51–60 of 538 posts
https://github.com/x-govuk/govuk-form-builder https://github.com/x-govuk/govuk-components
When I interviewed at Microsoft my senior year, this gave me a ton to talk about. It was real experience building a product and having customers. I could answer questions with something real and different than the other candidates. I know I bombed two of my interviews, but I ended up doing 7 interviews on the day and getting an offer.
The website is still around, but I haven't done anything to it other than delete the production log that fills up the server disk occasionally in the last 15 years. I don't know why anyone uses it, there are much better options. I still run and I certainly don't use it. But the server bills are cheap, so it lives on.
Back 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 ?
In 2009 I joined Percona and saw that, by then, it was better for me to contribute to other open source projects in the MySQL ecosystem than to continue trying to get highbase caught up with things like mysql-mmm.
Some of those libraries became _very_ widely used in the Perl community. The number one most used is probably DateTime (https://metacpan.org/dist/DateTime), and number two is probably (https://metacpan.org/dist/Log-Dispatch). But some of the others also got a lot uptake.
I also contributed a lot to libraries create by others, most notably HTML::Mason and Moose, both of which were very widely used in Perl.
All of that, plus speaking at the Perl conferences, really helped me develop my professional network. If I recall correctly, all three of of my most recent jobs came about because of my Perl connections to varying degrees. Two of them were just because I posted on my blog that I was looking for work and someone I knew through Perl reached out.
Today I work in Golang at MongoDB. In 2022, I again posted that I was looking for something new and someone I knew from Perl who worked at MongoDB reached out to me. I'm really thankful he did, because working there has been great!
Nowadays I don't do much Perl any more, though I still maintain many of my modules (bug fixes and small feature requests only, though). I've also done some Golang (https://github.com/houseabsolute?q=&type=public&language=go) and Rust (https://crates.io/users/autarch).
But I think it would be _much_ harder for a young person to do the same things I did. Nowadays there are just so many freaking programmers. Someone invents a new language and five minutes later there are a huge number of foundational libraries for it. By the time I started with Go (mid-2010s), pretty much all the stuff I had done in Perl already existed in Go. And I found the same to be true with Rust when I started using it after Go.
Not really a side project as I was trying to get traction on my ideas at my former employer. I do contract work for a pretty niche industry and after you've done a couple big implementation projects, you've seen 80-90% of all user stories, integrations and edge cases. I started a side project that was a combination of tooling, processes, checklists and methodology to stop reimplementing the same project work and stop…
looking to do the same, would appreciate any insight
Not 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?
I was planning to go into grad school for computational biology, but an early Square engineer saw me playing with the thing I'd built on the side of a Waffle House at 2 or 3 AM [1,2]. We exchanged numbers, and after six or so months of talking to me, they convinced me to join them instead. I got in early and had a really good exit. Completely changed the course of my life. My other passion (apart from biology) was fi…
A similar coincidence happened to me early career. I had finished an internship, wasn’t sure what to do full time after, and ran into my old boss in a grocery store. He had been impressed with my internship work and seeing me reminded him of me and we started talking, soon enough he invited me to be employee #6 at his new venture. It worked out really well.
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…
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…