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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?

#201

Post by resonious »

modeless wrote: post #111
kugelblitz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like a storyline in the Silicon Valley series.

That's nothing, the "Silicon Valley" part is what happened after the acquisition. Google was so paranoid about "user data" that they forced us to delete every scrap of our training datasets, going as far as physically shredding any laptop that had contained the data. We had a memorable evening at the office with the onsite shredder truck. It couldn't shred the MacBooks due to the aluminum case and we ended up smashin…

This is nuts. I sometimes lament my employer wasting money and engineer time but this is a whole nother level.

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

#202

Post by financltravsty »

electrondood wrote: post #152
financltravsty wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple recruiters have the professionalism and organizational skills of a shady manual labor staffing firm. 5 1-hour rounds, low-balled, and treated with what felt like an ad-hoc process. Wasn't impressed with the people, nor the caliber of engineering talent. The same is true of Microsoft (Azure specifically), Google, and Amazon. Only two "traditional" big tech companies of any note for having sharp people and all-ar…

Good vibes at Meta? That place absolutely oozes phoney hyper-idealized cringey millennial youth culture. It feels like a cult. I found Apple recruiters very clear and fair.

Haven't noticed it. All of the E5+s I know are real. Might just be luck and selective filtering on my end to not get involved with the... overgrown children.

Apple's recruiters were flaky on comms, rescheduled me a couple of times, and were disappointing for a company I had higher expectations for.

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

#203

Post by simonsarris »

When I was fresh out of college I semi-obsessively started answering StackOverflow questions about HTML Canvas, which was still new enough to not have a lot of coverage. At one point I answered over 10% of all canvas questions ever asked. I also blogged a few tutorials. This made Pearson email me for a book offer (HTML5 Unleashed, 2013, almost no one read it as I had no fame, but last amazon review: "Still relevant in 2018, best book on canvas I have read")

And writing that book lead to lots of recruiters. I humored one, they flew me out to SF, gave me a car for a few days (I had never been to the west coast), dined with me, and made me an offer before I was to fly back home, an offer that was lots more than I was making at the time. I told them I'd think about it.

But I was too scared to leave New Hampshire, and perhaps too sentimental, or some more nameless term, so I didn't accept the offer. All from answering some SO questions.

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

#204

Post by quesera »

jedberg wrote: post #44
jantypas2 wrote: post #20

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 addr…

I used to work at Sendmail, it was my first job. The entire premise of the company was "Sendmail is so hard to use, let us run it for you". We had software that added a GUI for configuration and management, and Pro Services to set up big installs. But also we had all the top maintainers of Sendmail. And we ran Sendmail for our corp mail. Once we had a problem with the network, so we had to reroute corporate mail over…

I used to do this at Uni, and I actually enjoyed it. It was like a complicated puzzle, and the thrill of solving it was powerful. I remember spending days getting a SunOS Lotus Notes gateway working the way I wanted it to.

Ironically, M4 felt over-complicated and abstracted, so I did not want to learn that. Direct edit all the way.

  vi /etc/sendmail.cf
This seemed like an obscure parlor trick that vanishingly few people could appreciate. I was totally OK with that.

And I was truly shocked to later learn that there were people willing to pay for this service. Ah simpler times.

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

#205

Post by Sophistifunk »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #97
KomoD wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who the hell wouldnt jump on a job offer from apple? Lots of people, including me.

Lots of people love being contrarian in theory. If it happened to you for real, no chance youre gonna say no to that

Move to California, go back to an office for 60 hours a week, sign my life away and swear to secrecy about my thrilling position on some compiler team? Yeah I think could say no to that.

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

#206

Post by solomonb »

Not a job per se, but some friends and I wrote a library for building compositional chatbots (like for IRC not LLMs necessarily) encoded as Mealy Machines: https://github.com/cofree-coffee/cofree-bot/

That project has since led to a long term collaboration with the Topos Institute where we are building a type theory for Polynomial Functors: https://github.com/toposInstitute/polytt

Polynomial Functors are a really powerful abstraction from Category Theory which subsumes the co-algebraic approach to finite state machines used in `cofree-bot` and which can also be used to encode wiring diagrams, tactics engines, game semantics, neural networks, and dynamical systems in general.

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

#207

Post by castiel652 »

Wouldn't count it as a project but it did help me get a job.

I was avoiding working on my thesis and started diving into the world of OpenWrt. Added support of two devices and got interested into wireless driver. Put the stuff above into my resume. My boss saw it and invited me for an interview.

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

#208

Post by coxley »

Not exactly a project, but I was very active in IRC between 2009-2017.

I stuck mostly to Linux and network engineering channels. I contributed to open source projects, answered questions, and asked plenty of my own.

One day I helped someone with some weird Docker issue in 2014. He later referred me to the company he worked for in San Francisco. I moved from my small 2,000 person unincorporated town a few months later, tripling my salary.

There were other ways it could have eventually happened, but the serendipity of that was never lost on me. Changed my career for the better — tho I left that company a year later for a unique opportunity at FB.

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

#210

Post by BD103 »

kepano wrote: post #174

I made a theme for Obsidian linked below. As a result I got to know the founders, and helped design the 1.0 version of the app. This eventually led me to join the company as CEO. I had previously founded and run two startups, so that helped too. https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-minimal

Yo that's awesome! I've been using Obsidian for some time, and it's absolutely superb. Since I started using it after the 1.0 release, what did it look like before the redesign?
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