Not a job but I got a contract due to a webapp template I have in my github profile, my customer shared that he wanted someone that wouldn't start from scratch and my template looked good enough to get the job done.
Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
161–170 of 538 posts
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#162I built a open source wireless IMU (http://adjacentreality.org/), integrated it into some projects, and posted about it on a hobbyist virtual reality forum in 2012. I sent one of two working units to another hobbyist there to use on the headset he was prototyping called the "Oculus Rift". A few months later, Palmer was looking for an engineer to build a VR tracking system, and the rest is history!
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny you say this. After struggling to find work (but mostly to find meaningful work), I've committed myself to pursuing jobs related to my curiosities/interests. I didn't really do that before. Over time, I've started to narrow down based off of what I'm genuinely interested in. That way I don't have to lie when I say I'm "passionate" about something I'm working on. :-)
> I've started to narrow down based off of what I'm genuinely interested in. How do you do that if you’re past work is disconnected from what you’re interested in.
you do side projects! More seriously, I'm exactly in this situation and you'll have to find transversal skills, often soft skills when it' very different. And side projects, or courses.
And accept a junior position, even if you're a senior dentist.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#164I wrote a an HTML template for a friend that looked like the Drudge Report (conservative news aggregator that looks a certain way). I posted it online for free and got a number of folks asking for a WordPress version. I coded one up and started selling it online as WP-Drudge. It sold quite well for many years and generated a solid portion of my freelance income making modifications for random sites. I ended up working for Alan Colmes (RIP), the sole liberal on Fox News (conservative news network) and a delightful individual. I built a few more products and eventually sold the whole business several years back. To this day I still get freelance inquiries!
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#165I modded Starcraft 2 (PeepMode). Helped me get a job at a AAA Blizzard spinoff. The company failed but it was a fun ride.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#166[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#167Back in 2002 I lost my job during a regional financial crisis (I’m from Uruguay). I was working at a bank (as a contractors) and some coworkers and I were working on a HA project for MySQL at the moment (to use it at work). Once I got laid off, I focused on it to the point that it became quite useful, and at some point, someone from Israel reached out with questions. I answered with a lot of delay, and when I explain…
Que bueno ver otro Uruguayo aca en HN, somos pocos pero buenos! Que estes bien Fernando, me alegro que prefieras quedarte en el paisito y cultivarlo ayudando a otros.
¡Somos al menos tres!
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#168A 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…
I remember seeing this published when I worked at Sonos. In fact, I might have been the one who put it on the Slack channel. It was a cool project at a time when a lot of people were saying it was insurmountable to make us AirPlay compatible. Sorry you didn’t get the job. I hope you didn’t lose much sleep over it. I left in 2020. I wouldn’t say you’re missing much any more.
Why is that? I recently bought a Sonos after getting plenty of recommendations. Even though it sounds great, I hate that they dropped support for Google assistant. Also, the Sonos voice commands can't handle Spotify or YouTube music. Kind of sucks.
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#169In a way, I owe my current job at Replay.io (a time-traveling debugger for JS) to having spent years maintaining the Redux JS state management libraries.
I got involved with Redux at the start of 2016, and Dan Abramov handed me the maintainer keys that summer after he got busy working on React.
Over the next several years I've put in thousands of hours maintaining the libraries (Redux, React-Redux, Redux Toolkit, Reselect), answering questions, rewriting our docs, and writing articles. That gave me a chance to start doing conference talks.
When I finally announced I was looking for a new position in January 2022, after 14 years at my previous job, I got flooded with companies expressing interest.
The one that actually caught my attention was Replay.io. The culture fit was perfect (smart people building an amazingly useful tool and solving unique techhnical problems), they knew me from my Redux work, the codebase used React + Redux, and it fit my history of working on dev tools that involved time travel in some way.
So, lots of overlap, and I'm having a blast there still :)
Re: Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
#170I was a QA tester at a transportation company with a PHP stack. My leader was great and allowed me to teach myself web development when tasks were done. Eventually I built a finance calendar in php/symfony modeled after the websites the team built.
I demo'd it to him and I was allowed to start picking up development issues. Eventually became a full time developer. Kept learning and ended up containerizing all our applications and set up a kubernetes cluster, moving us away from VMs. ( responding to a desire from all the devs to start using docker ).
Circled back around and built automation for spinning up k8s testing environments for each the story in the QA queue to simplify things for our testers. By the time I the left the company, they hired a whole company to do everything I was doing, which I held off leaving until they were set up and I was able to knowledge transfer fully to the company. Moved to GoLang also now, don't really do php anymore.
Though still get keepalived alerts when a node goes down.