Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

I wrote and open sourced a program to print guitar tablature in postscript (so it ran on our apple laserwriter instead of on a pc; as a phd student in the early 90s our computers were severely underpowered, but also I wanted to make it portable from Suns to Macs to Win 3.1). It could also process a lot of ascii tablature and turn it into nicer copy - this was what I wanted it for as I was trying to print out tab from OLGA using less paper, and when you scale down ascii tab it just leaves blank space to the side. (I got a mail from someone in New Zealand to say he used this code to publish a book of 5-string banjo music, as it was the only thing he could find that handled different numbers of strings)

Anyway, fast forward a year and I interviewed for a programming job with British Telecom. This project came up in conversation and the interviewer got super interested, and I landed the job. Then it turned out that almost everyone this boss hired was a musician of some kind-including a keyboard player for a chart-topping band (he's back touring with them now), a bass player, a professional saxophonist career changer, a singer in a band... he ran a weekly jam session after hours. So I really think it was the guitar playing that got me hired.

And no, it didn't relate to the job, at all. My phd involved parallel programming on transputers in C, and as it happened, the guy they sat me next to on my first day also had a phd involving C programming on parallel machines. And they got us to write Visual Basic for the next 6 months.

Back in 1994 I was a sophomore in college. In our C++ class I asked the professor how GUI programs were written and she suggested the Motif toolkit for Unix / X11. I checked out a book on Motif from the library and I had to type in about 2 pages of code just to pop up a single dialog box that said "Hello World" It also took about 5 minutes to compile on a DECstation 5000 with 32MB RAM.

An older student in the computer lab saw my Motif book and asked what I was doing. I told him and he suggested I use Tcl/Tk. I asked "What is that?" So he pointed me to some documentation on this brand new thing called the World Wide Web.

I spent the entire weekend reading everything I could about Tcl/Tk and had little GUI programs that were wrapper around lots of command line tools with radio buttons and stuff to select options. Then I started drawing circles and rectangles and stuff.

I was also learning HTML and had my own web page mainly to links that I liked but also maintained the FAQ for a popular childhood cartoon that I loved. I had taken the plain ASCII text FAQ and written a Tcl script to format sections into HTML with different header fonts, table of contents, etc.

A few months later I was starting to apply to summer internships. One of them mentioned Tcl as a scripting language for web server development. I put Tcl/Tk and HTML on my resume and got an interview.

The company didn't like Perl for CGI-BIN programming and preferred Tcl. I told them I had my own web page and you could also access the code I had written from my web page. During the interview they actually went to my web site, downloaded the code, and started looking at it.

I was a computer engineering major so most of my classes were on electrical circuits, digital logic, assembly programming, and they didn't ask me anything about that.

All of stuff I learned that wasn't directly related to my classes like Tcl, HTML, and playing around with Linux for fun is what got me the job.

Now 28 years later I'm designing integrated circuits / semiconductors and still write Tcl all the time because it is the integrated scripting language for most of the chip design software. It's not my favorite language but it's weird how this language that was kind of obscure in 1994 helped me get my first job and I'm still using it now.

I love the modesty in this story, from my point of view you: - Became an expert in HTML Canvas - Used that expertise to help a bunch of people - Wrote an entire freaking book on HTML Canvas

If I did that I would probably never shut up about it, so hearing you describe it as "answering some SO questions" is genuinely heartwarming.

I built a lot of weird 'inventions' in university, such as an airsoft sentry gun to keep squirrels away from the garden. I was also in a student club.

I don't think any project specifically made potential employers say 'wow, we definitely have to hire this guy', but I think having actual experience doing stuff and demonstrating an interest for the field goes a long way towards landing you those first couple of jobs.

Yes technically, and how could you possibly enforce that? There is no rule forbidding it, so by default most employers still require it in their applications, but if they don't and you don't supply it, they will be suspicious.

There is no way around that problem unless that practice is explicitly banned. Instead, you just get this weird workaround, that doesn't technically ban it, but makes it completely unenforceable, giving the German bureaucratic system an excuse that they addressed the issue without ever having to address it.