291–300 of 538 posts
My Siri proxy during the first iteration of Siri, which would intercept requests and inject custom responses. The code is fairly horrible by my current standards, but reverse engineering everything was fun.
Writing a C compiler got me a job at my own company.
It became a hobby and since I was in contact with the community, someone asked me if I would be interested to take a job in sysad for a very large company that was expanding in Europe. I was half mid my PhD but I said why not.
The job ended up being way way more than sysadmin, I started a few centers in Europe from scratch, learned a heap and the rest is history.
This was not exactly a side project but rather a hobby that one day on an IRC channel changed my life.
The goal was to find a job in Russia, but no one pay attention. Instead, the project got some traction in US, and company from here made me offer. So I continued the same side project as the full time job. They did all work to provide visa ( and Green Card later ), and sell project to Jboss where it became "richfaces" https://richfaces.jboss.org/ .
Decent success story, but keep in mind several points that made it happen: - Project targeted a current hype wave.
- It was implemented with wide used technologies.
- A lot of time spent to promote it.
For the moment, there are two possible candidates to repeat : Large language models, and cryptocurrencies. But former is already eclipsed the later, so probably it's the only candidate. There's a little set of technologies used by LLMs, so this choice is oblivious ( keep in mind, the project supposed to demonstrate you skills in areas required by potential employer, so nothing exotic ). When gold rush happened in Klondike, the total cost of the found gold was several times smaller than money spent on food, tools, whiskey, and whores. So it's better to create some useful tools project ( like LangChain ). And promote, promote, promote. Wherever it's possible.
This project has undoubtedly set of a series of impactful events in my life, and I attribute many of my successes to it. I've had opportunities to network with numerous amazing engineers through it, leading to a part-time role and multiple internships. Turns out companies that approached me for support also wanted to keep in touch! I also graduate this year and I am going with a full-time role from one of the aforementioned internships.
While I acknowledge my circumstances are extremely fortunate, I genuinely believe that having open source projects early on in your career can significantly contribute to standing out as a developer.
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.
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.
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.
There are however some who want "freedom". Not that they lack freedom in Germany but the spiritual cowboy style, rocky mountain lifestyle freedom. Another reason for migration are obviously job offers in some industries.