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Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

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381–390 of 538 posts

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

#381

Post by ploum »

My blog landed me multiple book deals: I wrote the very first book in history about Ubuntu because a publisher found my blog. I published my first novel because the editor found it published as a serie on my blog. I’ve never asked for it.

Hosting my own webservices for fun for years transformed to a side-business during a couple of years, where I was hosting paying customers.

My involvement with GNOME landed me a job with a GNOME-related company (but I sent them my resume, so this was not unexpected)

My life-long investment in free software landed me a teaching job at my university, totally unexpected.

I built a whole career doing side projects. Do more side projects. (many of my side projects didn’t pay me but, for some, it was a choice because you cannot do everything. Also, side-projects have different taste once you are paid for it. You don’t want that for every side project)

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

#382

Post by anunay_i »

I made a small configurable reverse proxy back in 2016 - https://github.com/ianunay/mock-node in an attempt to build my portfolio and to attract recruiters / interviewers. Sure enough in one of the system design interviews the interviewer simply did a architecture / code review of this project and was impressed by it. I like to think that this contributed a lot to the company making an offer. I ended up accepting the offer and my life changed a lot since as I had to move to a different country.

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

#383

Post by ciroduran »

Venezuela 2009: I'd been posting regularly to my blog El Chigüire Literario (The Literary Capybara)[1], a gamedev blog written in Spanish, since 2006. Some students contacted me by email telling me that they could petition their university to open a gamedev course. I wrote a syllabus, and in September of that year I started teaching a gamedev course at that uni. I later also taught a Computer Graphics course when it became available.

I taught at that uni until 2013 until I left the country. I had to wake up very early once a week to teach the course at 7:30AM, but I did it very gladly. Some of those students are in the videogames industry as well. So, overall, a great success.

[1] https://www.elchiguireliterario.com

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

#384

Post by rjzzleep »

I dropped out of Uni without doing my master thesis and in later learned that if you need a US Visa a graduate degree is helpful, so in 2014 I went back to write a thesis (it was about satcom). I was getting a bit disillusioned with the project, and since I was running Linux on my Macbook air, and noticed that there was a Qemu GsoC project to make MacOS run without modification. Long story short, I got to RE the UEFI bootloader and find a bug in the Linux SATA code which landed me a job at a place that wanted to migrated from VMWare to KVM. I went on to do a fair share of performance work with SRIOV and DPDK, but unfortunately didn't really manage to continue working in that domain.

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

#385

Post by adulion »

I was working full time in mcdonalds and when the facebook API launched in 2009ish created a few blog posts integrating the API to php and codeignter.

This lead to picking up a few projects from agency which led to a full time job and the rest is history.

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

#386

Post by hcfman »

My side project was once the reason for me getting a job which was then pulled within 24 hours because I didn't want to give up my side project. Then later, way later, a pull request for a coding challenge I was given for the job interview was merged into the main line branch.

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

#387

Post by rjzzleep »

pokepim wrote: post #239
binwiederhier wrote: post #121

I wrote a Dropbox-like file sync and share application called Syncany [1] as a side project back in 2014/2015. While it never made it out of alpha, it had gotten some traction, and looking back, I am still proud of the architecture and design (not so much of the code, hehe). One day, a developer from this random company in Connecticut (I am German and lived in Germany at the time) reached out to me in my project's IR…

Is it common for Germans to dream about getting out of Germany and moving to US? Congratulations to you that you managed to do that, I am wondering how hard for German is to migrate to US to puruse better life here.

This is vastly different for native Germans and immigrant Germans. There are even some papers about how having a Turkish name immediately cuts your chances of getting a response to your job application in half. German job applications also require a photo on the application.

For a lot of immigrant Germans leaving Germany is very much a goal, since upward mobility in German society is very low compared to the US. So for a lot of "German Germans" the answer is no, but for the rest it very much is something people aspire to.

If you look at the statistics I believe outward migration is a little under inward migration, but I'd wager that there are a lot more people with higher ed moving out than are moving in.

I complain about the US a lot, but for me both the US and the UK were vastly better for my mental health and career than Germany was, even despite the average standard of living in Europe being much higher.

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

#388

Post by jonplackett »

I made an app called Face Juggler. It was the first automatic face swap app in the AppStore. Now much copied and even more outdated.

I had an interview and just showed the live analytics of its use. At that time it had about 50,000 new users per day so the analytics was just a huge stream flying past.

That was fun.

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

#389

Post by korze »

During my military deployment in Afghanistan, I brought along a DSLR camera and developed a passion for photography. I spent a significant amount of time capturing various scenes, but I was particularly drawn to photographing troops working out in the gyms.

Upon returning to the States, my photography, particularly those gym and fitness-themed shots, caught the attention of locals in my city. They reached out to me for similar projects, focusing on social media branding and marketing, especially for bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts. This was around the time when Instagram was rapidly evolving into a major advertising platform.

What started as a personal interest in photography and a love for the gym turned into a lucrative side hustle. I found myself immersed in the world of fitness photography, working with influencers and brands in the nutrition and fitness accessory sectors. This experience, born out of a hobby and a deployment, unexpectedly paved the way for a sustained engagement in professional photography, particularly in the niche of fitness and social media marketing.

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