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Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

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101–110 of 538 posts

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

#101
post #21

I was planning to go into grad school for computational biology, but an early Square engineer saw me playing with the thing I'd built on the side of a Waffle House at 2 or 3 AM [1,2]. We exchanged numbers, and after six or so months of talking to me, they convinced me to join them instead. I got in early and had a really good exit. Completely changed the course of my life. My other passion (apart from biology) was fi…

wow i’d love to watch a film regarding your life

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

#102
I have worked four jobs related to https://github.com/pion/webrtc and one for https://webrtcforthecurious.com

* Amazon was using WebRTC, didn’t care about Pion

* Apple was the same. Just cared about my knowledge of WebRTC

* Twitch I joined because they use Pion

* LiveKit uses Pion and is very open about it!

Side projects/Open Source has been so beneficial for my career I can’t recommend it enough. It also frees you from defining your career by your employer.

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

#103
post #33

Back 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.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not everyone is willing to uproot their life on a whim, even for a theoretically great job and a theoretically great company.

Im sure "uproot your life and dedicate it to Apple" isnt on the job description and apple is very flexible with this stuff. You think all 164,000 apple employees live in silicon valley?

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

#105
post #98

Maybe it didn't land me a job on its own but it helped in the interview process. I wrote a limited Slay the Spire rules engine[0]. If I could do it again I wouldn't choose PHP, but my current job had an interview round where I walked the hiring manager through something I've written and it did a great job of showcasing a variety of things like writing testable code, separating concerns, making an extensible framework…

[0]: https://github.com/dgunay/slay

Looks like the repo is private.

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

#106
post #33

Back 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…

That must give you an adrenaline rush of another level when the interviewer turns out to be your user. I want to feel that one day

It was great though honestly, my first reaction was a bit of panic. The first thoughts that came to my mind were "will he say it sucked? maybe he used it and lost some data?". Once that didn't happen then yeah, it was thrilling, and completely unexpected for a project I hadn't worked on for over a decade!

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

#107
post #33

Back 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…

That's a fantastic story. I hope fortune has followed you. I would be thrilled to find even one user of software I've wrote. To be interviewed by one for a job? That's amazing. Good stuff!

Thank you!

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

#108
post #6

Not a side project, per say, but I answered questions on my local Linux User Group almost daily. After applying for a job and not hearing back, I got a request to come in for an interview weeks afterwards. Long story short, the boss told me he saw my responses on the mailing list and it turns out I knew more than the RHCEs and CCNAs walking into his interviews. That landed me my first job ever in IT as a Junior NetEn…

Brilliant. Would stack overflow be the equivalent today?

SO’s … ‘strict’ rules are in part informed by perceived shortcomings in communities that proceeded it. So, imagine something more chaotic :)

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

#109
post #99

Earlier this year I went to the Australian F1 GP. Between qualifying on Saturday and the race on Sunday I built an integration between a live timing API and Telegram to send me position updates every minute with lap times. This was because anywhere near a screen was packed with crowds and my mobile network couldn’t keep up using the official app. I was job searching and wrote it up and posted to LinkedIn. My now mana…

I'd be curious to read the post if you're willing to share?

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

#110
Back in around 2004-2005, I was doing contracting work in Australia for a big retailer, maintaining one of their monolithic webapps that was built using C++, believe it or not. At that time, Ruby on Rails was the new hotness, and I was trying to learn that on the side.

When MacOS released their "dashboard widgets" framework back around 2005ish, I wrote a widget for RubyDocs and released it, and it got quite popular.

At the same time, a US company I heard about via the Rails mailing list was investing pretty heavily in Rails and, as a long shot, I applied there and mentioned I made that widget. It turns out they were all using it, and they basically gave me a job on the spot working remotely from Australia.

The experience I got in that job led me to get an job at Microsoft in 2007, and they moved me and my family to Seattle, where I still live to this day, though I left MS over five years ago now.

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