Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job

During the interview for my current job (Machine Learning & Deep Learning Scientist), I didn't get any theoretical questions on machine learning, but only questions on my projects.

I didn't study machine learning per say, I followed dozens of online courses but no diploma in this exact field, and my last job was in traditional software engineering.

Despite this, I managed to do two small projects (one of music genre recognition [1] on my own iTunes library, and one of eye motion recognition [2]). For both I had published the code on my GitHub, and written a small Medium article to expose the problem I was trying to solve, the data available, the issues I faced and how I overcame them.

I personally believe that this is all the recruiter wanted to know, and why I encourage interns and candidates to work on their side projects.

References of the projects: [1] https://github.com/despoisj/DeepAudioClassification [1] https://medium.com/@juliendespois/finding-the-genre-of-a-son... [2] https://github.com/despoisj/DeepEyeControl [2] https://medium.com/hackernoon/talk-to-you-computer-with-you-...

I write about iOS development stuff on my blog (https://fluffy.es), and I have gotten a few mentoring gig for junior iOS dev, and gotten job offers as well.

Didn't do any leetcoding, just keep on writing helpful tutorial

I started my blog in 1999, so it was a different world. I guess it's a story of right place, right time more than anything else. At that time it took some REAL effort and at least a little bit of skill to get a blog going. But I'm here because I started that silly little blog. I got my first real programming job because I was able to show that I could do real programming from having that blog. My second job, more or less the same thing. That blog led to me starting my own tiny little hosting company. And because I had some decent tech cred on my resume, I got yet another job. Then, finally, that got me here. That didn't happen over night, it took from 1999 until 2013. I couldn't be happier with my current position and hope to never change jobs again.

Almost every professional job I've had since the 1990s was because I liked Slashdot in 1999 and wanted a site just like that. So, thanks CmndrTaco!

Not really a side project, however:

I wanted to make the jump from system administration to devops engineering. As i started started learning ansible i noticed that something was a little off and submitted a small pull request about one of the core ansible modules.

That didn't get very far because the maintainers didn't like the way it was and also i hadn't time to fix it the way the maintainers wanted it to be (not having time was also one of the reasons for me wanting to make the jump).

Despite this, I included a link to that pull request in my cv anyway (along with other OSS contributions) and that definitely helped, in two ways:

1. during the technical interview i was asked about that pull request and that meant i was able to direct the discourse where i wanted and where it was most favorable to me and basically talk about stuff i knew about (i mean, i did the stuff).

2. as i have been told much later, their gut feeling when taking the decision about my hiring was that i wouldn't have had much problem in figuring how stuff work even though i wasn't technically qualified for that position (in my opinion I was like ~30% qualified). Worst case scenario, i could have been let go during the probation period (I was not).

That was my experience.

Needless to say, that helped me getting hired. I then had to work my a.. off to fill the gaps in my competencies and learn a lot of the new tools. It's been almost a year now and I'm fairly confident with most of the stack, even though there are a few components that I still have to properly study and learn.

So far, it's been a pleasure.

Agreed. Side projects really help you but don't you think it would be better to leetcode if your aim to land a position at FAANG