I would love to hear from people who a got job through their side project or got recognized through there blog. What was the experience like and how much leetcoding did you do?
Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job
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Re: Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job
#2When I was early in my career I would do a variation of this. I would read the job descriptions for something unique that I could write a demo app for the show that I actually, A. Had the skills to do the thing they wanted, B. Had the dedication to do something like this.
It got me to the interview stage often and then it was up to whether I knew the nonsense whiteboard leetcode situation, which I've never been particularly good at.
If I got the job it was because they were pre-sold on step one's effectiveness I've always felt like.
Re: Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job
#3When I was early in my career I would do a variation of this. I would read the job descriptions for something unique that I could write a demo app for the show that I actually, A. Had the skills to do the thing they wanted, B. Had the dedication to do something like this. It got me to the interview stage often and then it was up to whether I knew the nonsense whiteboard leetcode situation, which I've never been parti…
This is a very good point.
Re: Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job
#4I started writing blog 5-6 years ago. Initially, there was no tracktion. With time, as the content grew and a few of my posts got attention on HN and StackOverflow; I started getting requests from companies to work for them. A few of them were small gigs but I have been working with 2 companies as a freelancer since last 6 years.
A few of the posts were research based and therefore they wanted to know more about my insight. A few of them were tutorials and they wanted me to build something for them. Hope this helps. If you have any other question, send me an email. (in profile)
Re: Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job
#5While I was working on my “startup” one guy wrote me the following: “I lost my internship due to COVID. I’d like to help you guys with your project”.
So, it was hard to us to find some job for the guy but we were open sourcing our job. I told the guy to work on a next version of our open-sourced Python package[1].
After we released it, it went #1 on Hacker News. I put him everywhere in the credits. You can still see him in our “Team” section[2].
The next day he got 2 offers.
Re: Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job
#6I've never worked a day in my life as a developer, but I've been offered positions multiple times because of side projects.
My mantra to everyone is to just build things. Don't wait to be asked. Build things. Makers make things.
I built an ecommerce site out of curiosity using some of the lesser documented PayPal APIs and services for micro-transactions (even talking to their developers to get concrete answers.) While relaying this to someone at a tech meetup I was offered a job on the spot from a fintech company CTO because he'd been trying to solve the same problem and was impressed with how far I went to solve it out of curiosity.
Another time I got invited to beta a product from a company and was able to show them a variety of uses cases by building small projects around it, which lead to a job offer.
I wasn't doing particularly sophisticated coding, but I knew enough to build everything from mobile apps to server-sided apis.
I never would have made it past the recruiter for either company had I taken the traditional route because I've never formally worked for anyone in tech. However my habit of learning all kinds of frameworks and outside thinking was something they realized they wanted.
P.S. In the latter instance I also blogged about their technology which helped showcase its potential.
Re: Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job
#7I posted here (on a different account) and a VP-level tweeted it saying it was cool. I pestered them on email and LinkedIn until they responded (I assumed they were busy and was very polite). I got very lucky with who I contacted and how it worked out, but if you get on the front page you’ll notice a lot of automatic tweets are sent out. Can be good to sort by popularity and find potential people to connect with.
Re: Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job
#8I've never worked a day in my life as a developer, but I've been offered positions multiple times because of side projects. My mantra to everyone is to just build things. Don't wait to be asked. Build things. Makers make things. I built an ecommerce site out of curiosity using some of the lesser documented PayPal APIs and services for micro-transactions (even talking to their developers to get concrete answers.) Whil…
+1 on this. Trying to get back that hacker velocity that doing professional software engineering seems to put a drag on.
Re: Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job
#9I started building two blogs about tech in 2012, in the first blog I wrote a lot about automation with WordPress, and the other one I wrote about cross platform automation with python. The main goal when I build those two blogs is to get extra income from Google Adsense. Then things started to change when I joined a few communities and getting active in there. I contribute and share what I created until the day I got few offers a month.
Re: Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job
#10When I was applying for my first job I passed various filters and eventually landed a cool job thanks to a side project.
It helped to show case that I understood several parts of the software development cycle, my communication style and documentation. This, I believe, would be hard to describe on a CV. [1]
It also helped me a lot to practice and learn things otherwise I wouldn't have, and that I put on practice for the interview task. [2]
Here are my examples:
[1] https://github.com/eaguilera23/miSalleScrapper [2] https://github.com/eaguilera23/ex_banking