Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

I got tired of my job that involved 95% meetings and 5% coding so I quit in August 2022 and decided to figure out what's next. But, since I'd spent a few years not doing as much coding as I'd have liked, I felt rusty. I probably could've gotten a decent job if I'd tried (I have lots of years of experience) but I didn't have confidence and had lost the joy of it.

So, while I tried to figure out what to do, I worked on my hobby NES emulator for Apple platforms, Blackbox[1]. It's written in Swift and uses SwiftUI.

When a potential contracting role (100% SwiftUI) dropped in my lap, I had the confidence and skills to go for it. It's been great (my meeting-to-coding ratio has inverted!) and they're wanting me to extend my contract for another 12 months. I know the project helped make them feel confidence in my capabilities, but I think it's possible that they'd have gone for me regardless. But, I would've struggled, and I probably wouldn't have even gone for it in the first place because I'd have known that my skills weren't where I wanted them to be.

[1] https://github.com/glhaynes/Blackbox

Yeah I tend to use Obsidian on mobile alot so I was thinking of just running a minimal linux VM with just X windows installed on my homelab and utilising a script like the one you posted.

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I have a couple of things that I have mentioned at recent job interviews and helped me get the job, but in a sideways manner. Still make me smile because I essentially did them to learn something and they kinda acquired a life of their own.

Long story short: I had a bit of a fixation with political data wrangling.

This got me two really odd personal successes (excuse the slightly blowing of my own trumpet here, for story's sake): an app [1] that takes UK Parliament debate transcripts and makes an interactive n-gram analysis, similar to Google Books N-gram viewer, which was used by Robert Peston's political show on national TV and the press in the UK (e.g. on the Financial Times [2] and the Sunday Times [3]); then I did a quasi-viral blog post that used code to calculate the average face of a British MP [4], which got me a few contracts, including one with the BBC for the same thing in the US Congress [5]

When I say sideways, what I mean is that the interesting thing is that the jobs I got when using these as examples were not hands-on data wrangling jobs (in fact, they are terribly dirty pieces of code, but that's another story). What they got me is two things: from a technical perspective, the ability to see an end-to-end process to create a product, the running of a service no matter how small for a decade, the use of cutting-edge technology; from a broader point of view, they were great to show me catching the zeitgeist, seeing stories in data, engaging with national media. Both were incredibly "catchy" stories to tell during an interview, and even when challenged (my recent employers being in the public sector) they allowed me to explain myself and my journey.

So, in summary, I love how these two one-day hacks turned into great interview stories, beyond the very minor direct income that they got me.

Aside from the ability to blow my own trumpet a little, the broader applicable lesson here is that by working on something you have a passion for, no matter how geeky it might be, you can build something simple and not necessarily super tidied up, that will however be a good prompt to discuss both your technical and non-technical skills.

I've coached a few candidates for interviews in the intervening years, especially people in tech roles, and it strikes me how often they play down their own side project, which are sometimes much way technically better than mine and with some pretty good stories around the initial motivation and use examples.

[1] https://parli-n-grams.puntofisso.net/

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/d9db05e7-bb1c-4f38-9a02-bd6b66c9c...

[3] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mps-are-becoming-more-loc...

[4] https://puntofisso.medium.com/i-calculated-the-average-face-...

[5] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171018-this-is-the-face...

I built an end2end machine learning platform. It had authentication, model registry, serving and search capabilities