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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?

#281

Post by tmsh »

I did a startup at night in the early days of React (2014), using React and golang for the backend. Building the whole stack from scratch gave me the confidence to form a web team within a larger company later some 7-8 years later, even though i had focused on iOS / mobile development only up until that point for my day job. So the project didn't get me a job. But it helped me expand my role. I went from iOS engineer to now engineering manager of a full-stack web team. And I probably would not have been able to do so without the confidence from that startup (whichever never reached PMF).

These days I should probably do something similar with LLMs if there's time.

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

#282

Post by ishandotpage »

When I was in high school, I was kind of into competitive programming. We wanted to conduct contests, but the labs didn't have internet access, so we couldn't use stuff like SPOJ/Codeforces.

To make it easier for our computer club to conduct small contests, I made a small application in Python that could display problems, accept submissions, and automatically grade them.

It had a horrible "single page" UI that used jquery to hide and show divs to switch pages, and obviously had 0 sandboxing, but it got the job done for our purposes.

A couple of years later, a CEO of a local startup was visiting my high school, and he happened to catch the program in action. His business had been struggling with a hairy Google Drive integration and he asked me if I had any ideas. That eventually led to a part-time offer, which became full time after I graduated.

So yeah, it was quite serendipitous. While the project wasn't directly related to my job, it did give me an in, even though the code quality was so shoddy it makes me shudder to even think about it now.

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

#283

Post by Sophistifunk »

alephnan wrote: post #278
Sophistifunk wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> thrilling position on some compiler team What’s wrong with compilers?

Nothing I'd love to work on that sort of thing. The point wasn't that the kind of job is bad, but that even if you're working on stuff that shouldn't be secret, you still have to jump through all those hoops.

And imagine how many middle-managers they have who think a) they're the next Steve Jobs, and b) that what drove his success was being a dick to his workmates.

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

#284

Post by khaldiameur »

After graduating in the summer of 2017, I was freshly equipped with coding skills from Harvard’s CS50 course. It was around this time that Meta’s Messenger unveiled their locations API, sparking an idea in me: What if you could book a driver directly from a Facebook page? To explore this concept, I developed a prototype using Flask and MongoDB. Although it was a basic model, it functioned and received positive feedback from everyone who saw it.

Recognizing potential in this idea, I approached a burgeoning startup in my country that was launching a ride-hailing service. To my astonishment, they expressed interest and invited me to join as one of their first engineers. This role turned out to be one of my most enriching startup experiences. I dedicated over a year there before transitioning to another company.

This startup, Yassir, later gained traction and support, securing backing from Y Combinator and raising over $150 million. My early work with them remains a pivotal point in my career, highlighting the power of innovation and the impact of new technology in the startup world

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

#285

Post by webprofusion »

My open data side project (which incidentally had interest from Apple and Google at the time) had a need for a couple of web server certificates for the API and website, so as yet another side project I built a little certificate management tool and forgot about it for a year.

After a year I then went back and realized it was getting 1,000 downloads a week, I did it a bit more work on it and stuck a price tag on it, it's since been my full time job for several years.

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

#286

Post by canadaduane »

I built a spatial platform similar to gather.town called relm.us in 2021 (now MIT-licensed open source [1]) and was hired by an edtech company in 2023 because of the expertise I'd gained in overlaying audio/video for participants in the game world.

[1] https://github.com/relm-us/relm

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

#287

Post by lnsru »

resonious wrote: post #201
modeless wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hear these things about smashing hardware from other places too. Absolutely crazy… An ex colleague was smashing prototypes of wireless chargers for cars for weeks.

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

#288

Post by archeantus »

Back in 2014 I was tired of how awful the Mint app was and I wanted to make a banking app of my own (that I affectionately called Basil). The premise was that it would be like Mailbox (remember that flash in the pan email app?) but for finances. You’d swipe on every transaction to make sure they were categorized correctly. I even wired it up to my local bank’s very rudimentary API.

It was beautifully designed (thanks to some help from a designer friend) and I was really proud of the architecture and Objective-C code.

A large retailer reached out to me on LI and asked about a job. As part of the interview process they asked me to submit a code sample and I submitted basil. The senior dev in the interview commented that he didn’t have any negative comments about the code but instead spent the interview telling me the things he liked about it. It was so fun and gratifying to get that feedback and I got the job and worked there for seven years. It totally changed the direction of my career!

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

#290

Post by carabiner »

doublemint2203 wrote: post #2

Working on cubesat club for my university. Helped me get 2nd round internship interview @ Mr. Beast studios. not sure if this counts since internship + haven't got job yet, but I think it played a big role in helping me advance.

SpaceX hired most of the kids in the rocket club at my school. Certain companies care a lot about student club participation, especially if it's a leadership role.
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