Not a job I took. But when I launched https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover I got offered a high level position in a a photo company via my email which at the time was on my GitHub profile.
wow just a immediate offer?
Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
61–70 of 538 posts
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#62A 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…
> I did some protocol reversing This would make for an interesting blog post. Could you recommended resources to learn to do the same?
I actually forgot that I did in fact write about this! https://medium.com/@stephencwan/hacking-airplay-into-sonos-9...
A bit light on the technical details perhaps, but I recall getting stuck on getting the right airplay parameters, learning how byte endianness works... happy to try to answer any other questions as best I can remember.
EDIT: Sorry, I realized that I didn't actually answer the other question. I first got interested in reversing from console hacking, specifically this talk about wii hacking: https://youtu.be/0rjaiNIc4W8 (including marcan of asahi linux fame!). Their group also had more writing at: https://fail0verflow.com/blog/. Also interesting to read about mgba emulator development: https://mgba.io/tag/debugging/, v8 internals: https://mrale.ph, react internals: https://overreacted.io/
Consuming a lot of literature on how different systems work helped me develop intuitions around how you might take something apart. Then it's a matter of trying things and banging your head against the wall a lot, e.g. at some point I was interested in how compilers worked so I tried hacking typescript syntax support into babel (circa 2017 maybe) - I got pretty far! and got a lot better sense of how compilers work.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#63For a few years I devstreamed on Twitch. I got one of my longest running freelance clients when he watched me integrate Django authentication into VueJS which was a part of a web based game I was making. The game didn't go anywhere but Django has been my primary focus for most of my career and that was what I did for the client!
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#64Back 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…
That must give you an adrenaline rush of another level when the interviewer turns out to be your user. I want to feel that one day
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#65Built a trinary sorta 6502 emulator and sorta C compiler[1]. This was my resume when I got my first programming job with no formal education in the field.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#66A 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…
> I did some protocol reversing This would make for an interesting blog post. Could you recommended resources to learn to do the same?
The repository https://github.com/stephen/airsonos has the code and is surprisingly accessible.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#67Years ago, I built Asterank, an open-source database of asteroids. It landed me a job at Planetary Resources, an "asteroid mining" company: https://www.asterank.com/
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#68Earlier 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?
The repository https://github.com/stephen/airsonos has the code and is surprisingly accessible.
The meat for the airplay side is here: https://github.com/stephen/nodetunes
Please excuse the code quality... I think I was still learning how to write js at the time.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#69[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#70A 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…
So, respective teams from those two companies (or even other companies for that matter) are actively searching GH for any mods to their work?
In my experience it's more like people happen to stumble across your work or hear about it somehow, not a systematic search for people working on X thing.