Another item (HN won't let me post a long reply), is a programming environment called Onyx. (After my grandson in Africa, who has NO interest in it whatsoever as he intends to be a pilot -- but this is OK as, unless she works for Airbus, we're ignoring the ladies for a few more years. Sosongo Abasi as his father would say!) Onyx is a language designed for 13-17 year olds who may not have the best command of English -- we can work in the language of the Igbo, the Yoruba and Erik. Doesn't matter to my parser. And it will all be free, documented, Github'ed and built with free tools. Education is hard over there..
Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
41–50 of 538 posts
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#42Well, a very long time ago, in a company funded far far away (and since defeated by the empire), I had the "joy" of working with Sendmail. For you youngsters, back then, back when we had dial telephones (tell us more Grandpa!), there were multiple "mail networks", not just this fancy Internet you kids have. Sendmail was a mail processor that could not only arrange to send and receive mail, but it could translate addr…
Not directly related, but I'm working on some short stories inspired by some of the hacker/cyberpunk literature from the 80's and since I grew up and learned programming in the late 90's early 2000's, I feel completely inadequate at writing cheesy hacker stories.
Keep them old timer stories a' comin'.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#43After discovering Erlang (thanks, Bruce Tate) I started following the community on Twitter and elsewhere, then created the Twitter account ErlangInfo to share news and resources about the language.
Because I was following multiple Erlang-related accounts I saw that Basho was hiring a tech evangelist in my region, and while I doubt there was a lot of competition for the role, my side “gig” as ErlangInfo at least didn’t hurt my chances.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#44Well, a very long time ago, in a company funded far far away (and since defeated by the empire), I had the "joy" of working with Sendmail. For you youngsters, back then, back when we had dial telephones (tell us more Grandpa!), there were multiple "mail networks", not just this fancy Internet you kids have. Sendmail was a mail processor that could not only arrange to send and receive mail, but it could translate addr…
I used to work at Sendmail, it was my first job. The entire premise of the company was "Sendmail is so hard to use, let us run it for you". We had software that added a GUI for configuration and management, and Pro Services to set up big installs.
But also we had all the top maintainers of Sendmail. And we ran Sendmail for our corp mail.
Once we had a problem with the network, so we had to reroute corporate mail over a phone line. One of the maintainers came down, typed what looked like line noise for five minutes, and all of a sudden all the mail was working again.
It was crazy to watch him basically read and write raw Sendmail configs. He didn't even use m4.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#45My blog led to 3 major book publishers reaching out. I signed a deal with one earlier this year!
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#46A 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…
have you written about how you created this? very interested
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#47Back 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…
phenomenal story, did you keep working on the project after ?
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#48Not a side project, per say, but I answered questions on my local Linux User Group almost daily. After applying for a job and not hearing back, I got a request to come in for an interview weeks afterwards. Long story short, the boss told me he saw my responses on the mailing list and it turns out I knew more than the RHCEs and CCNAs walking into his interviews. That landed me my first job ever in IT as a Junior NetEn…
Brilliant.
Would stack overflow be the equivalent today?
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#49Oh my, this called for me. I did a side-project related to Second Life in 2007, and it landed me a job at Amazon Web Services in 2008. I narrated the story back then, and replicated it on Medium [0]. I don't want to brag or anything, but please trust me if I tell you that this is a good story to read. [0]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...
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Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#50During my physics PhD I built my own Segway (and a second one with a power tool company who came to me after first asking tlb) and did a bunch of projects with a high-power laser cutter that I got funding for in our lab. I included these on my resume and they were much easier for interviewers to talk to me about than my PhD work. I think they also helped me stand out a bit. Receiving positive feedback about these projects gave me confidence to sell myself as someone who could build things.