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Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
41–50 of 121 posts
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#42Somehow I managed to land my first programming job in the most stereotypical means possible.
I had connected with this young startup through my budding network. I was young, they were young, and we were both involved in TeensInTech (formerly a community of teens interested in startups). I had done a couple rounds of UI/UX feedback for them, that they had requested via TinT. The company made a password & bookmark manager (not one of the ones that is available today. They want out of business).
One day they launched a major website overhaul. Excitedly, I went to their website to play around with it. Purely by chance, I fat fingered my password as I was entering it in. The login failed, obviously, but I was surprised to see that the password input on the failed login page was now filled with a mysterious looking hash. My assumption was that was my hashed password.
This spurred me to open my dev tools and look at the network requests to figure out what was going on. It turned out that their new website was powered by a new API which hadn't really been hardened at all. Within about an hour I was able to find an endpoint that allowed me to enumerate all of the users on their site, and another endpoint that returned a user's stored authentication details (hashed passwords, full usernames & URLs). I wrote a few lines of javascript that looped through all of the users, and fearfully received a dump of their entire credentials table. Obviously that is bad bad bad.
I sent them an email explaining the issue. Their website was promptly taken offline, hardened, and then I received a job offer.
tl;dr; I hacked my first employer's website, and they offered me a job for it.
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#43In my own time, I built a data-logger PoC that would help us fault-find some issues we were having with a generator (in an aircraft). After the PoC, I did it as an official project (designed the hardware, wrote the embedded software, and wrote some interface software that ran on a PC in c++).
That (and a few other factors) got me a role at Headquarters, on a networking team. But I kept writing tools in software and ended up getting snaffled for a web-development team. And have been doing web-applications ever since.
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#44My first freelancing job (previous jobs were internships) came from this project getting to the HN front page: https://umbrellajs.com/ It basically skyrocketed from there to what you can see in https://francisco.io/resume/ , with basically all experiences afterwards building on top of that (either directly, by reference or just as credentials for the next ones). People (including Google) also seem to love https://pic…
Umbrella JS is a well deserving project. You won me over with the little animated illustrations. I feel like people have attached those to "quality" and "legitness"; at least I do.
I am going to play with that lib this weekend. Could be good for small Eletron/NW.JS apps.
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#45I got my foot in the door via a front-end job/internship in England. What I did was I would find free website design templates (this was in 2014) and turn them into live websites. Then I quickly created a portfolio, hosted it on GH pages, linked to my github account at the time and started applying. It was easier for me because it was a paid internship through an EU funded program. They made me an offer and later on retracted. But thankfully right before the end they were nice enough to hook me up with a couple of other companies who were desperately looking for a Junior Dev (whatever that means). I must say I'm really greatful for the oppotunities because it exposed me to much much more talented devs and I got to learn tonnes of things (vim, back-end dev, basic devops, linux) I barely do front end anymore.
So to answer your question I guess, it depends on your area of expertise. It's easier in my opinion if you're a front-end guy because you'll have "something to show". If you're a backend developer you can always cook up a library in whatever language you use and share it with the community, that along with a blog can go a long way in helping you landing a job.
Hope this helps
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#46I converted my internship to a job.
How did I get the internship in the first place? I begged. I begged and begged till they got tired of my begging and offered me an internship.
Actually to be fair to myself, I demonstrated my knowledge of Joomla (a PHP CMS) internals which they thought was cool. The company was a python shop running on Django so that was the second framework I mastered.
Four years later, I now work at Google :)
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#47A really simple VB.NET desktop application landed me a job writing C# code which still handles millions of dollars in banking transactions in Latin America.
I just started working on a simple Django cms called Amy[0] and that has also gotte me work. Weird.
[0] https://github.com/yelluw/amy
See Amy live at yelluw.com (https incoming!)
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#48Not so much self-taught as i was after 2nd year of CS. But i've landed my internship and ultimately first full time job with a game written in c++ and opengl. It was guitar hero style music game with much simpler graphics. Job was at small game studio. It ultimately led to drop out from uni so I never got my degree.
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#49My first freelancing job (previous jobs were internships) came from this project getting to the HN front page: https://umbrellajs.com/ It basically skyrocketed from there to what you can see in https://francisco.io/resume/ , with basically all experiences afterwards building on top of that (either directly, by reference or just as credentials for the next ones). People (including Google) also seem to love https://pic…
Really like your resume layout. What did you build it with? Is that an open-source layout? Would love to use it.
I didn't think it'd be so interesting as to publish it separately, thanks! It's built on top of my own Picnic CSS (in above comment) but with many px/em/cm-specific adjustments as seen in https://francisco.io/resume/cv.css
Feel free to reuse any of the code under the MIT.
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#50Back in 2012-2013 I was learning about javascript and nodejs was the new kid in town. I started learning about express and mongodb and within a few weeks I manage to create a scraper for torrentz.eu to index a bunch of movie torrents and fetch their metadata from imdb/omdb and trailers from youtube. I built a pretty UI and publish the website in the chrome store as an app. It quickly began to grow and was averaging a…
That's a great story! How long after you started learning JS did you start making the movie app?
Maybe a year give or take, and I ended up building it to scratch my own itch of wanting to find a nice movie to watch over the weekend.