Ask HN: How Blog/side projects helped you land a job • Hacker News Board

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

#21

Post by mraza007 » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

bandarqq wrote: post #9

I 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…

that's great. Honestly blogs really help and this is why I believe blogging is one way of giving back to the community and I have been blogging for about 2 years now but I have been on and off. I need to start contributing actively

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

#22

Post by codegeek » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

As someone who hires, I can tell you it works. I hired a Go developer after finding his ebook and blog posts and he did a project that was worth $10K+ USD. If he didn't have that ebook and his blog along with his open source contributions, I wouldn't have found him and hired him.

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

#23

Post by DangerousYams » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 3:57 PM UTC

Blogging and side projects helped me land a job at Pixar! Many years later I wrote about it in an article- https://hackernoon.com/3-things-i-learned-from-5-jobs-in-12-... Blogging about how blogging helped me get a job got me the job I have now as CTO at Tonk Tonk Games :)

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

#24

Post by jetti » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 4:32 PM UTC

A recruiter for the company I'm at saw my github with a few Elixir projects, which was one of the reasons he reached out to me. During the interview my use of Elixir and dynamic languages came up as well since the company uses Clojure. A previous job I found out that the VP had read my blog and utilized it to work with Excel and .NET.

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

#25

Post by edmundsauto » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

I had a "consultancy" website up, with basic content. Maybe a dozen posts, never kept the habit.

Because I had something (even though it was crap), I was able to talk my way into being the cofounder at a startup, then a job at a FAANG at a crazy salary. The FAANG recruiter mentioned specifically that they saw I was running my own shop (even though I never landed any accounts > $10k in the 6 months).

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

#26

Post by sonofaragorn » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

artembugara wrote: post #5

While 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…

Hey I remember your package! Why did you write startup in quotes?

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

#27

Post by sonofaragorn » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

bandarqq wrote: post #9

I 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…

Is the blog on automation with python still active? I'd love to take a look.

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

#28

Post by artembugara » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 6:03 PM UTC

sonofaragorn wrote: post #26

artembugara wrote: post #5

While 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…

Hey I remember your package! Why did you write startup in quotes?

Because it is business. I think we all should stop calling “startup” any project. But. That’s how people like to talk these days.

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

#29

Post by milkytron » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

I created an app for helping people find parking at my college. It was really simple, each parking lot had a traffic light color corresponding with likelihood of being full (Red: likely full, Yellow: possibly full, Green: unlikely to be full).

It was based off of class times, so when more classes were in session near the buildings of those parking lots, the color would change.

I put it on my resume, and had it in the Google Play Store during my time at university. Got asked about it during interviews and every interviewer really liked the fact that I saw a problem, proposed a solution/assistance, and published it to the world.

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

#30

Post by pknerd » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

My web scraping related blog posts helped me to get the current job and many side gigs. All because I had written not only code related tuts but also discuss about theirs efficiency and other stuff that help non coder people like CEOs etc to learn about me.