I started https://github.com/thbar/kiba#kiba-etl to scratch my own itch & be able to write properly structured ETL jobs in Ruby. It was a blank-slate rewrite of something larger (activewarehouse-etl) which I could not maintain anymore.
This landed me not strictly a job, but long term consulting gigs with a number of companies in EU, UK & US.
The job was directly related to the project: companies wanted the expertise of data engineering & ETL, often with Kiba directly, but also in general.
I built an early HTML5 game engine in 2010 called CraftyJS when Facebook games were starting to become big. The project itself got me the job at a gaming startup and an offer at Zynga.
1. Letting me have a place to write to get better at writing, which makes it easier to do my job in DevRel.
2. Lets me talk about all of the interesting projects I work on (eg: an AI novel writing experiment https://xeiaso.net/videos/2023/ai-hackathon/) that people regularly find interesting. This gets people interested in wanting to employ me, which ends up working up well for me in the long run.
Do side projects, but write about what you did and what you learned.
I’ve learned an unbelievable amount trying to systematically invest on my own. All of what I have learned is levered in my career and I’ve utilized that knowledge during all interviews.
Care to elaborate? Never had the money to invest but have dabbled with some very basic auto trading algos. Long story short, before I learned any math related to gambling, I didn't understand why martingale can't work in gambling or investment. Now I do. :P
Not really a side project, but I used to be a lot more active on stackoverflow. A recruiter reached out to me through the job board that stackexchange used to host. Been with the job for about 5 years now.
Pretty lame that they discontinued that job board. It was a lot nicer experience than using linkedin.
My most recent post about my side project [0] got me some freelancing work as well as an internship for this summer. Project was related to both of them! Unbelievably grateful for the opportunities it’s given me.
I’ve got thoughts about the ability for side projects to directly demonstrate not just proficiency, but passion, which is very important in undergrad when looking for opportunities. Might end up writing a blog post about it.
It was my half hearted attempt at factorio with Clojure: https://github.com/pyrrhic/learning-clojure-factorio-clone It mostly just showed that I had a genuine interest in programming, and served as a talking point (why Clojure, my experience with it, etc). The project wasn't related to the job at all.
I've put a lot of hours into factorio. This is amazing. I genuinely love the art style in the gif.
Well, a very long time ago, in a company funded far far away (and since defeated by the empire), I had the "joy" of working with Sendmail. For you youngsters, back then, back when we had dial telephones (tell us more Grandpa!), there were multiple "mail networks", not just this fancy Internet you kids have. Sendmail was a mail processor that could not only arrange to send and receive mail, but it could translate addressing between the different networks (ARPA, Bitnet, CSNET, UUCP, etc.) The problem was, reading a sendmail config file was something like reading assembly code except you weren't allowed to by vowels. It was nearly all symbols -- executable line noise.
I got tired of working with it - so I wrote my own sendmail compiler/de-compiler of sorts just to work in English prose. Got me my job at Sun.
These days, I'm not sure if it will let me keep my job, or be the justification for my losing it, but I'm working on a programming language for teens called Onyx (after my grandson, who has NO interest in this as he's intending to a be a pilot, but it means unless she works for Boeing, I'm safe for a few more years