Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job? • Hacker News Board

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

#501

Post by erhaetherth » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 4:27 AM UTC

yieldcrv wrote: post #419

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the top 250 on Stackoverflow and didn't get any job offers through there. I wasn't looking but I think I've only had one person contact me off the platform which involved finding my website and then my contact form. But they just wanted more answers.

it wasn't through there, it made a difference in the recruitment and hiring process and I had my stackoverflow badge on my resume at the time just happenstance that somoene at that particular company was looking for it. actually was a red flag that they were, but it paid a lot more than I had ever been paid before, for those 3 months I worked there

Hah. I have my badge on my website. I'm surprised a recruiter was looking for it.

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

#502

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 6:02 AM UTC

tmountain wrote: post #94

whycombagator wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I did some protocol reversing This would make for an interesting blog post. Could you recommended resources to learn to do the same?

Step 1 — study popular protocols to understand how client/server interactions typically work. Step 2 — deploy the network appliance in question to your LAN and intercept its packets with wireshark. Step 3 — begin inference of protocol from observed behavior and test hypothesis by sending hand-crafted payloads to the server in question. Step 4 — rinse and repeat until assumptions are proven to be correct with a high d…

> Step 3 — begin inference of protocol from observed behavior and test hypothesis by sending hand-crafted payloads to the server in question.

Curious about common tactics people use for avoiding the ban-hammer from the company at this stage. Surely they can tell the difference between normal operations and this kind of hand crafted probing?

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

#503

Post by oaiey » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 8:52 AM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #418

Seanambers wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The country you grew up in almost always has a big quality-of-life head start, because it's where your friends and family are. If you're in a poor country and changing country will get you a 10x increase in salary, that might more than compensate for only seeing your loved ones for a few days every few years. But if you're already pretty well off? Not so much.

The headstart is also in your customs. If you are used living w/o e.g. social security, a migration to the US is far more easy/interesting than when you are used to social security.

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

#504

Post by kurama » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 8:54 AM UTC

covid api

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

#505

Post by redbell » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 9:40 AM UTC

Back in 2019, I made an advanced MS Word add-in spellchecker that integrates the ProWritingAid API to spot all the errors in an interactive way where you just hover over a misspelled word or an incorrect expression and a popup shows at the mouse pointer's position where you can quickly correct the word with suggestions, or open a task pane on the right side of the active document for more advanced features. The issues were highlighted by different colors depending on the type of issue. In short, you can think of Grammarly's Chrome extension.

After a short period of time, I saw a job posting by the company that read something like, "We need an MS Word Add-In developer," and from the job's description, it was clear that they want a developer to build a Word Add-in that consumes their API. Yay! I said. I instantly applied and attached a short video showing the add-in I built in action. I immediately got a response from the CEO himself, and I think the CTO or a lead developer was with him. They interviewed me and liked me, but, unfortunately, they didn't hire me because of me!

Honestly, I tried to sell them the add-in and ensure some level of future support, but they insisted on hiring me on an hourly basis; instead, I couldn't. I did not decline the offer directly but asked for an hourly rate I knew they would not be able to afford, and well, that was the end.

________________________

1. https://prowritingaid.com/

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

#506

Post by notpushkin » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 10:11 AM UTC

Yoric wrote: post #476

notpushkin wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> turned it into a programming language That sounds weird. Did you mean that they reimplemented it in another programming language?

No, they actually wrote a (domain-specific) programming language based on this. The tax code is apparently complex enough to be Turing-complete :)

Oh wow. Yeah, that's totally another level :D

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

#507

Post by stsrki » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 10:34 AM UTC

vortegne wrote: post #415

stsrki wrote: post #406

I made a Blazor component library for one of my personal projects that failed, but the component library lived on as an open-source project called Blazorise [1]. In late 2019, I got a well-paid job in a large local company because of the project reference. Unfortunately, COVID happened, and I lost that same job after a few months. So again, because of Blazorise, I got several other gigs as a freelancer. But after a w…

I used Blazorise at my old job! Great work!

Thank you. Glad you like it.

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

#508

Post by Markstar » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 11:42 AM UTC

pokepim wrote: post #239

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…

Is it common for Germans to dream about getting out of Germany and moving to US? Congratulations to you that you managed to do that, I am wondering how hard for German is to migrate to US to puruse better life here.

My wife is a researcher in Germany and because of something called the "Wissenschaftszeitgesetz", she is looking for a job outside of Germany for her next research project.

With having 2 kids, the US is definitely on our blacklist despite both of us having gone to school there, still keeping in touch with friends from that time and even professors actually offering her a position. We know many others who feel the same, so my impression is that for most Europeans, the US is not a desirable place to live anymore.

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

#509

Post by Morloc » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 1:29 PM UTC

Back in 2010, while graduating in computer science I wrote an iOS app called "Ricarichiamoci" that allowed students of Pisa University (unipi.it) to recharge and manage their dining facility cards via mobile instead of queuing for 30 minutes in front of a few ATM-style recharging machines. The app scraped and submitted data via a form on the official facility company website (unusable on mobile)

The company lawyer called me and accused me of "hacking" their website and ordered me to shut down the app or I would be sued. 30 (very long) minutes later the CEO called me, apologised, and offered me a job as iOS engineer.

And this is how I landed my first job, and the one that shaped my career for the next 13 years.

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

#510

Post by vain_cain » Tue, Dec 05, 2023, 5:42 PM UTC

A couple months after I started studying software engineering in 2017 I made a facial recognition desktop app that was just a few open source projects bundled together. It would just write the name and age of the person that was standing in front of the camera if it recognized the person. It was very unimpressive, but what got one of my professors attention was that I managed to scrape the college intranet web app for pictures(with names, surnames and year of birth) of pretty much everyone who ever attended or is attending the college(including all the professors). I was inspired after watching "The social network" movie where mark scrapes the yearbooks for pictures of students.

When it was finished I showed it to a few colleagues, one of which told the professor. I showed it to him and he got me a interview with a friend of his who was looking for an employee. We went for a coffee and he offered me the job right away which i took. A few weeks later i quit college, and I'm still mostly working for the company that gave me that first job, but I have my own company now.