistake as they don't do per minute/hourly billing like other providers.

The project was eventually discovered by my (now former) employer who needed the same provider but did some searching before writing his own and discovered my project on Github. It landed me a job interview and eventually a job. I don't think my project was the sole reason I got the job, but was more likely telling them I was operating in the niche they were looking for. Something that probably didn't stand out as much in my LinkedIn profile to be noticed there. Or I hadn't told it to enough people as there was some shared working history with others in the company. Enough to let them know they should hire me, but not enough to tell them I was someone they were looking for.

One of the contributors to the project also ended up at that company, I was asked about him during his interview and could give nothing but praise because I had been working with him on my project.

My 2ct is that whatever you do, make, patch, write, think up of, just put it out there. Even if it is not finished, create a repo and publish it, write a blog post, post it on a social. You never know who is searching for what and will find you that way. Your project , contribution or code snippet doesn't have to become a (commercial) success, if it just helps people or connects you in a way to someone new w're all better for it.

[0] https://github.com/aequitas/terraform-provider-transip

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#352

Post by alpaca128 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #312
microtonal wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Germans I know in tech (lived in Germany for 5 years or so) would never want to move the US. Everyone prefers the Germany social security/insurance/pension system (even if it’s quite mediocre compared to The Netherlands and Scandinavia).

>Most Germans I know in tech (lived in Germany for 5 years or so) would never want to move the US. And yet GP did, and others more like him. FWIW I had two German bosses who emigrated to the US(one to California, one to Atlanta), so the US is clearly an attractive place for them and they say they loved it there just like GP. The majority of Germans talking about how much they hate the US, have never lived there but t…

> a blanket generalization cannot be made of "Germans wanting to move to the US"

Same goes for your blanket generalization implying Germans are either rich, rely on welfare or like working in the US.

I myself would never consider moving there just for a higher salary.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#353

Post by hknmtt »

All of them. But it's not what you think. The experience I gained by working on them simply increased my confidence and THAT always got me a job. To the point where I reached fuck it level and never got stressed out by a work. I set my red lines and that was that. I ended up working the best job I ever had, until I quit working altogether to live off of my investments. Mind you I have worked a full time job only one year in my whole life.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#354

Post by sakjur »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #312
microtonal wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Germans I know in tech (lived in Germany for 5 years or so) would never want to move the US. Everyone prefers the Germany social security/insurance/pension system (even if it’s quite mediocre compared to The Netherlands and Scandinavia).

>Most Germans I know in tech (lived in Germany for 5 years or so) would never want to move the US. And yet GP did, and others more like him. FWIW I had two German bosses who emigrated to the US(one to California, one to Atlanta), so the US is clearly an attractive place for them and they say they loved it there just like GP. The majority of Germans talking about how much they hate the US, have never lived there but t…

Maybe it’s not US-bad Germany-good or Germany-bad US-good, and more like home-good, away-scary or home-bad, away-alluring. Or maybe even home-good, adventure-exciting.

We can compare salaries, schools, freedoms, houses, and so forth til the end of time, but there’s always an intangible personal factor weighing down the scales to some extent. I think that’s what gets people to actually uproot and move, no matter which direction they go.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#355

Post by notpushkin »

Yoric wrote: post #340

Anecdote from a friend. As a student, he reverse-engineered his country's tax application (not sure how he did that), turned it into a programming language, published the result as open-source along with formal semantics and precise documentation. Apparently, the official implementation was closed source, the state didn't have access to the source and the results were undocumented and nobody understood how it worked.…

> turned it into a programming language

That sounds weird. Did you mean that they reimplemented it in another programming language?

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#356

Post by fredsmith219 »

In the mid 90s, the rumor was that the company I worked for would switch from VMS to Unix. I figured I would get ahead of the curve and bought a magazine that included a free OS with the funny name of RedHat Linux.It wasn’t exactly Unix but it was close, so I figured I would give it a go. Turns out that was a great decision. The company is gone but my knowledge of Linux has given me a leg up in many job interviews.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#357

Post by paulluuk »

When GPT3.5 and Dall-E were out for only a little while, I wrote a Discord D&D bot which would act as a DM and generate images for each scene and generated audio for all the voices using play.ht

It was a silly, hacky, poorly made mess but it got the attention of a VP at my current company. They offered me the highest paying job I've had thus far (and I've worked at Apple and Spotify in the past) to play around with Gen AI.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#358

Post by FirmwareBurner »

alpaca128 wrote: post #352
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most Germans I know in tech (lived in Germany for 5 years or so) would never want to move the US. And yet GP did, and others more like him. FWIW I had two German bosses who emigrated to the US(one to California, one to Atlanta), so the US is clearly an attractive place for them and they say they loved it there just like GP. The majority of Germans talking about how much they hate the US, have never lived there but t…

> a blanket generalization cannot be made of "Germans wanting to move to the US" Same goes for your blanket generalization implying Germans are either rich, rely on welfare or like working in the US. I myself would never consider moving there just for a higher salary.

>Same goes for your blanket generalization implying Germans are either rich, rely on welfare or like working in the US.

I never said Germans are relying on welfare, I said the Germans WHO rely on welfare would not consider moving to the US for obvious reasons. Nor those who are already financially stable, again for obvious reasons.

>I myself would never consider moving there just for a higher salary.

Good to know. Tell us more about yourself.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#359

Post by CTDOCodebases »

kepano wrote: post #174

I 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. Obsidian is awesome.

Obsidian Sync has saved me a few times too. The only thing it lacks for my usage is an API. I just want a clean way to backup my notes to my own storage.

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