Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?
I'm curious to see what projects members of this community have worked on that contributed to them getting a job.
What's the project?
How did it help you land a job? Did the project itself get you the job or did it help in the interview process? Was the project work related to the job at all?
Edit: Ya'll hirin'?
537 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 392 ms ] threadAnd so on. It's crazy how pushing a series of little things can put you on the right path, especially early on life.
[1]: https://github.com/askonomm/ruuter
[2]: https://github.com/askonomm/clarktown
[3]: https://github.com/askonomm/blocko
It got me a C programming job that had nothing to do with the side project.
I would say that it only helped me in the interview process, but it did so in two ways:
* I could actually answer C-related questions on top of the more generic questions.
* It showed that I had skill in C.
[1] https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/bc/src/branch/master/manua...
That landed me my first job ever in IT as a Junior NetEng and eventually a Linux SysAd.
Would stack overflow be the equivalent today?
I'd disagree with that. Community building is every bit as much work, and arguably often more impactful than just putting up yet another OSS repo on github.
All of what I have learned is levered in my career and I’ve utilized that knowledge during all interviews.
It's no longer on the App Store as there's just been too many big changes I couldn't keep up with on that codebase. I'm working on a followup right now for Steam that I'd like to port to mobile afterwards.
Gameplay video: https://youtu.be/uy08ohBLGhE
[1]: https://touchhle.org/
[2]: https://touchhle.org/app-archive/
It mostly just showed that I had a genuine interest in programming, and served as a talking point (why Clojure, my experience with it, etc). The project wasn't related to the job at all.
This landed me not strictly a job, but long term consulting gigs with a number of companies in EU, UK & US.
The job was directly related to the project: companies wanted the expertise of data engineering & ETL, often with Kiba directly, but also in general.
This "side project" was totally worth it :-)
1 - https://github.com/skhaz/wintermoon
1. Letting me have a place to write to get better at writing, which makes it easier to do my job in DevRel.
2. Lets me talk about all of the interesting projects I work on (eg: an AI novel writing experiment https://xeiaso.net/videos/2023/ai-hackathon/) that people regularly find interesting. This gets people interested in wanting to employ me, which ends up working up well for me in the long run.
Do side projects, but write about what you did and what you learned.
p.s your use of "Technophilosopher" and "chaos magician" to describe yourself is incredible
Also every title is made up. Some are more made up than others.
I got to learn a lot of from folks who read my Content.
Also if you don’t mind me asking
How can a blog aid in finding or landing a job
Pretty lame that they discontinued that job board. It was a lot nicer experience than using linkedin.
I used to hire people straight off of SO. Sometimes skipping the usual process of they has solid answers to the types of questions we’s ask - went straight for culture fit.
I think instead of blaming ai and other esoteric reasons for SO’a downfall leadership should look into the damage cancelling the job board has done. People helping others at least had the incentive of being given a job. Now there’s no point really.
Although, since they made all of these controversial changes, it feels less like helping people and more like doing free work for a random company.
The real killer for me was limiting the data dumps to paying customers. They really let down the community who trusted SO would be a trustworthy steward of the data. The charm of the site is gone.
1. Most questions were already answered by reputation hunters with pastes from documentation when I got around to it.
2. SO started discouraging "teach the man how to fish" answers and insisting on code ready to copy/paste. I'd like to help people learn not write their code.
I did get invited to the job board thanks to Google. Some error in their android examples didn't get corrected for years and my answer on SO explaining the 'right way' to do it whored me ... checks ... what, I'm at almost 8000 points now in spite of not logging in in years.
Said job board didn't get me anything but then I never filled anything in. Maybe I had them import my linkedin, but iForget.
Hell, I used to auto generate my resume from it.
I’ve got thoughts about the ability for side projects to directly demonstrate not just proficiency, but passion, which is very important in undergrad when looking for opportunities. Might end up writing a blog post about it.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38252566
Keep them old timer stories a' comin'.
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 a phone line. One of the maintainers came down, typed what looked like line noise for five minutes, and all of a sudden all the mail was working again.
It was crazy to watch him basically read and write raw Sendmail configs. He didn't even use m4.
Ironically, M4 felt over-complicated and abstracted, so I did not want to learn that. Direct edit all the way.
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.
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 film. I've made a lot of indie films over the last decade, but I always focused on film tech - volumetric video, mocap, etc. I'm currently building a startup in that space that started as one of my side projects. We're doing really well!
Side projects have always led to inflection points in my life. They have more pull than anything else, and they lead me down interesting problem gradients.
I'll get back to biology one day. I have some ideas there, too.
[1] https://youtu.be/5XTi-jf-ans
[2] https://youtu.be/x034jVB1avs
A similar coincidence happened to me early career. I had finished an internship, wasn’t sure what to do full time after, and ran into my old boss in a grocery store. He had been impressed with my internship work and seeing me reminded him of me and we started talking, soon enough he invited me to be employee #6 at his new venture. It worked out really well.
I did a side-project related to Second Life in 2007, and it landed me a job at Amazon Web Services in 2008.
I narrated the story back then, and replicated it on Medium [0].
I don't want to brag or anything, but please trust me if I tell you that this is a good story to read.
[0]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...
I love "A job is not everything in someone’s life, but it’s very, very important to love your job." from your article. After a couple burnouts over a decade in this industry, I truly seek positions I at least think I'll love.
(I know you are joking).
First, give yourself an hourly anal probe for a few days. If you can deal with that, then you may be able to deal with working at Amazon.
> I love "A job is not everything in someone’s life, but it’s very, very important to love your job."
There are literally billions of people on earth who go to work everyday not “loving their job”. I don’t dislike my job no more than I dislike using the bathroom everyday. It’s just something I have to do to survive.
I do contract work for a pretty niche industry and after you've done a couple big implementation projects, you've seen 80-90% of all user stories, integrations and edge cases.
I started a side project that was a combination of tooling, processes, checklists and methodology to stop reimplementing the same project work and stop approaching every client like it was greenfield work. Not fully productizing our approach but moving in that direction.
My company was not interested. During an interview I pitched my side project ideas and they immediately said they wanted to hire me. Skipped the rest of the hiring process and landed a new role doing exactly what I had wanted to do at my previous company.
looking to do the same, would appreciate any insight
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 interviewing for the job I did take.
This would make for an interesting blog post.
Could you recommended resources to learn to do the same?
A bit light on the technical details perhaps, but I recall getting stuck on getting the right airplay parameters, learning how byte endianness works... happy to try to answer any other questions as best I can remember.
EDIT: Sorry, I realized that I didn't actually answer the other question. I first got interested in reversing from console hacking, specifically this talk about wii hacking: https://youtu.be/0rjaiNIc4W8 (including marcan of asahi linux fame!). Their group also had more writing at: https://fail0verflow.com/blog/. Also interesting to read about mgba emulator development: https://mgba.io/tag/debugging/, v8 internals: https://mrale.ph, react internals: https://overreacted.io/
Consuming a lot of literature on how different systems work helped me develop intuitions around how you might take something apart. Then it's a matter of trying things and banging your head against the wall a lot, e.g. at some point I was interested in how compilers worked so I tried hacking typescript syntax support into babel (circa 2017 maybe) - I got pretty far! and got a lot better sense of how compilers work.
Please excuse the code quality... I think I was still learning how to write js at the time.
Step 2 — deploy the network appliance in question to your LAN and intercept its packets with wireshark.
Step 3 — begin inference of protocol from observed behavior and test hypothesis by sending hand-crafted payloads to the server in question.
Step 4 — rinse and repeat until assumptions are proven to be correct with a high degree of reliability.
A good way to ensure you’ve captured the major parts of the protocol is to record about 72 hours of traffic and then replay it through a proxy that directs traffic to your newly created service.
If you can interpret the vast majority of the messages without error, you’re getting close to a reliable implementation.
Step 5 — use this strategy to develop a deep understanding of both protocols in question.
Step 6 — write an “adapter” that can translate protocol A to protocol B and vice versa.
Step 7 — implement the adapter towards whatever use case you have in mind.
Curious about common tactics people use for avoiding the ban-hammer from the company at this stage. Surely they can tell the difference between normal operations and this kind of hand crafted probing?
I added a discord link and they joined that too and just watch and lurk, its a weird world
I bought a couple and then found 2 pairs of nice second-hand bookshelf speakers. Presumably everyone is upgrading to smart speakers and dumping their old stuff because it was really easy to find great speakers for a very low price.
Lots of people, including me.
I've used Apple products for years and generally like them a lot as a company, but I have no interest in working for them or any other large US tech company.
The money is good, of course, but the quality of life sacrifices aren't worth it (for me).
That's not contrarianism. That's understanding what matters to me.
100% guarantee I would
What’s wrong with compilers?
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.
yeah I mean you
https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...
On a personal level, this is my life now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767599
Do you really think I would give this up in exchange for more money and more stress?
In case it's not, there's an extension of Cunningham's law. If you're wrong and disagreeable to a sufficiently high degree, people will just ignore or quietly ridicule you rather than try and correct you.
Do you seriously think someone cares if you work at FAANG outside of those student groups on Reddit?
So depending on what job you'll want to do at Apple you might have to relocate.
You're doing RTO, and you're signing NDAs out the wazoo.
Helluva opportunity if you're young, but I'm in agreement with the parent posters that it's not the end-all, be-all. I'm far enough along in my career that I don't need the prestige line on my resume, and 100% remote somewhere I want to live is worth far, far more to me.
I say this as someone that’s never worked for any tech company anybody has heard of, nor any hip SV startup.
It takes a particular sort of person to thrive in Big Tech. That isn’t just code for ‘really really really good’. It sounds like you still believe that it is. Plenty of ‘really really really good’ people wouldn’t do well at Apple, and plenty wouldn’t want to work there. I wouldn’t necessarily call myself ‘really really really good’, but I know that I don’t want to work at Apple. Not because I think I’m not good enough, not because k don’t think that I could keep up, and not because I don’t like their output as a company.
Putting companies in a pedestal the way that you are is ultimately damaging for the industry. It fosters the increasingly cringey “get a job at FAANG!!!” culture. I’m sick of my YouTube recommendations being poisoned with “here’s how you pass a system design interview at Google” BS. I implore you to stop putting companies on a pedestal. You need only look at accountants talking about working at the ‘big 4’ to see how utterly ridiculous it can get.
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-around good vibes are Meta and Netflix. Otherwise, I'd rather go with a unicorn like Snowflake or Databricks, which feels more what software engineering was like in the aughts: exploratory, pioneering, actually building things that people haven't before, rather than gluing stuff together or being drowned in the machinations of some incompetent director.
I wouldn't make it at Apple, because I would get pissed off and quit. There's more to life than money. I don't want to work with people that see "FAANG" (or use "staffed by ex-FAANG" in their recruiting pitch) and think it's a good signal to be presenting.
Putting in a stint at any of these lower end tech companies would cost me intangibles that I'm not willing to give up at this stage of my life. Namely, my sanity, spiritual well-being, and fulfillment with life.
I found Apple recruiters very clear and fair.
Apple's recruiters were flaky on comms, rescheduled me a couple of times, and were disappointing for a company I had higher expectations for.
Sure, your experience is probably true, but it’s anecdotal and the sweeping generalizations you’re making on limited datapoints makes things untrustworthy
Second, you’re assuming money is mutually exclusive from all else at those companies. You admit not being able to get in, which makes this the equivalent of “money can’t buy happiness” from someone who never had money to know first hand that they wouldn’t be happy
Here's what I value: getting shit done, being surrounded by intelligent, hard-working, and perceptive people, not being treated like a peon and gaslit to work to the bone. With that in mind, Meta and Netflix are the only ones that satisfy those conditions. Microsoft is working on some very cool stuff, but those are all in their research orgs, while the rest are effectively the same people that would work at Intel: lifers. Not even coasters, but people who don't care that much at all about tech, and are putting in their hours and moving on with their lives. Nothing wrong with that if that's your value system, but it's not mine. Amazon is a neo-feudalist code mill, no different than Infosys. The people there are better than most devs out in the wild, but that's not a high bar. Google lost its touch when Sundar hopped in around 2015. It's not cool. And Apple I've already lambasted. Netflix's and Meta's engineering cultures are great; I like the people; and I like how none of the people I know there are stressed to the core. Though the problems they're working on aren't interesting to me.
I never admitted to not getting in, that's a conclusion you made yourself. I received offers from all of these companies at various points, but chose not to accept.
They’re unicorns for being extremely stupid. I’ll give you that.
Every company has their warts. Some warts don't matter to me.
> Majority wouldn’t want to deal with bullshit at FAANG
Your comment:
> most of us here probably wouldnt be able to keep up with the amount of work it takes to thrive at apple, sure
You have some weird fetish with FAANG?
Well Amazon is a well known shit show (been there done that)
1. Their software gets used by millions of people 2. They are paid incredible amounts of money 3. They have wonderful working environments and perks 4. Are generally given more autonomy than non big tech companies?
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.
It was a cool project at a time when a lot of people were saying it was insurmountable to make us AirPlay compatible.
Sorry you didn’t get the job. I hope you didn’t lose much sleep over it. I left in 2020. I wouldn’t say you’re missing much any more.
However, what should be used instead? I would take the boxes from Apple, but, as far as I know, they are also quite limited (only AirPlay).
Another example of the fact that such things should rather be expanded with open standards.
From my point of view, the best strategy for Sonos would be to be as open as possible.
I came across Decipad while looking for a job, and messaged the founder, highlighting my work on NumPad. They were impressed enough that the hiring process ended up being just a few interviews, I've been there for almost a year now, and it's been pretty good!
If there's a moral to this story I think it's that you should aim for work that's highly relevant to your side project experience. In my case both NumPad and Decipad have a sort of programming language that can do calculations with units.
But ignore this advice if you can't find that work, or it doesn't seem good for whatever reason. You can still highlight your side project in an application, and they might be impressed anyway.
How do you do that if you’re past work is disconnected from what you’re interested in.
And accept a junior position, even if you're a senior dentist.
This was the side project that I ended up writing about in more detail later on: https://paulstamatiou.com/stocketa/
[0]: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pulls?q=is%3Apr+autho...