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Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

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Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#81

Post by mraza007 »

jessehorne wrote: post #22
xena wrote: post #15

My blog https://xeiaso.net (source code: https://github.com/Xe/site ) and the stuff I've written for it ended up doing several things to help me get employed over the years: 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-hack…

I've heard from many that writing can help build credibility for hiring purposes. I have committed myself to writing at least something on all future projects because of this. Thanks for the tip. p.s your use of "Technophilosopher" and "chaos magician" to describe yourself is incredible

I have gotten very good engagement of my blog content as I write for fun sometimes

I got to learn a lot of from folks who read my Content.

Also if you don’t mind me asking

How can a blog aid in finding or landing a job

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#82

Post by rikafurude21 »

stpn wrote: post #27

A long time ago sonos didn't support apple airplay. 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 in…

Sorry but this sounds like LARP, who the hell wouldnt jump on a job offer from apple? Even if it doesnt work out, having Apple on your resume wouldve been an insane career booster, telling people you got an offer from them but didnt take it sounds very unbelievable, atleast personally, I wouldnt have believed you

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#83

Post by michaelbuckbee »

I built https://foragoodstrftime.com ~10 years ago as I was sick of reading the docs for date formatting.

It generally gets around 1000 users a day.

Over the years, it's gotten me consulting gigs and the occasional job offer (amidst other projects).

Today, it sends a decent chunk of the traffic and sign-ups to my startup, Wafris -> https://wafris.org

OP's asking for a strategy with these, and the advice I'd offer is to treat them like assets. You make these various side projects to learn something, take the extra 20% of time to package it up buy a domain, and spend $10 on a logo or something to make it a little more like a project and not just a repo.

If it's not something directly usable like this, take some screenshots and collect them into a gallery on a personal site.

You stack these assets over time (and like my example above), they pay off over years in all sorts of ways.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#84

Post by qingcharles »

In 1999 my friend's band wanted to sell their music online and so I looked at the new Microsoft DRM that had just been released (don't kill me!) and set up a test web page. I ended up getting an interview (and a job) with a company that Peter Gabriel had just started as I was practically the only person in the country that had even looked at the SDK.

PG gave us an opening to every record label ("Hi, Peter Gabriel would like to come visit and show you something...") where we'd show them we could sell their music legally online. Five minutes after PG leaves each building a team from Apple would show up and show off what they were building too. Their meetings were much shorter as we always did all the heavy lifting first. (Note, we always had to use our own equipment because the MS stuff worked way better on Windows, but all the record labels were like 99% Mac).

On another one.. it wasn't a side project, but I "hacked" a competition on a popular TV show's web site and they ended up hiring me as the co-presenter o_O

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#85

Post by KomoD »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #82
stpn wrote: post #27

A long time ago sonos didn't support apple airplay. 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 in…

Sorry but this sounds like LARP, who the hell wouldnt jump on a job offer from apple? Even if it doesnt work out, having Apple on your resume wouldve been an insane career booster, telling people you got an offer from them but didnt take it sounds very unbelievable, atleast personally, I wouldnt have believed you

> who the hell wouldnt jump on a job offer from apple?

Lots of people, including me.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#86

Post by bifurcations »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #82
stpn wrote: post #27

A long time ago sonos didn't support apple airplay. 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 in…

Sorry but this sounds like LARP, who the hell wouldnt jump on a job offer from apple? Even if it doesnt work out, having Apple on your resume wouldve been an insane career booster, telling people you got an offer from them but didnt take it sounds very unbelievable, atleast personally, I wouldnt have believed you

Not everyone on this site is a student with nothing on their resume.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#87

Post by kugelblitz »

modeless wrote: post #78

I was one of the first backers of the Oculus Rift Kickstarter. When I got it I decided eye tracking was going to be huge for VR, so as a side project I cut a hole in my Rift and built my own eye tracker. I posted it on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7876471 A few days later the CTO of a small eye tracking startup gave me a call. I quit Google and joined them. I built a (novel at the time) deep neur…

Feels like a storyline in the Silicon Valley series.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#88

Post by trzy »

I was working in HFT in New York and messing around with HoloLens in my spare time. I went to GDC and gave a talk (https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024862/HoloLens-and-Beyond-AR...) and Apple hired me to work on AR prototyping and ideation because the creator of the HoloLens, then working at Apple, attended the talk :)

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#89

Post by marpstar »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #82
stpn wrote: post #27

A long time ago sonos didn't support apple airplay. 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 in…

Sorry but this sounds like LARP, who the hell wouldnt jump on a job offer from apple? Even if it doesnt work out, having Apple on your resume wouldve been an insane career booster, telling people you got an offer from them but didnt take it sounds very unbelievable, atleast personally, I wouldnt have believed you

Not everyone is willing to uproot their life on a whim, even for a theoretically great job and a theoretically great company.

Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

#90

Post by xena »

mraza007 wrote: post #81
jessehorne wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard from many that writing can help build credibility for hiring purposes. I have committed myself to writing at least something on all future projects because of this. Thanks for the tip. p.s your use of "Technophilosopher" and "chaos magician" to describe yourself is incredible

I have gotten very good engagement of my blog content as I write for fun sometimes I got to learn a lot of from folks who read my Content. Also if you don’t mind me asking How can a blog aid in finding or landing a job

Become an expert in a thing, companies that need expertise in that thing will come knocking.
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