I hepled jQuery UI which landed me first real job with contract and everything, first side project was react like for canvas where only diff is drawen not all canvas, I have full family eating from this.
Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
441–450 of 538 posts
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#442I created the wiki for Path of Exile.
Eventually landed me a job at Curse out in the States.
It’s also just quite a nice thing to be able to talk about in interviews or with colleagues who may be into the game.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#443Back in 2014 I was tired of how awful the Mint app was and I wanted to make a banking app of my own (that I affectionately called Basil). The premise was that it would be like Mailbox (remember that flash in the pan email app?) but for finances. You’d swipe on every transaction to make sure they were categorized correctly. I even wired it up to my local bank’s very rudimentary API. It was beautifully designed (thanks…
How difficult was it to connect to banking API to get the transaction list?
Not many banks offer APIs to pull transactions. It's easy if you don't mind usign a third party like plaid. I wanted a solution for managing personal finances and didn't want a third party getting a copy of all my financial data, so had to build my own. I ended up building a solution using sqlite and Apache superset, however it used a module that imported data from exports from the banks (so that was a manual step)
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#444I wrote some code for Roomba-mounted (Create 2) Raspberry Pi connected to AWS that would kick off a cleaning run whenever your build fails. The goal was to physically find the person.
I used AWS kinesis video and Rekognition primarily with opencv and Python. There were electrical components to deal with too.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#445I made a Doom "renderer" (no game but you could run around Doom maps) as a side project one summer. This was 20 years ago and in Flash so it was a novelty.
Later I applied for an internship on a whim. I assumed I wouldn't get it since I didn't have the best qualifications. But the job required Flash experience and the Doom renderer made it very clear I had that much. I got my foot in the door, made a career out of it, changing the course of my life.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#446I made a robot to physically find whoever broke the build and alert them. I used a Create 2 (Roomba), AWS Kinesis Video and Rekognition, a Raspberry Pi, some Python and various libraries like OpenCV.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#447[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#448The interview for my current job first went mediocre, but by talking about frugally-deep (a side project of mine) I was able to excite my (now) employer. :-)
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once upon a time, answering people's questions on forums was an excellent long-tail payback career strategy. I used to answer many questions, write explainer blog posts based on repeated questions, etc. In the early-to-mid-2000s, Macromedia paid for my trip to San Francisco, a hotel stay at the W, and a chance to meet the programmers and authors I looked up to -- all because I answered and helped people with their qu…
Yes, every forum has its early years phase where this occurs. It’s about like trying to catch a wave, you look for a building wave, invest some participation, and you have a fine ride. Eventually, the “organizers” show up and add too much order to a system that wants to be a balance between loose structure and otherwise chaotic ad hoc interplay. And if the organizers aren’t the ones that over constrain the system, th…
quite similar to "Mop Theory" -- https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#450Pufftygraph [1]
I wrote a Spirograph clone that worked on an iPhone as a Christmas present for my 6 year old, mainly because back then I couldn't find any existing clones where you could drag the gears around to draw, and I thought it would be a fun coding exercise.
It got me over the line in a job interview at the first startup I worked for. Spirographs and toy web apps had nothing to do with the job, but it was a quick way to demonstrate "chops" to the engineering team, in what was otherwise a disaster of an all-day interview.
I was sick, and tried to reschedule the interview, but the company had planned their whole day around me being there, and the CEO was going to travel for vacation afterwards. I put on a brave face and talked with the CEO, then the tech founders, but I was becoming more and more listless as the day went on.
The engineering team took me out for lunch and beers. We sat outside, and I was facing the sun, feeling like hell, and after the first beer I was in no way able to think technically. Rather than invert a binary tree, or whatever they were asking me about, I shifted the conversation to kids and apps, and passed my phone around for them to all play with the Pufftygraph controls and draw some hypotrochoids.
Some combination of sympathy for someone obviously dead on their feet but still trying, and the app, was enough to get my foot in the door. I had a good time there, but if I had it to do over again, I would have just cancelled since they were so inflexible. Now in the post-covid world, the idea of inviting someone sick to breathe all over your team for a day sounds insane.
[1] https://cautery.blogspot.com/2012/12/pufftygraph-html5-spiro...