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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?

#231

Post by scarface_74 »

When I was at AWS working in the ProServe department, I got onto a popular open source project that eventually became a more official “AWS Solution”. While much of the work came out of customizations I did for customers that got reintegrated into the project, I did spend some time working on features that just scratched an itch.

Once I found out how easy it was to put something through the open source process and have it posted to AWS Samples:

https://github.com/aws-samples

I sanitized all of my customer facing solutions that didn’t have proprietary business logic and submitted them - 8 projects in all.

When the interviewer asked me what project was I most proud of, I discussed my contributions to the “AWS Solution” that I knew the company probably used or had at least heard of and my own related work that was open source that I knew was inline with the strategy they were pursuing.

I’ve been at the company 3 months and I’ve already implemented and modified 5 of my 8 personal open source projects. Two of the other three are based on now deprecated methods and once I dig into AWS Reinvent announcements, there may be better options out there than the AWS Solution.

All that being said, the last time a side project landed me a job and the last time I did anything “open source” before 2021 was 1995 when I was in college. I submitted a HyperCard based Eliza clone to the info-Mac archive and AOL (this was 1995) and a professor from another college wanted me to integrate it in a HyperCard based Gopher server (kids ask your parents).

I don’t do side projects. Anything I can’t afford from my main job I don’t need or I need to get a job paying more. For me, the same applies to learning new to me technology. If I can’t learn it on my main job, I need to be getting another job.

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

#232

Post by Brajeshwar »

simonsarris wrote: post #203

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 i…

Once upon a time, answering people's questions on forums was an excellent long-tail payback career strategy. I used to answer many questions, write explainer blog posts based on repeated questions, etc.

In the early-to-mid-2000s, Macromedia paid for my trip to San Francisco, a hotel stay at the W, and a chance to meet the programmers and authors I looked up to -- all because I answered and helped people with their questions on online forums.

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

#233

Post by scarface_74 »

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…

I’m curious, why didn’t you accept either offer? Compensation? Relocation requirements?

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

#234

Post by hkhanna »

My law practice [0] started as a side project from an errant Hacker News comment years ago, and now it’s my primary source of income.

At the time I was an in house lawyer, and then a software engineer, and things just kind of snowballed from there.

[0] https://www.khanna.law

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

#235

Post by kepano »

BD103 wrote: post #210
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?

You can find screenshots by going to the Wayback Machine, e.g.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210212001340/https://obsidian....

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

#236

Post by moody__ »

Working on plan 9 (9front) has gotten me two different jobs now. Not through companies wanting to work with Plan 9 specifically, but from members of the community who happened to have open spots at their company and were familiar with my work. This has the side effect of working with folks that have similar technical ideas in my dayjob, which is a nice bonus.

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

#237

Post by scarface_74 »

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

I wouldn’t accept an offer from Apple if given one because I wouldn’t want to relocate and I really don’t have any interest working for any large company at this point in my life.

Heck, I never wanted to work at a large company. A chance to work remotely at AWS ProServe more or less fell into my lap and from the minute I got there I knew I didn’t want to be there more than four years.

More realistically from my connections and experience I would have a better chance working in the consulting division at GCP (full time position). I wouldn’t work there either even though it would probably pay close to $100K more than I make now.

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

#238

Post by scarface_74 »

financltravsty wrote: post #132
rikafurude21 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a developers perspective youre right, most of us here probably wouldnt be able to keep up with the amount of work it takes to thrive at apple, sure. Im looking at it from a future employers view, who sees "Apple", has an iPhone, and immediately has an idea in his head about what kind of developer you are, even if its completely inaccurate- Its all marketing. But also, immediately assuming youre not gonna make it…

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…

Meta? Out of the BigTech companies I would least want to work for are Meta and Amazon (again).

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

#239

Post by pokepim »

binwiederhier wrote: post #121

I wrote a Dropbox-like file sync and share application called Syncany [1] as a side project back in 2014/2015. While it never made it out of alpha, it had gotten some traction, and looking back, I am still proud of the architecture and design (not so much of the code, hehe). One day, a developer from this random company in Connecticut (I am German and lived in Germany at the time) reached out to me in my project's IR…

Is it common for Germans to dream about getting out of Germany and moving to US? Congratulations to you that you managed to do that, I am wondering how hard for German is to migrate to US to puruse better life here.

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

#240

Post by slantedview »

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 sounds like most big corp acquisitions, but nevertheless, sorry that happened.
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