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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?

#421

Post by xena »

strangelove026 wrote: post #218
xena wrote: post #15

My blog https://xeiaso.net (source code: https://github.com/Xe/site ) and the stuff I've written for it ended up doing several things to help me get employed over the years: 1. Letting me have a place to write to get better at writing, which makes it easier to do my job in DevRel. 2. Lets me talk about all of the interesting projects I work on (eg: an AI novel writing experiment https://xeiaso.net/videos/2023/ai-hack…

Stumbled on your blog the other day while trying to figure how to use tailwindcss with Go. Had seen other posts here and the. Also a tail scale fan. Thanks!

Thanks! I don't work there anymore though. I'm at fly.io now.

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

#422

Post by lfkdev »

Seanambers wrote: post #402
oaiey wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not common. Most Germans consider would never use the phrase "pursue a better life" when talking about the US. Quality of Life is in most European countries better including Germany. There are however some who want "freedom". Not that they lack freedom in Germany but the spiritual cowboy style, rocky mountain lifestyle freedom. Another reason for migration are obviously job offers in some industries.

Have you actually lived in both the US and Germany? I haven't but from what I have gathered the U.S is in many ways more preferable than Europe.

At least for Germans the USA has a very bad image here. Because of all the Healthcare problems, Trump Jokes, Shootings etc

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

#423

Post by going_north »

plondon514 wrote: post #413

In 2019 I built the original version of codeamigo.dev, a place to create coding tutorials, after codecademy rejected me for the third time. About a year in Amjad from replit reached out and offered to acquire the product and hire me full time. I went through the interview process, and was offered the job, but in the end I backed out because others convinced me it wasn’t for enough money. One of the worse career decis…

> thus far

that's the spirit! :)

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

#424

Post by johnwalkr »

23B1 wrote: post #80
stpn wrote: post #27

A 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…

You didn't miss out because Sonos continues to do an awful job software-wise. One of the things I'm most looking forward to as I de-IOT-ize my life is selling that system and running speaker wire like a true G.

The little amplifiers you can get on aliexpress and the like for about $70 can be quite good although pre-covid there were more like $35. They just have simple bluetooth and analogue in and depending on the model support 2 or 4 speakers plus 0 or 1 subwoofer.

I bought a couple and then found 2 pairs of nice second-hand bookshelf speakers. Presumably everyone is upgrading to smart speakers and dumping their old stuff because it was really easy to find great speakers for a very low price.

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

#425

Post by enginoor »

Shane Wighton's story of getting hired at Formlabs is interesting.

He wanted to work for the company and didn't have a way in. He built a better version of their slicing software over a long weekend and sent it to the Formlabs team. He was hired very quickly after they saw it.

https://shane.engineer/blog/how-to-get-hired-at-a-startup-wh...

https://shane.engineer/stl-preprocessor

The idea of a very targeted side project seems novel. Build for an audience of 1 specific company. Any other examples?

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

#426

Post by SCM-Enthusiast »

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…

Drew Houston probably wanted to see if you were a threat ;) If you had written back and asked about an acquisition/ or how you are focusing on "Taking Syncany to the next level", you might have gotten a response. That was when they were doing their network expansion initiative.

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

#427

Post by ccozan »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #318
pjerem wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP’s story is from 2014-2015. I’m not German but French, however I do feel that this "Silicon Valley dream" upon developers was still existing in this era. It was at that time that we started to have startups in Europe who tried to follow the SV culture. GAFAMs were still seen as cool enough to envy a well paid job at them. A lot of SV startups weren’t openly privacy hostile (or maybe the issue wasn’t took seriously…

GP moved to Connecticut though. There's probably less "SV-culture" there.

CT is also quite close to european culture ( or, as closest possible in US ).

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

#428

Post by twen_ty »

aristus wrote: post #140

I made a hobby of writing intro posts on deep technical topics, from DNS to concurrency to cutting cloud cost. From 2009 ish onwards all my gigs have been at least helped if not initiated by someone reading a post and saying "we should talk to this guy". Not a magic spell. I had been writing for almost ten years prior before anyone noticed, and only a fraction get any play.

Wait you're the guy who wrote the mature optimization book, right?

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

#429

Post by mpeg »

shihab wrote: post #264

Among all these feel-good stories, how about one with a bit different ending? During my masters, I created a ML library that dealt with noise in dataset [1]. I implemented bunch of papers, but unlike your usual research code, I spent a long time obsessing about it's API, performance, created documentation, CI- the whole shebang. But then, like avg research code, I moved on and promptly forgot about it. One day about…

If it makes you feel any better, I got contacted like a decade ago by these two super friendly guys, who wanted some advice on how to handle infosec/devops in their fast growing startup

I happened to be travelling to San Jose as I had just started working in a company based there, and they were based in the YC offices in Mountain View so they invited me to come over for drinks at this nearby bar. They were very casual about it so I took it to mean they were there with other people, so I showed up slightly later (as they said "we'll be there from 4pm") and it was just the two of them waiting for me.

We had a couple drinks and I basically talked myself out of a job by emphasising that I had just started a job and it would be awkward to leave it, plus they didn't really need me and they were doing just fine. Said "let's keep in touch" but, you know, life got in the way and didn't really.

Their startup was valued at $5b on their last raise :)

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

#430

Post by michaelbuckbee »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #242
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #83

I built https://foragoodstrftime.com ~10 years ago as I was sick of reading the docs for date formatting. It generally gets around 1000 users a day. Over the years, it's gotten me consulting gigs and the occasional job offer (amidst other projects). Today, it sends a decent chunk of the traffic and sign-ups to my startup, Wafris -> https://wafris.org OP's asking for a strategy with these, and the advice I'd offer is…

I just started recently, and I regret not taking screenshots or archiving websites that mentioned me and my work. I always believed that they would stay because they are the big brands, but nope- content gets regularly removed. Also, if not for your job and career, keep exciting records of the history of your life for you and your family. I love your suggestions. I'm starting to keep digital archives -- domains, thou…

Check the WaybackMachine - might be enough for you to pull some things out of.
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