Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

We exchanged numbers, and after six or so months of talking to me, they convinced me to join them instead. I got in early and had a really good exit. Completely changed the course of my life.

My other passion (apart from biology) was film. I've made a lot of indie films over the last decade, but I always focused on film tech - volumetric video, mocap, etc. I'm currently building a startup in that space that started as one of my side projects. We're doing really well!

Side projects have always led to inflection points in my life. They have more pull than anything else, and they lead me down interesting problem gradients.

I'll get back to biology one day. I have some ideas there, too.

[1] https://youtu.be/5XTi-jf-ans

[2] https://youtu.be/x034jVB1avs

I used to hire people straight off of SO. Sometimes skipping the usual process of they has solid answers to the types of questions we’s ask - went straight for culture fit.

I think instead of blaming ai and other esoteric reasons for SO’a downfall leadership should look into the damage cancelling the job board has done. People helping others at least had the incentive of being given a job. Now there’s no point really.

I do contract work for a pretty niche industry and after you've done a couple big implementation projects, you've seen 80-90% of all user stories, integrations and edge cases.

I started a side project that was a combination of tooling, processes, checklists and methodology to stop reimplementing the same project work and stop approaching every client like it was greenfield work. Not fully productizing our approach but moving in that direction.

My company was not interested. During an interview I pitched my side project ideas and they immediately said they wanted to hire me. Skipped the rest of the hiring process and landed a new role doing exactly what I had wanted to do at my previous company.

I did some protocol reversing and wrote a small program that pretended to be an airplay speaker to pipe audio to a sonos speaker (archive: https://github.com/stephen/airsonos)

I ended up getting recruiting messages from both the airplay team at apple and some folks from sonos. I didn't end up taking either offer, but it was also an interesting talking point when interviewing for the job I did take.

I came across Decipad while looking for a job, and messaged the founder, highlighting my work on NumPad. They were impressed enough that the hiring process ended up being just a few interviews, I've been there for almost a year now, and it's been pretty good!

If there's a moral to this story I think it's that you should aim for work that's highly relevant to your side project experience. In my case both NumPad and Decipad have a sort of programming language that can do calculations with units.

But ignore this advice if you can't find that work, or it doesn't seem good for whatever reason. You can still highlight your side project in an application, and they might be impressed anyway.