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 interviewing for the job I did take.
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 IRC channel, and asked if I wanted to interview. I did, and I got the job.
I moved to the UK, then to the US with my wife, and stayed with the company for 8 years. I got promoted from senior engineer to Sr. Principal Engineer and had an amazing time there. I now have a green card and live in CT with my 2 amazing children (with German and American citizenship).
I often think back about how much that project and that person who reached out to me changed my life. How different it would be if I hadn't worked on my side project, if it hadn't become semi-popular, or if he hadn't reached out. Butterfly effect at it's finest.
Edit: Fun fact: Drew Houston (Dropbox CEO) emailed me at the time and wanted to hire me, but he didn't respond when I emailed him back. And even many years later when I applied at Dropbox they didn't want me, hehe.
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.
Most Germans I know in tech (lived in Germany for 5 years or so) would never want to move the US. Everyone prefers the Germany social security/insurance/pension system (even if it’s quite mediocre compared to The Netherlands and Scandinavia).
>Most Germans I know in tech (lived in Germany for 5 years or so) would never want to move the US.
And yet GP did, and others more like him. FWIW I had two German bosses who emigrated to the US(one to California, one to Atlanta), so the US is clearly an attractive place for them and they say they loved it there just like GP.
The majority of Germans talking about how much they hate the US, have never lived there but they hate it nevertheless because it's a populat thing to hate in Germany, and also they don't work in tech, or need to rely on the welfare state, or are already from well off families where the lower local salaries make no difference. The ones working in tech who don't rely on the welfare state, are quite open to the idea of moving there for the right money.
Sure, if GP was one of those Germans from a mid-upper class background with a nice inherited Bavarian house (unaffordable at any German working wage) then immigrating to the US makes no sense as he already would have enough prosperity at home, but if you have no wealth and want to build it, then working in the US tech sector is much better than working in Germany.
So no, a blanket generalization cannot be made of "Germans wanting to move to the US", as that highly depends on their social/wealth class and career.
Edit: seems I upset the apple cart with my comment. Sorry, next time I'm gonna parrot the HN accepted "Germany-Good, US-Bad" party line if that pleases the crowd.
I think you got downvoted because you answer like you're being attacked, when someone just stated their opinion/views. He mentioned this is an opinion of people HE knows. This is also an opinion of most people I know(and I work with a lot of people from central/western EU). People have their opinions and that's ok, you might know people with different opinions and that's also ok, noone is attacking you or US.
I'm from Poland and I would also not move to US, unless me and my SO had guaranteed high-paying jobs. I currently make around 85k USD/y(base) and even if I could double that easily just by moving there, my living standard would go down dramatically as my current salary already puts me in top 5% in my country. I absolutely love how big US is, amazing national parks, the access to nature and general diversity of people, foods and cultures, but lack of public healthcare and free access to guns would be an absolute no no for me unless I was paid obscene amounts of money for those 'inconveniences'.
>I'm from Poland and I would also not move to US [...] I currently make around 85k USD/y(base)
Well that's why, because you already make very good money here. But the vast majority of Poles, or even other Europeans in even more expensive countries, don't make anywhere near that money, while having much more expensive housing than Poland.
With that kind of money you're living the good life here already so there's no reason to move to the US even for 2x-5x the money as you can already afford everything you could ever need in Poland on your current salary. You're pretty much in a bubble and are the exception, not the rule.
Like I said before, people with good material situation in Europe have almost no reason to move to the US. But what about those on less fortunate salaries with no wealth to their name, who would get a shot in the US for a >10x pay bump?
A childhood friend's dad moved to work in construction in the US(also from eastern Europe), and with the money from working 15 years there he's set for life in Europe, already retired early and in a McMansion back home. There's no way he could have achieved that financial independence by staying in his eastern European country. Not everyone in Europe has the potential to earn 85k/year here, while in the US it's much much easier.
For many jobs, the EU-US discrepancy in pay is insane, and not just in SW dev.
Well that's why, because you already make very good money here. But the vast majority of Poles, or even Europeans in richer countries, don't make anywhere near that money.
Sure but we're talking in a technical forum where most of people work in software. Most devs in Poland make good or really good money.
But what about those on less fortunate salaries with no wealth to their name, who would get a shot in the US for a 10x pay bump?
I can't imagine a person who makes minimal and moves to US in hopes of making more. Most people in EU who make minimal salaries live from paycheck to paycheck, they don't save enough to risk moving across the world. I honestly think that this person either ends up homeless or makes minimal salary in US too and probably ends up worse, due to lack of public healthcare/social support. If you want to make good money, you can do that in most countries(obviously with exception of 3rd world countries, countries with an ongoing crisis etc.). Moving to US won't suddenly make it happen.
If you already work in IT then the salary bump these days might be significant, but I would argue that salary to CoL ratio will stay roughly the same. Unless you're exceptional at what you do and have an extremely good offer, you're probably not going to improve your life significantly by moving. Why would moving to US give you 'a shot at 10x pay bump' that you didn't have in your own country?
>Sure but we're talking in a technical forum where most of people work in software. Most devs in Poland make good or really good money.
That may be, but on the topic of emigration from the EU to US, I was talking about the general population and what reasons they may have to move there since the initial question was about Germans wanting to move to the US, not about German devs exclusively wanting to move to the US, so please not move the goalposts to just to the SW dev bubble.
Yes, I'm aware many SW devs in Europe can build comfy lives, especially in low-Col eastern Europe with western wages, but again, that's a bubble of a small subset of the country's total workforce. The vast majority of Poles not working in tech don't earn that well at all (average salary in Poland is 20,265 EUR/year, and if you exclude well paid SW devs it's probably much lower) so pretty sure they might be more inclined to move to the US is given the chance at a 5x or so pay bump.
>I can't imagine a person who makes minimal and moves to US in hopes of making more.
The alternative to well paid SW dev careers in Europe is not minimal wage person living paycheck to paycheck. There are other jobs in between that pay mediocre or sub-mediocre in most EU countries but pay stellar in the US. For example my office mate's brother moved to the US(North Carolina) to work in banking just like he did in Austria but according to him he "gets paid bank just to move money from one account to another and has less stres than at his job in Europe".
Same for other average jobs as well, that while not living paycheck to paycheck in Europe, don't allow you to build any wealth either, but in the US can get paid significantly more even adjusted to CoL(North Carolina is not Poland cheap but it's not SV expensive either).
Maybe it’s not US-bad Germany-good or Germany-bad US-good, and more like home-good, away-scary or home-bad, away-alluring. Or maybe even home-good, adventure-exciting.
We can compare salaries, schools, freedoms, houses, and so forth til the end of time, but there’s always an intangible personal factor weighing down the scales to some extent. I think that’s what gets people to actually uproot and move, no matter which direction they go.
Exactly. Having just made an international move for a job and going through the research and decision making process, I found it really boils down to the intangible personal factor that you speak of. What does the individual value and what are they seeking? It's impossible to assign one answer as to which place is best.
a blanket generalization cannot be made of "Germans wanting to move to the US"
Same goes for your blanket generalization implying Germans are either rich, rely on welfare or like working in the US.
I myself would never consider moving there just for a higher salary.
>Same goes for your blanket generalization implying Germans are either rich, rely on welfare or like working in the US.
I never said Germans are relying on welfare, I said the Germans WHO rely on welfare would not consider moving to the US for obvious reasons. Nor those who are already financially stable, again for obvious reasons.
>I myself would never consider moving there just for a higher salary.
Good to know. Tell us more about yourself.
OP’s story is from 2014-2015.
I’m not German but French, however I do feel that this "Silicon Valley dream" upon developers was still existing in this era.
It was at that time that we started to have startups in Europe who tried to follow the SV culture. GAFAMs were still seen as cool enough to envy a well paid job at them. A lot of SV startups weren’t openly privacy hostile (or maybe the issue wasn’t took seriously enough).
But I felt that this "dream" was only upon developers at that time and it stoped sometimes after. In fact, in 2015, while on a trip to SF, I ate with a former French coworker who decided to live the dream and he was already saying to me that he wanted to come back in Europe because he couldn’t stand the ambiant culture anymore.
It wasn’t the job, he loved it, performed well, was well paid. It wasn’t even the people, he made some friends there, felt like people were genuinely nice.
But it was more the delusion about the SV-Life and the mismatch in cultural values and in the global society lifestyle in which he felt you were nothing to others / to the society without money.
Now I do feel like that this sentiment about the US is now more mainstream in Europe even amongst those who never came in USA.
ps : I urge you to not read any criticism in my comment, I’m describing a general sentiment from the other side of an ocean, probably with a big bias. But I do feel this sentiment is pretty recent and it’s probable that Trump made it way worse.
GP moved to Connecticut though. There's probably less "SV-culture" there.
CT is also quite close to european culture ( or, as closest possible in US ).
Trump made me doubt the stability of the US as a system. I don't daydream much of moving to the US anymore.
It is not common. Most Germans consider would never use the phrase "pursue a better life" when talking about the US. Quality of Life is in most European countries better including Germany.
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.
Have you actually lived in both the US and Germany?
I haven't but from what I have gathered the U.S is in many ways more preferable than Europe.
And in many ways the reverse is true...
We could start listing things, but there's probably a list that someone else has made. And depending on how much weight/value they put on things, they could say one or the other is better.
The country you grew up in almost always has a big quality-of-life head start, because it's where your friends and family are.
If you're in a poor country and changing country will get you a 10x increase in salary, that might more than compensate for only seeing your loved ones for a few days every few years. But if you're already pretty well off? Not so much.
At least for Germans the USA has a very bad image here. Because of all the Healthcare problems, Trump Jokes, Shootings etc
This is my view as well. However, if you are a young and healthy software developer, you can earn much more money in the US.
Most Europeans moving to America for work do so for this reason. Live frugally in America, earn cash, use it to improve life when moving back to Europe.
This is vastly different for native Germans and immigrant Germans. There are even some papers about how having a Turkish name immediately cuts your chances of getting a response to your job application in half. German job applications also require a photo on the application.
For a lot of immigrant Germans leaving Germany is very much a goal, since upward mobility in German society is very low compared to the US. So for a lot of "German Germans" the answer is no, but for the rest it very much is something people aspire to.
If you look at the statistics I believe outward migration is a little under inward migration, but I'd wager that there are a lot more people with higher ed moving out than are moving in.
I complain about the US a lot, but for me both the US and the UK were vastly better for my mental health and career than Germany was, even despite the average standard of living in Europe being much higher.
upward mobility in German society is very low compared to the US
This appears to be untrue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
Germany ranks 11th on social mobility, while the us ranks 27th.
I'm not sure why this would be called "social mobility index":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index#M...
I would argue this measures governments services available to the poorest for free + to some extent how successful those government services are in fixing social issues (like teen pregnancy, "checked out" NEET youngsters, ...)
This Doesn't seem to me to at all measure how likely you are to get ahead if you try hard enough.
You can't get ahead if you get dragged down the bottom all the time, though. However, the chance of outsized success in the US if you make it, is larger though. I guess because of access to a larger market, but probably cultural factors, too.
German job applications also require a photo on the application.
I don't disagree with the rest of your comment but this is not true. Technically an employer cannot legally require you to attach a picture to your application or judge you any differently if you do not attach one, since the AGG passed in 2006 – although I don't doubt that it plays out different in practice sometimes.
I remember even being told in Highschool though that we shouldn't attach a picture to job applications, since it's generally not done anymore to avoid discrimination.
Yes technically, and how could you possibly enforce that? There is no rule forbidding it, so by default most employers still require it in their applications, but if they don't and you don't supply it, they will be suspicious.
There is no way around that problem unless that practice is explicitly banned. Instead, you just get this weird workaround, that doesn't technically ban it, but makes it completely unenforceable, giving the German bureaucratic system an excuse that they addressed the issue without ever having to address it.
Not super common, but many people dream of having better jobs and there's few better jobs than software engineering in the US. It's harder to move to the US since Trump cracked down on immigration.
I know I do and the amount of engineers in my circle that do is sharply increasing in the last couple of years.
I rarely think about it but not for more freedom.
For making more money for 5 years or so to retire earlier.
But than I think about the bigger social gap and dislike the idea again.
Its finest, not it's
Thanks. Though I must blame this one one my phone's autocorrect. Hehe.
Add-on story:
I joined binwiederhier for a while in developing Syncany and he invited me for an internship at his current employer.
The experience I gained both in contributing to Syncany and said internship helped me indirectly land the role I'm currently in, and my open source experience in general helped me land a cool engagement where I got to do some innovative open source projects.
Oh man, Pim! What a small world. I looooved working with you on Syncany, and I tried so hard to recruit you hehe. I looked you up on LinkedIn the other day and it looks like you're doing amazingly.
Ping me and we'll chat if you like. I'm working on a new open source project [1] that needs your help, hehe.
[1] https://ntfy.sh
Sehr schön und süß!
Amazing!
Getting a green card by writing code on the side. Very cool, congrats.
That's crazy about the missed reply. Maybe it was just email filters influencing fate! An abomination, but fascinating. Cool story! :)
Awesome story! Thank you
That sounds hilariously on character for Drew :)
Drew Houston probably wanted to see if you were a threat ;) If you had written back and asked about an acquisition/ or how you are focusing on "Taking Syncany to the next level", you might have gotten a response. That was when they were doing their network expansion initiative.
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 explained that was due to me being out of a job and not able to afford a permanent internet connection, he offered to hire me and also set me up with a permanent connection with a contract paid by him.
If you’re reading this, thank you Aric, I’m forever grateful for that chance!
Curiously, last year I switched jobs and during the interview process it turned out the hiring manager had been a user of my project back in 2003 or so, which definitely helped with the interview process.
The project’s name was mysql-ha, later renamed to highbase due to a Copyright infringement notice from Sun (who were good about it and gave me a free 1 year subscription to Enterprise MySQL when I renamed the project). I abandoned it around 2008 as better things became available around that time .
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.
¡Somos al menos tres!
¡Somos como cuatro!
Dozens of us! Dozens!
Gabriel? Trabajamos en un proyecto común en 2007 para un proyecto de robótica para una empresa americana... otro uruguayo acá pero yo me tuve que subir al avión :(
Me acuerdo del proyecto :) Para que lado te tomaste el avión? Yo estoy en Europa desde 2011...
!Al menos cinco! All joking aside, great story @fipar.
¡Muchas gracias!
Y si, espero que ahora que el trabajo remoto es mas aceptado, mucha mas gente pueda "irse sin irse", trabajando para donde sea pero desde acá.
¡Que estés bien también!
I wonder how many of us got their life trajectories completely altered by that crisis. Mine sure was.
There's this fun question "if you could change one thing from the past...", and I don't know how to answer it truthfully, because we are the sum of everything in our past, the good and the bad, and I like where I am today... but man, that crisis was rough.
because we are the sum of everything in our past, the good and the bad
Oh, definitely! I had a bunch of obviously bad things happen to me and I’ve gone through your “if you could change one thing “ exercise many times, until I learned to accept all of it got me to where I am.
In late 2001 my mother killed herself so by the end of 2002 I had a crash course on dealing with adversity!
Anyway, while I’m slightly older than you, one of my coworkers at the bank was the same generation as you at university so I remember you, and all the software you wrote that your classmates used. Crisis or no crisis, it’s no surprise you did great :) Nice to see your name on a comment!
Wow, that sounds pretty rough, I hope you're doing better now :)
Thanks for the kind words, your name definitely rings a bell. Small world!
I mean better things became available to manage HA in a MySQL deployment.
Having done a large scale MySQL deployment (700+ servers), I still find the HA landscape in MySQL land pretty sad. It's all very manual, nad it's very easy to screw up failovers. Even with Vitesse or Orchestrator or semi-sync ...
Oh, definitely, I meant things better than my project had become available. MySQL still has a long way to go in terms of friendly HA, and I’m not sure it will ever get to the level of something like cockroachdb. There’s plenty of room for improvements in that area, just not through something like what I was doing (mostly shell scripts).
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!
who were good about it and gave me a free 1 year subscription to Enterprise MySQL when I renamed the project
Sun really was good, huh?
Considering I was (unknowingly) very obviously infringing their trademark (X for MySQL was OK, MySQL-X was not), yeah, I felt the whole thing was handled in a good way.
phenomenal story, did you keep working on the project after ?
Thanks!
In 2009 I joined Percona and saw that, by then, it was better for me to contribute to other open source projects in the MySQL ecosystem than to continue trying to get highbase caught up with things like mysql-mmm.
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!
Hola uruguayo. Los amo, nunca cambien. Abrazo grande.
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 in 2018, best book on canvas I have read")
And writing that book lead to lots of recruiters. I humored one, they flew me out to SF, gave me a car for a few days (I had never been to the west coast), dined with me, and made me an offer before I was to fly back home, an offer that was lots more than I was making at the time. I told them I'd think about it.
But I was too scared to leave New Hampshire, and perhaps too sentimental, or some more nameless term, so I didn't accept the offer. All from answering some SO questions.
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.
Yes, every forum has its early years phase where this occurs. It’s about like trying to catch a wave, you look for a building wave, invest some participation, and you have a fine ride.
Eventually, the “organizers” show up and add too much order to a system that wants to be a balance between loose structure and otherwise chaotic ad hoc interplay.
And if the organizers aren’t the ones that over constrain the system, there’s always a PM somewhere looking to “monetize that asset.”
I think, sadly, SO has passed that inflection point now. I haven’t intuited where the next waves are breaking at.
sounds like the downfall of Quora. Interviewed there and it seemed like they're still on board thinking a flood of ads is the perfect UX
I still don't understand why the Quora UI shows you unrelated answers, and it's always a weird topic.
"Question: Why did PyTorch beat Tensorflow in popularity"
"Answer (to a different question): I lost my virginity when I was 11 years old"
quite similar to "Mop Theory" -- https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
I got a job from stackoverflow posts too, it was a company whose entire strategy was hiring "Developer Evangelists" which I had never heard of before. I tried to internalize that silly name but really the company's product just wasn't in a place to "evangelize" anyway so it didn't work for very long. I hated that job, I excluded it on my resume.
I'm in the top 250 on Stackoverflow and didn't get any job offers through there. I wasn't looking but I think I've only had one person contact me off the platform which involved finding my website and then my contact form. But they just wanted more answers.
it wasn't through there, it made a difference in the recruitment and hiring process and I had my stackoverflow badge on my resume at the time
just happenstance that somoene at that particular company was looking for it. actually was a red flag that they were, but it paid a lot more than I had ever been paid before, for those 3 months I worked there
how has your life worked out not having taken that offer?
Well I'm not certain about life on twin earth where I chose differently, but I'm quite happy. I still live 10 miles from where I was born in New Hampshire. I still work at the company that I interned with when I was in high school. I am now part owner.
I probably have a lot less money than if I went to California, but I have a house and family (2 children so far, we want more) and I somewhat think that if I went out west, it would be harder to have that, at least I would have probably delayed it by a decade or more, like people in cities seem to do.
Similar experience for me, I was active answering questions about Qt (and asking plenty as well) and got approached through to go work at a startup building 3D printers with bespoke software. Took it, had a great time, learnt a huge amount outside of my skillset and got to go do the CES experience.
I love the modesty in this story, from my point of view you: - Became an expert in HTML Canvas - Used that expertise to help a bunch of people - Wrote an entire freaking book on HTML Canvas
If I did that I would probably never shut up about it, so hearing you describe it as "answering some SO questions" is genuinely heartwarming.
My blog https://xeiaso.net (source code: https://github.com/Xe/site) and the stuff I've written for it ended up doing several things to help me get employed over the years:
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.
I've heard from many that writing can help build credibility for hiring purposes. I have committed myself to writing at least something on all future projects because of this. Thanks for the tip.
p.s your use of "Technophilosopher" and "chaos magician" to describe yourself is incredible
I have gotten very good engagement of my blog content as I write for fun sometimes
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
Become an expert in a thing, companies that need expertise in that thing will come knocking.
Great advice thanks for sharing
I've been meaning to write a longer rant about this, but I'm not an engineer. I'm a glorified product designer and marketer.
Also every title is made up. Some are more made up than others.
Data point for you: In Douglas Coupland's Microserfs the start-up team choose their own titles for their business cards (yes, business cards - it was written a long time ago). Two that I remember were "Personal Trainer" and "Crew Chief".
Stumbled on your blog the other day while trying to figure how to use tailwindcss with Go. Had seen other posts here and the. Also a tail scale fan. Thanks!
Thanks! I don't work there anymore though. I'm at fly.io now.
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.
I use Obsidian extensively to organize my life. A big thank from me to the entire team! The only thing I wish it had out of the box was web clipping. I know there are few third party extensions but I havn't found one that works seamlessly
I made this one you can try: https://stephango.com/obsidian-web-clipper
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....
Nice work. Huge Obsidian fan and use it every day to run my entire life.
Started using Obsidian a couple months back but the default line-spacing was really bothering me, I'm pretty sure I found your theme looking for something with better line spacing and I've been using it since, so thank you.
Nice work. Obsidian is awesome.
Obsidian Sync has saved me a few times too. The only thing it lacks for my usage is an API. I just want a clean way to backup my notes to my own storage.
I love your writings, and I quote a lot of you while helping others, especially on simplicity, text-based file organization, etc.
And the only theme I have on my Obsidian setup is Minimal. Thank you again for your work with Obsidian.
I was one of the first backers of the Oculus Rift Kickstarter. When I got it I decided eye tracking was going to be huge for VR, so as a side project I cut a hole in my Rift and built my own eye tracker. I posted it on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7876471
A few days later the CTO of a small eye tracking startup gave me a call. I quit Google and joined them. I built a (novel at the time) deep neural net based VR eye tracking system for them, and less than two years later Google acquired us.
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 smashing them with hammers in the parking lot.
When we got to Google of course privacy concerns blocked new data collection until we completed an overengineered project to build a shiny new database with access controls and stuff. About a year later with no technology progress to speak of, the whole eye tracking project was shelved due to a strategy pivot from higher up (unrelated to anything we were or weren't doing) and we all went our separate ways. Fun times!
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.
> Google was so paranoid about "user data"
you said you were ex-google, how come the privacy policy surprised you? privacy around user-data is big concern, especially for tech giants. Some companies are forced to leave entire Markets, to adhere to privacy/use-data policies.
I first joined Google in 2010. Back then user data concerns were about good security and engineering. There wasn't a big bureaucracy around regulatory compliance. GDPR didn't even come into effect until 2018.
Our data wasn't actually "user data" in the sense Google usually deals with. It wasn't data collected incidentally after click-through consent from billions of random people on the internet as they use their computers in daily life. It was ~100 people, many of them employees, who voluntarily participated in a one hour in-person data collection session after signing ink-on-paper consent forms, who received monetary compensation for the use of their data, and the data was used solely for training and evaluating models and not cross-linked with any other data for any other purpose. But Google's privacy bureaucracy wanted to apply the same processes and standards as user data collected continuously from billions of internet users.
But of course ultimately it didn't matter. The privacy bureaucracy issues were not at all related to the division-wide strategy pivot that killed our team (and many others). It just made my life very frustrating for the year or so before that happened. And I understand why the bureaucracy exists. In today's climate the PR risk to Google from a hit piece headline like "Google scans your eyeballs and we have the leaked data" is much higher than the probable benefit from a small team's engineering work. So they err on the side of slowing things way down. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating for that small team. And it makes me quite pessimistic about the future development of new technology at Google. I expect that their continuing failure to deploy AI anywhere near as good as GPT-4 can be attributed to similar locally rational risk-averse bureaucracy...
This sounds like most big corp acquisitions, but nevertheless, sorry that happened.
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 NetEng and eventually a Linux SysAd.
Brilliant.
Would stack overflow be the equivalent today?
Good question! Not sure. Yeah probably, or Discord/Slack?
SO’s … ‘strict’ rules are in part informed by perceived shortcomings in communities that proceeded it. So, imagine something more chaotic :)
Not a side project, per say
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.
It's differently work, for sure. I know from experience: my DevOps Discord is 5000+ members strong :)
Not really a side project, but I used to be a lot more active on stackoverflow. A recruiter reached out to me through the job board that stackexchange used to host. Been with the job for about 5 years now.
Pretty lame that they discontinued that job board. It was a lot nicer experience than using linkedin.
Pretty lame that they discontinued that job board.
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.
I used to look at SO on my morning coffee and try and answer a question or two with no incentive. However:
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.
I still like to help people regardless of if it will directly benefit me. It was just a nice perk.
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.
I also got a significant job upgrade this way.
I will also note that yes, that job board was hands down the best. Maddening that they killed it off.
Hell, I used to auto generate my resume from it.
I built https://foragoodstrftime.com ~10 years ago as I was sick of reading the docs for date formatting.
It generally gets around 1000 users a day.
Over the years, it's gotten me consulting gigs and the occasional job offer (amidst other projects).
Today, it sends a decent chunk of the traffic and sign-ups to my startup, Wafris -> https://wafris.org
OP's asking for a strategy with these, and the advice I'd offer is to treat them like assets. You make these various side projects to learn something, take the extra 20% of time to package it up buy a domain, and spend $10 on a logo or something to make it a little more like a project and not just a repo.
If it's not something directly usable like this, take some screenshots and collect them into a gallery on a personal site.
You stack these assets over time (and like my example above), they pay off over years in all sorts of ways.
Just want to say thank you. I've used your site tons over the years, it's been a great resource
You're welcome! It's honestly a great feeling just to have other devs use your work.
I just started recently, and I regret not taking screenshots or archiving websites that mentioned me and my work. I always believed that they would stay because they are the big brands, but nope- content gets regularly removed. Also, if not for your job and career, keep exciting records of the history of your life for you and your family.
I love your suggestions. I'm starting to keep digital archives -- domains, thoughts, alternate thoughts, documentation, etc.
My startup was acqui-hired in 2009. I kept the domain for records to tell the truth about people going around narrating weird stories in interviews and online articles. Early this year, I finally finished selling off all of that digital property -- the domain and a tiny component we wrote during the early years. That is the end of an era from 2006, when the domain was registered based on an idea, to 2023, when everything got sold.
Check the WaybackMachine - might be enough for you to pull some things out of.
Well, a very long time ago, in a company funded far far away (and since defeated by the empire), I had the "joy" of working with Sendmail. For you youngsters, back then, back when we had dial telephones (tell us more Grandpa!), there were multiple "mail networks", not just this fancy Internet you kids have. Sendmail was a mail processor that could not only arrange to send and receive mail, but it could translate addressing between the different networks (ARPA, Bitnet, CSNET, UUCP, etc.) The problem was, reading a sendmail config file was something like reading assembly code except you weren't allowed to by vowels. It was nearly all symbols -- executable line noise. I got tired of working with it - so I wrote my own sendmail compiler/de-compiler of sorts just to work in English prose. Got me my job at Sun. These days, I'm not sure if it will let me keep my job, or be the justification for my losing it, but I'm working on a programming language for teens called Onyx (after my grandson, who has NO interest in this as he's intending to a be a pilot, but it means unless she works for Boeing, I'm safe for a few more years
I used to work at Sendmail, it was my first job. The entire premise of the company was "Sendmail is so hard to use, let us run it for you". We had software that added a GUI for configuration and management, and Pro Services to set up big installs.
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.
I used to do this at Uni, and I actually enjoyed it. It was like a complicated puzzle, and the thrill of solving it was powerful. I remember spending days getting a SunOS <-> Lotus Notes gateway working the way I wanted it to.
Ironically, M4 felt over-complicated and abstracted, so I did not want to learn that. Direct edit all the way.
vi /etc/sendmail.cf
And I was truly shocked to later learn that there were people willing to pay for this service. Ah simpler times.
Doesn't sound like that was sendmail.mc, but I'm curious what it was.
Not directly related, but I'm working on some short stories inspired by some of the hacker/cyberpunk literature from the 80's and since I grew up and learned programming in the late 90's early 2000's, I feel completely inadequate at writing cheesy hacker stories.
Keep them old timer stories a' comin'.
I made a hobby of writing intro posts on deep technical topics, from DNS to concurrency to cutting cloud cost. From 2009 ish onwards all my gigs have been at least helped if not initiated by someone reading a post and saying "we should talk to this guy".
Not a magic spell. I had been writing for almost ten years prior before anyone noticed, and only a fraction get any play.
Wait you're the guy who wrote the mature optimization book, right?
Yes. Thank you for reading. :) It's aged a bit but I am working on an update for the cloud era: https://carlos.bueno.org/2023/03/aws-dismal-guide.html
Link?
In my profile, but https://carlos.bueno.org . I also write kids books on computer science and that seems to hook some parents. ;)
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!
How difficult was it to connect to banking API to get the transaction list?
Not many banks offer APIs to pull transactions. It's easy if you don't mind usign a third party like plaid. I wanted a solution for managing personal finances and didn't want a third party getting a copy of all my financial data, so had to build my own. I ended up building a solution using sqlite and Apache superset, however it used a module that imported data from exports from the banks (so that was a manual step)
I do not know how to reconcile the obvious advantage using plaid gives you with the obvious privacy problems it brings for users
I am actually currently working on something like this - inbox zero style (don't have swipe gestures built yet) finances tool where you check/set the category. What's old is new I guess.
Is basil still around? Would be interested in taking a look.
I created an online fan forum for The X-Files back in 1993 on the Delphi vax-based network as the web was starting to emerge. I created ASCII art of logos and stuff since it was a text-based menu-driven system. Newscorp bought the company and their marketing managers started asking me to create ASCII art for them. It turned out my fan forum was the biggest on the service with 25,000 members (that was a lot back then.) This got the attention of executives who wanted to use this new digital medium to market their properties not just for FOX Broadcasting but TV Guide, Harper Collins, FOX Film, FX Cable Network, etc. They decided to create a web-based online service to do it and hired me away from my job as a lab researcher working on gene therapy and moved me to Los Angeles to create and run the official X-Files web site. They liked me because I knew the tech and what fans wanted. I basically invented what was then the TV/film marketing web site. All I really did was assess what marketing resources were available and figure out a way to put them online. I was literally the first person to put TV show trailers online Not film trailers, just TV. No one thought anyone cared enough about T shows to download a 1.4MB 320x240 TV spot over 14400bps. Crazy times. I spent $1000 on the video capture card to digitize tv spots on VHS tapes they sent me. This was when the Pentium 90 had just come out. They never followed through creating the web-based online service for Newscorp, but since I had created a web site and online community with millions of users I ended up managing all of the web sites for the television network (and coded most of them) and even worked on sites like FOX Sports when it first came out and became the goto guy on the FOX lot when it came to online content and understanding what the fans wanted out of web sites. I moved on to create and work on ecommerce sites during the dot com boom, later worked on the original Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2 and created the mod tools (the classic/good ones), worked for Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive ultimately Sony PlayStation where I managed the production on all of the PS1 Classics available for digital download as well as some less notable stuff. That was my last full time job. Today I can't get a fulltime or even freelance job to save my life, despite nearly three decades of experience managing technology initiatives and software production that generated tens of millions in revenue. Entertainment is a different beast, you age out if you aren't an executive, and other industries don't seem to care about transferrable skills unless you're an individual contributor (programmer).
That's a rad story!!! I want to believe!
What are you working on now? Are you still a huge x files fan?
Technically I've been unemployed for 9 years. When I say I can't get a job to save my life, I mean that literally. Today I'm looking for a full time job as a manager of software product design and development or production in other industries and burning through my retirement savings.
I do some software design and development on the side to try and keep up with all the changing tech but nothing I can invest a lot of time in if it's not going to earn me a living wage. I taught myself technical analysis and watch a stock chart all day between sending out resumes and teach people online what I know about reading stock charts and how the markets actually work to try and keep people from losing money unnecessarily. It makes me feel useful and keeps me a active as a coach and mentor.
I'm still a fan of the show. It was innovative and we wouldn't have Vince Gilligan and Breaking Bad let alone mythologies and serials the way we do now if it wasn't for The X-Files.
You've had some awesome experiences. X-Files rules, and there's few things more satisfying than running a fan community like that. Running forums as a kid is also what got me into design and engineering, and greatly influenced my approach to networking and building relationships.
It sounds to me like you need to stop trying to conform to a market not optimized for your skill set, and instead start a company or consultancy which makes full use of it. Numerous possibilities come to mind based on the experiences you've listed, if you want to bounce around ideas drop me a line.
I did some consulting and tried starting my own company but I don't have the resources (co-founders, money, programming skills) and the market is dramatically different today.
Funding until 2020 was chasing the next big thing, (VR/AR/XR, Crypto, Metaverse, NFT, now AI) and after 2020 the US has been in an economic death spiral due to our debt to GDP ratio so there's a lot of competition for a lot less money and more and more the products are just infrastructure as markets are contracting. Even my peers who still have their own companies are fighting over or collaborating on/for scraps tossed to them by the giants like Amazon, Google or Microsoft.
It's a much longer nuanced discussion but the summary is if I had the resources I could create and build something great but we are no longer in an economy where large investment takes large risks to create a better/revolutionary version of Facebook or Twitter or the digital advertising industry that doesn't rely on antiquated or exploitive business models (sunken costs). That's not to say there aren't opportunities and I don't have killer revolutionary ideas, there's just a lot of barriers to entry. No one can afford the risk these days. It's something I've struggled with since before even Facebook existed.
My side project NumPad https://numpad.io got me my current job at Decipad https://www.decipad.com/ (the similar naming scheme is a coincidence!).
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.
It's funny you say this. After struggling to find work (but mostly to find meaningful work), I've committed myself to pursuing jobs related to my curiosities/interests. I didn't really do that before. Over time, I've started to narrow down based off of what I'm genuinely interested in. That way I don't have to lie when I say I'm "passionate" about something I'm working on. :-)
I've started to narrow down based off of what I'm genuinely interested in.
How do you do that if you’re past work is disconnected from what you’re interested in.
you do side projects! More seriously, I'm exactly in this situation and you'll have to find transversal skills, often soft skills when it' very different. And side projects, or courses.
And accept a junior position, even if you're a senior dentist.
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.
Did a similar thing. I did a cubesat internship at some university (different from where I was), which played a role in getting a master and then an other internship at a lab working on a part of a scientific satellite to study Jupiter's moons (launched in 2023!).
And so on. It's crazy how pushing a series of little things can put you on the right path, especially early on life.
Europa Clipper?
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.
From 2004 to 2007, I created and maintained a Linux distribution called Kaella. It was kind of a fork of the Knoppix live CD. It was not really a fork, because each version of the Kaella was based on the latest Knoppix (adding French language packs, a software selection more adapted to France, and drivers for ADSL modems common in France). Anyway, this project allowed me to be contacted by an IT architect at Amadeus, a company for plane ticket management (and more than planes). I could work with great people there, very smart. It was very stimulating. Unfortunately, with my family we decided to move for a better quality of life to a nicer region of France, but my time there was great.
Hey, thanks for Kaella ! It helped me a lot when I was a 12 years old French kid and struggling with English :) !
Oh ! It was you? Thanks for that! It was great. The teenager in me still fondly remembers the beach wallpaper.
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 manager saw it and was trying to hire for a role building integrations. My project was enough for him to reach out and set up a chat. Without the project we wouldn’t have connected.
I'd be curious to read the post if you're willing to share?
Here’s the blog version https://willemhandreck.com/f1-live-updates
I made a sweet visual programming editor for JavaScript that no one really ended up using: https://devev.com/
Rec Room saw the product and hired me as their visual scripting architect. I ended up building Circuits which is used by millions of players: https://recroom.com/cv2. I've even had children message me in Discord that they've chosen to get degrees in programming because they used Circuits.
My team is currently hiring: https://recroom.com/careers?gh_jid=5382144003
I'm definitely going to look into open positions. Rec Room looks awesome. I'll see if I can come up with a project they'd be impressed by. ;)
y'all take interns?
It was my half hearted attempt at factorio with Clojure: https://github.com/pyrrhic/learning-clojure-factorio-clone
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.
I've put a lot of hours into factorio. This is amazing. I genuinely love the art style in the gif.
The creator of shapez.io has made money on it, I think. It's like Factorio but simpler.
Oh my, this called for me.
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-...
Hey quick question, how do I get a job at Amazon? ;) jk
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.
Hey quick question, how do I get a job at Amazon? ;) jk
(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.
Among all these feel-good stories, how about one with a bit different ending?
During my masters, I created a ML library that dealt with noise in dataset [1]. I implemented bunch of papers, but unlike your usual research code, I spent a long time obsessing about it's API, performance, created documentation, CI- the whole shebang. But then, like avg research code, I moved on and promptly forgot about it.
One day about a year ago the cofounder of a very new, small startup working on something similar texted me about the project on linkedin. We chatted for a bit, but as a guy who thinks he's too cool for linkedin, I next logged in and saw his last message about wanting to collaborate about 3/4 months after the fact.
Well they raised $25 million dollars a few months ago :(
If it makes you feel any better, I got contacted like a decade ago by these two super friendly guys, who wanted some advice on how to handle infosec/devops in their fast growing startup
I happened to be travelling to San Jose as I had just started working in a company based there, and they were based in the YC offices in Mountain View so they invited me to come over for drinks at this nearby bar. They were very casual about it so I took it to mean they were there with other people, so I showed up slightly later (as they said "we'll be there from 4pm") and it was just the two of them waiting for me.
We had a couple drinks and I basically talked myself out of a job by emphasising that I had just started a job and it would be awkward to leave it, plus they didn't really need me and they were doing just fine. Said "let's keep in touch" but, you know, life got in the way and didn't really.
Their startup was valued at $5b on their last raise :)
if it makes you feel better, it's really common to have "almost" moments like this in life. i had a project circa 2007 that was very successful and working great and making decent money ($300/month, which was a lot for me). i was a young stupid fresh college kid and blew it off to do other stuff. several years later someone started the same premise but stuck with it and now surely makes a million+ per year off it.
(i dont want to be too specific but it was a website to help people make purchasing decisions for a specific thing in an interactive way and made tons off referral links)
Hacking the firmware in Fuji cameras definitely impressed a few recruiters, and helped me get a position recently.
Any interesting things I could do with my X-T2?
Not yet, although I'm slowly working on an alternative to Fuji's X app
I wrote a JAX-based neural network library (Equinox [1]) and numerical differential equation solving library (Diffrax [2]).
At the time I was just exploring some new research ideas in numerics -- and frankly, procrastinating from writing up my PhD thesis!
But then one of the teams at Google starting using them, so they offered me a job to keep developing them for their needs. Plus I'd get to work in biotech, which was a big interest of mine. This was a clear dream job offer, so I accepted.
Since then both have grown steadily in popularity (~2.6k GitHub stars) and now see pretty widespread use! I've since started writing several other JAX libraries and we've turned this into a bit of a foundation for a JAX sciML ecosystem.
Hey, diffrax is cool by the way. I've used it to do some automatically differentiate through some ODEs for optimal experimental design. Great stuff.
I am a big fan of Equinox! It inspired a library I wrote for a previous employer for a stochastic simulator! :D
Not a job I took. But when I launched https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover I got offered a high level position in a a photo company via my email which at the time was on my GitHub profile.
wow just a immediate offer?
I'm sure they did some research on me and saw other projects I had worked on at the time. But for all intense and purposes yes.
Around 2008/2009 I was working in a public relations position, and web development was still just a hobby for me.
My boss owned a pro volleyball team, one of my responsibilities was managing an online community for fans.
Every time we needed changes to the community forums, we had to hire external devs who were very slow and very expensive. So I explained my boss that I could code and asked if I could just do the changes myself, he agreed. I gradually started coding more and more regularly, this helped me keeping my skills current even if I wasn't formally employed as a dev.
Fast forward to about a year later - my boss bought a hotel, and shortly after the hotel director quit. He asked me if I could temporarily take the role as a director, I agreed. Business was slow (low season), and I was more confident about my programming skills thanks to the experience with the volleyball forums, so I kept myself busy working on a simple calendar web app for the hotel.
The next year, I left my job and I became the tech co-founder of a travel bookings startup, where my main task was building a calendar synchronisation system. I couldn't have done it without that previous experience building the hotel calendar app. My co-founder later told me that he chose me over someone else because of that specific experience I had.
What does a hotel director do all day? Does it require training? Customer interactions? Is it technical or social in nature?
As you can tell from my post above, I have only had this role temporarily so I'm not an expert.
Based on my experience, you have a few people that report to you from the different teams (reception, cleaning, maintenance, kitchen, sales etc.) - what you actually do depends a lot on the size of the hotel and on how large those teams are; in a small B&B you are probably doing some of those tasks yourself, but in a larger hotel there will be different teams and you are purely in a management position.
The amount and frequency of customer interaction also depends on the hotel size.
Whether it is more technical or social depends on the above. And it also depends on whether you consider management itself to be a technical or social skill.
Edit - regarding training: I have seen people in this field who had hospitality management degrees so I suppose that's the most common path.
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 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.
wow i’d love to watch a film regarding your life
This is cool. If it were written into some movie I’d accuse the writer of lazy writing. Kudos to you.
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.
Created a financial markets tech project, put it on sourceforge. Didn’t even get to the second commit. A hiring manager from a nyse group co emails me: “can you implement this for us to completion we will give you money”. I go “sorry I am busy building a startup [in some unrelated area]”. Startup grew and then failed, and I became poor, temporarily.
sourceforge? must be ancient. what did the project do?
Yes 2007! Without going into details, a piece of infrastructure related to one of the then new Fix protocol specifications.
This game I made and released on iPhone way back in the day directly led to me getting my first full-time job making mobile apps for a startup as the Lead Developer. I showed it during my interview.
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
If you still have the IPA file for it, you should look into seeing if it runs on touchHLE [1], an emulator for early versions of iOS. They also have an app archive [2] if you'd like to give permission for them to preserve the game.
Thanks for linking to this project. There are some old games on iOS that I was sad to see go so it's great to see a project like this bringing life back to them.
I made a Blazor component library for one of my personal projects that failed, but the component library lived on as an open-source project called Blazorise [1].
In late 2019, I got a well-paid job in a large local company because of the project reference. Unfortunately, COVID happened, and I lost that same job after a few months. So again, because of Blazorise, I got several other gigs as a freelancer.
But after a while, it was hard to do all the work on the projects and do freelance jobs at the same time. Not to mention that family time was also very limited.
So I decided to commercially license Blazorise to companies, and keep it free for individuals. Hopefully, the decision paid off. Today I run a small company and continue to work on Blazorise full time. We're still fully bootstraped without any external funds.
I used Blazorise at my old job! Great work!
Looking all this amazing comments, feels like i started coding in such a lame era. FYI started coding around 2020. Such amazing people and motivating stories!
Appreciate the lore but build your own. :)
Not exactly a side "job", but I was part of a group making a mod for Half-Life that got purchased by Valve. It did actually turn into a side job for a handful of years while I worked full time at a university position.
What mod?
Way back when the Nintendo Wii was brand new and hard to find, I wrote a script to scrape Target.com for store inventory and notify me if a nearby store restocked. A few years after that I revamped it to check on inventory for newly released iPad models. I put the code up on GitHub [1] and the CTO for a company that had large-scale store inventory checking as part of their product emailed me out of the blue after seeing my repository. A little while later, I replied back, interviewed and got a pretty good job offer out of it. I wound up not taking the offer, but in hindsight I probably should have.
Why did you turn it down then regret that? I don’t hear that often, that’s why I’m curious
In 2019 I built the original version of codeamigo.dev, a place to create coding tutorials, after codecademy rejected me for the third time. About a year in Amjad from replit reached out and offered to acquire the product and hire me full time. I went through the interview process, and was offered the job, but in the end I backed out because others convinced me it wasn’t for enough money. One of the worse career decisions I’ve made thus far.
thus far
that's the spirit! :)
This thread gives me a lot of hope and motivation thanks everyone for sharing there experiences.
I am glad it does, and I don't want to stop the motivation, but you are hearing the success stories. Most Github projects / side projects don't land jobs. That is why I think it is important to do them (if you choose to!) for other reasons too, like fun, charity, learning, or whatever.
I built an early HTML5 game engine in 2010 called CraftyJS when Facebook games were starting to become big. The project itself got me the job at a gaming startup and an offer at Zynga.
Nice! I used CraftyJS for my pet project!
I worked for something like 15 years on a Semantic Web/Linked Data/Knowledge Graph client GUI. Funnily, the market never provided a convenient alternative. So when a big company decided that their data were becoming a massive mess, and it was time for a proper layering of data architecture, they chose my tool. Then me.
Congratulations! Which GUI and company, if I may ask? I've heard KG demand is on the rise, but one of the companies expects you to move to Sweden...
Not really a side project as I was trying to get traction on my ideas at my former employer.
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.
did you consider making your own company? sounds like a prime opportunity.
looking to do the same, would appreciate any insight
I’ve learned an unbelievable amount trying to systematically invest on my own.
All of what I have learned is levered in my career and I’ve utilized that knowledge during all interviews.
Care to elaborate? Never had the money to invest but have dabbled with some very basic auto trading algos. Long story short, before I learned any math related to gambling, I didn't understand why martingale can't work in gambling or investment. Now I do. :P
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 in which to easily implement new cards, etc.
In some ways the backend at my current job is slowly coming to resemble some of the patterns I used here, funnily enough.
[0]: https://github.com/dgunay/slay
Looks like the repo is private.
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.
Dashboard widgets! I miss those — yes we still have widgets in macOS, but being able to author in HTML/JS/CSS really leveled the playing field in who could contribute. I made a widget called Gas that fetched local gas prices, and that got a bit popular too. Developing it led to my career in frontend and I’m sure didn’t hurt when I applied to (and landed) a job at Apple right out of college.
20 years ago, I was a college kid who built a running log website as an alternative to keeping paper records. My college cross-country team lived all over the country, so this let us keep each other accountable during summer training. It was fairly early in the Internet, before GPS watches and not many runners had heart rate straps. It got featured in Women's Health and Runners' World (UK edition) magazines.
When I interviewed at Microsoft my senior year, this gave me a ton to talk about. It was real experience building a product and having customers. I could answer questions with something real and different than the other candidates. I know I bombed two of my interviews, but I ended up doing 7 interviews on the day and getting an offer.
The website is still around, but I haven't done anything to it other than delete the production log that fills up the server disk occasionally in the last 15 years. I don't know why anyone uses it, there are much better options. I still run and I certainly don't use it. But the server bills are cheap, so it lives on.
If you don't mind me asking, what is the site? My issue with "much better options" is that they tend to include an overwhelming amount of distracting data (Avg HR, Max HR, Cadence, Pace, ect).
Sometimes, less is more :) I use a Google excel doc for mine and have not looked back!
In 2003/2004, during my undergrad, I observed a recurring trend in the university's IT department. They struggled to retain Unix/Linux engineers for more than three months, primarily due to two reasons: the university's remote location (apparently engineers loved the city life) and the local telecom companies' at the time hired anyone who could type "ls" on a Linux shell. Recognizing an opportunity, I began self-studying FreeBSD and Linux, the operating systems used by the university for their internet services like DNS, email, and proxy servers. Before completing my degree, I applied for the sysadmin position at the uni. In the interviews, I was able to explain and answer even the hardest of questions. I was hired. I eventually went to "ls" elsewhere as well but this role, which I held for eight years, provided me with a foundational knowledge that I believe influences my career even to date!
eventually went to "ls" elsewhere
Poetic
Anecdote from a friend.
As a student, he reverse-engineered his country's tax application (not sure how he did that), turned it into a programming language, published the result as open-source along with formal semantics and precise documentation. Apparently, the official implementation was closed source, the state didn't have access to the source and the results were undocumented and nobody understood how it worked.
A few years later, the state adopted his application as the backend for the tax computation infrastructure and, if my memory serves, offered him a job. He declined.
turned it into a programming language
That sounds weird. Did you mean that they reimplemented it in another programming language?
Writing a C compiler got me a job at my own company.
There's a wikipedia page talking about your accomplishments Mr. Bright. Never thought you'd comment on one of my HN posts but here we are. :-)
Very good question. I don't have a degree so the way that I use to demonstrate my skills is all due to public projects. I'll show you the main projects that really landed me my first tech jobs. Granted, they weren't very good and have many engineering problems. I was still learning at the time but here they are:
1. https://github.com/robertsdotpm/pyp2p - This was an attempt to make a peer-to-peer networking library in Python. Don't use it or anything as it's horrible code. But it was enough to get me a job at a startup called Storj. I messaged the team and was able to talk about specific challenges of peer-to-peer networking which were relevant to the product they were building.
2. https://github.com/robertsdotpm/coinbend - This was my attempt to build a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange whereby all trades were done without the need for an intermediary to hold deposits using smart contracts. This was actually one of the first 'decentralized exchanges' made at a time when the only coins that existed were forks of Bitcoin. It was impressive enough to land me a job at Exodus which is still the most incredible company in the blockchain space (IMO obviously.)
((If anyone's wondering: I lost both jobs due to severe untreated depression. Lmaoo... But I'm on meds now.)) But yeah, companies absolutely will hire people without degrees and based on the quality of the projects you've worked on. I know that many people say that working on side projects doesn't matter. But you need to actually talk about your projects and reach out to people for it to matter. If you just apply through HR they'll just go through a generic list of things to check off while they look at your resume.
By the way OP: I've always found that taking the effect to actually understand the problems that companies are trying to solve and outlining how existing work that you've done qualifies you to provide a solution is the fastest way to get a job. But again -- you need to reach the people who know what you mean. Shout out to Storj and Exodus -- both great companies that I would recommend.
Thank you for sharing. It reminds me I need to put more effort into applications. Cool projects btw :-)
For my current job, I talked about a lot of stuff I had done over the years. (My role is not best described as "Cloud Architect" which is my actual title; I do a lot more stuff than that)
The thing which caught the interest of one of my interviewers was a side project I had creating tools to be more effective at playing Travian.
Travian did something interesting, in that each server instance would dump a single database table nightly for players to ingest and tinker with.
I wrote a script which would grab the file, de-MySQL it to get it to run on SQLEXPRESS, and then execute some stored procedures to extract some insights out of the data. Then, I had some Asp.Net pages which would let you do interesting stuff with it: Find inactive accounts, Track someone's alliance history, a few other things. I had half a dozen tools for different things, mostly I focused on building stuff which nobody had thought of yet, and made the tools only available to people in my alliance.
All this was on the roadmap to start building a bot to play the game for me. That turned out to be a lot more work, and I ended up losing interest in the game in the interim.
We only spent about 10 minutes or so talking about it, but still, it was 10 minutes of followup questions. I feel pretty strongly this, and one other anecdote is what got me hired. (The other anecdote was writing a really dumb hotfix out of a decompiled java class to fix Novell eDirectory support for one of my prior company's products - in protest of our engineering group not finding the effort worthwhile)
Re. title, I still like "System Administrator". I'm of the opinion that any competent sysadmin (good luck finding one) has cloud architecture under his belt at this point.
My AI sandbox game https://www.chesscraft.ca helped me get a great transfer within government to an AI prototyping team at Environment Canada. The job is a bit of a unicorn because it's full remote with tons of freedom.
I wrote a book on JBoss for fun around 2006 and it helped me to get a job at Red Hat in 2019. Funnily enough some people at the company thought it was a cool thing, even though I didn't think that the book was important at the time of getting hired. A side note, even though I didn't regard the book as anything special, it was the fact that I has written and published it as being important
I was working for a flash game hosting company that you probably remember if you were ever of age to care about flash games. We had like 30 different payment methods for buying in-game currency[1] and a good number of them had this stupid problem where if your browser timed out we charged you and then immediately forgot about it.
I wrote an essay[2] about it which turned into a book[3] which turned into consulting gigs. Gigs turned into full time jobs including a stint at Stripe. The book also earned mid-five-figures over time.
[1]: I'm convinced that one of them was straight up gift card fraud facilitation. You could buy in-game currency with retailer gift cards.
[2]: https://www.petekeen.net/design-for-failure-processing-payme...
[3]: https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments-launch-da..., the book links don't work any more :(
My blog (https://alicegg.tech/) as well as the small discord bots I used to do in my spare time (https://github.com/zer0tonin/mako) helped me land a gig working at MEE6. During the interview, the founders clearly said that my CV was unimpressive, but my blog showed without a doubt I was really able to code.
It was a fairly decent job, I helped the company scale from 5m to 15m communities and gave my software and infra skills a huge boost. I think without this experience, I wouldn't have the confidence to start working on software by myself as I do now.
I wrote a game[1] fully in typescript and uploaded it to various platforms, I was lucky enough and the game was found by a company that wants to create exactly those type of games (Arcadey/casual party games).
They had to go deep into the library of the platforms I uploaded to but it stood out as a work of passion. They contacted me and offered me a job on the spot.
The project took 9 months and a ton of iterations but I was so happy doing it I didn't care.
Still happily working at this gaming company.
I’m not sure if it counts as a side-project, as it was just something I hacked together mostly out of curiosity. I’m also not sure if qualifies as “landing me a job”, but it was explicitly asked about during the interview process and they were certainly interested, so…
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.
It wasn't a project, per se, but my personal blog on BlogSpot. I was mostly documenting my foray into using Ubuntu as I started the blog around 2006-ish. It mostly surrounded bumps and hurdles I faced when trying to get my Windows games to run in wine. I posted some (funny to me) memes along the way, too.
I was looking to switch careers from the current electrical engineering job to IT around 2008, and I found out after getting the job that members of the hiring committee had read through my blog and thought I'd be a good fit. I'm very thankful to that group.
I wrote a generic kernel driver overlay for error correction for block devices on Linux (Winter 2017-18) for a student org at my university. Interned at NVIDIA on their Linux graphics driver in Summer 2019
This project was a Show HN and I had a few people reach out to me after, ended up taking a position as a founding engineer at a YC company in SF (2013).
It's an alternate program editor that breaks source into tiles around grammatical boundaries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tztmgCcZaM4
I created two SSL related projects, SSLPing and SSLBoard, and both helped me get jobs, starting in 2016.
SSLPing would check TLS servers like SSLlabs does, but way faster and would repeat the test every day and email you alerts. Got to 700 users, and impressed a few hiring managers. SSLPing's shutdown made the HN front page in 2021!
SSLBoard would scrape all Certificate Transparency logs and collect and index all certificates in real time. I got my last job thanks to it.
I even refused an incredible acqui-hire offer from a US company. I thought I'd rather work on my project alone... I should probably have said yes.
I've started working on SSLBoard again, and I'm moving SSLPing to a serverless architecture, because I have nothing left to show recruiters, only stories to tell...
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.
Not a project, per se, but this is how I got to become a freelancer.
I was bored at work in one day, in summer 2007, and I was searching on internet free tests to test my knowledge. I did that previously in 2000 when BrainBench was new, and I even got physical diplomas from them for free. So, in this summer I searched for BrainBench again, to test me to see how much I grew during these years, and I was disappointed to find now BB was paid. So during my search I found this site oDesk, which was a freelancer site, but also allowed you to take tests. Didn't cared about freelancing part, only testing. So I took some HTML, Delphi, SQL tests there in that day. On Delphi I was proud that I was on 2nd place, while on rest I was in top 5% of all people that tested. I published that and forget about them.
In November I receive an e-mail. Someone was contacting me on my oDesk account. I was like "wtf is oDesk?". Then I remembered about the day in summer whne I got bored and made an account on that site. Long story short, that was my first client, he hired me and I realized how short I was selling myself to companies in my country. In March 2008 I quit from the day job and went full freelancer ever since. Btw, oDesk, after acquired Elance, got renamed Upwork. I still, partially, get new clients on Upwork, though most of my new clients are now through recommendations from my previous clients.
If I wasn't bored that day, if I didn't created that account, I'd still be working for a soulless corporation in my country.
Years ago, I built Asterank, an open-source database of asteroids. It landed me a job at Planetary Resources, an "asteroid mining" company: https://www.asterank.com/
I was working in HFT in New York and messing around with HoloLens in my spare time. I went to GDC and gave a talk (https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024862/HoloLens-and-Beyond-AR...) and Apple hired me to work on AR prototyping and ideation because the creator of the HoloLens, then working at Apple, attended the talk :)
Sadly, doesn’t this sort of “faith promoting stories” create a sense of survivorship bias?
I love these stories. And for every cool one, there’s at least a hundred “contributions” that result in no form of “payback.” I fear younger readers might read these and work their butts off in hopes of a payback, or worse, “tune” their philanthropic contributions (er, open source) to optimize for a return. Make cool things. Be glad when good things happen to you. Don’t try to connect too many dots.
My contributions to SerenityOS[0] helped me get my current job. My team lead (who was also my interviewer) was interested in what I did since I listed some of it in my CV, and I showed him some PRs I made and explained what went into each of them. It was really exciting because I didn't have professional experience with low-level development, and basically got the job due to hobby programming.
[0]: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pulls?q=is%3Apr+autho...
My first job was at a hydroponics store. I wanted to grow some fresh fruit in my basement over the winter, and wanted to build the system rather than buying an out-of-the-box one. I asked the owner a few questions about building a system, and got some advice from him. When I came back the second time to get more materials, I was offered a job.
I got my first (and current) mobile developer job after building a budgeting/personal-finance app that synced with my bank account using Plaid.
I created http://autotutor.com.au together with my father, and that landed me a job at an educational software company.
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.
I started https://github.com/thbar/kiba#kiba-etl to scratch my own itch & be able to write properly structured ETL jobs in Ruby. It was a blank-slate rewrite of something larger (activewarehouse-etl) which I could not maintain anymore.
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 :-)
One of the members of the core team of our open-source library https://albumentations.ai/
It was not the only reason he was hired; it was a solid addition to his already good performance at the interviews.
Or at least that is what the hiring manager later said.
I co-authored a smart contract compiler that landed me two different jobs.
Not a job per se, but some friends and I wrote a library for building compositional chatbots (like for IRC not LLMs necessarily) encoded as Mealy Machines: https://github.com/cofree-coffee/cofree-bot/
That project has since led to a long term collaboration with the Topos Institute where we are building a type theory for Polynomial Functors: https://github.com/toposInstitute/polytt
Polynomial Functors are a really powerful abstraction from Category Theory which subsumes the co-algebraic approach to finite state machines used in `cofree-bot` and which can also be used to encode wiring diagrams, tactics engines, game semantics, neural networks, and dynamical systems in general.
My most recent post about my side project [0] got me some freelancing work as well as an internship for this summer. Project was related to both of them! Unbelievably grateful for the opportunities it’s given me.
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.
A few years ago I got fed up with then-popular JavaScript linter, JSLint, and forked it to make JSHint. I wouldn't say JSHint was the only criteria that landed me the job but it definitely help when interviewing for positions where JavaScript was important. At the very least, it put my name thru the first filter both at Mozilla and then at Medium.
It was a toy interpreter https://github.com/Shafin098/pakhi-bhasha
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.
I got the opposite: I was really curious about some security stuff so I wrote a chat system over Tor (which was actually quite difficult!) and used that project as my main showcase when I was in college. Anyways, I didn’t get a single job when that was linked on my resume. I did have one interview where I brought it up and I got dropped after that point. When I took it off, I actually got interviews and eventually hired. I always assumed it was cause Tor has a bit of a reputation I guess.
I dropped out of Uni without doing my master thesis and in later learned that if you need a US Visa a graduate degree is helpful, so in 2014 I went back to write a thesis (it was about satcom). I was getting a bit disillusioned with the project, and since I was running Linux on my Macbook air, and noticed that there was a Qemu GsoC project to make MacOS run without modification. Long story short, I got to RE the UEFI bootloader and find a bug in the Linux SATA code which landed me a job at a place that wanted to migrated from VMWare to KVM. I went on to do a fair share of performance work with SRIOV and DPDK, but unfortunately didn't really manage to continue working in that domain.
It is unclear to me whether this "landed me a job", but in advance of working at big tech, I made a presentation about Smithy (www.smithy.rs), in which there was an engineer in the audience (employed at the same big tech co). I believe he lobbied for my candidacy with the hiring committee.
Secondly, before taking my most recent job (at Pinterest), I had just secured a conference talk about Isograph (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO65JJRqjuc). At both companies where I eventually got offers, I spent a good amount of interview time nerding about Isograph with the interviewers.
Ultimately, it's unclear if this tipped the balance in any case, but the side projects seemed helpful.
----
Previously, while interviewing at a previous place, I showed off a side project to the interviewers, ran into a bug, and deployed a fix in real time. I was later told that they had never seen that. I think I would've gotten that job anyway, though.
Two projects.
As a teenager, I got my first job as a technician at a local PC store in the mid-90s, I think solely because I dabbled on a Amiga at home. I just walked into the store with a resume. The guy who ran the shop was an early Amiga user, and though Amigas had fadded by that time (1994), it created a connection - in the interview, the owner said: "Amiga, that's a sign of good taste".
When I graduated from university, I was looking for work. I had an great-uncle who repaired and sold church organs. I helped build out his website, and I think it ultimately helped me land a job at a another company that build digital control systems for pipe organs.
In 1999 my friend's band wanted to sell their music online and so I looked at the new Microsoft DRM that had just been released (don't kill me!) and set up a test web page. I ended up getting an interview (and a job) with a company that Peter Gabriel had just started as I was practically the only person in the country that had even looked at the SDK.
PG gave us an opening to every record label ("Hi, Peter Gabriel would like to come visit and show you something...") where we'd show them we could sell their music legally online. Five minutes after PG leaves each building a team from Apple would show up and show off what they were building too. Their meetings were much shorter as we always did all the heavy lifting first. (Note, we always had to use our own equipment because the MS stuff worked way better on Windows, but all the record labels were like 99% Mac).
On another one.. it wasn't a side project, but I "hacked" a competition on a popular TV show's web site and they ended up hiring me as the co-presenter o_O
Not exactly a side project, but same idea:
After not getting a faculty job (and after a couple of postdocs) a wrote an essay about failure in academia. At the urging of a friend, I pitched it to a place that liked it and published it. The response was really surprising to me, all the kind random messages I got. And someone asked if I wanted to apply for a job opening they had, teaching writing at a university. A couple of weeks later I had moved and was in the classroom, the last place I expected to be. It was teaching in an area I never expected and not research in my field, but I've always enjoyed the teaching part of university life.
And that story, along with all the rest here, is what I tell my students about putting work out there. Good and surprising things happen!
My blog landed me multiple book deals: I wrote the very first book in history about Ubuntu because a publisher found my blog. I published my first novel because the editor found it published as a serie on my blog. I’ve never asked for it.
Hosting my own webservices for fun for years transformed to a side-business during a couple of years, where I was hosting paying customers.
My involvement with GNOME landed me a job with a GNOME-related company (but I sent them my resume, so this was not unexpected)
My life-long investment in free software landed me a teaching job at my university, totally unexpected.
I built a whole career doing side projects. Do more side projects. (many of my side projects didn’t pay me but, for some, it was a choice because you cannot do everything. Also, side-projects have different taste once you are paid for it. You don’t want that for every side project)
A long time ago I built a business app for the company to replace our existing. I first ran it in parallel and then had my boss do the same. They loved it and it went into production.
Later I applied for a job and all the work I did, backend and frontend and support and database and migrations and reports and visualizations showed my future employer that I knew every stage of work suddenly finding myself moving them into devops.
I build and maintain some libraries that are used by teams working on GOV.UK projects in Rails. Have been inundated with offers since their release, and they've gone on to be used in some fairly high profile things.
https://github.com/x-govuk/govuk-form-builder https://github.com/x-govuk/govuk-components
When GPT3.5 and Dall-E were out for only a little while, I wrote a Discord D&D bot which would act as a DM and generate images for each scene and generated audio for all the voices using play.ht
It was a silly, hacky, poorly made mess but it got the attention of a VP at my current company. They offered me the highest paying job I've had thus far (and I've worked at Apple and Spotify in the past) to play around with Gen AI.
Overall be different and create fun to unique things on the web that get ppl's attention.. good or bad.
My first startup was a different idea and back in 2007 it was a very odd idea that received attention here (lots of hate ..some pretty vicious) and in various tech publications. I learned how to code and design during that time and I think both factors which I marketed when applying for jobs helped me more easily get my first few tech jobs.
I worked in a school as a technician and wrote a room booking system. It shaped my life. It has brought sideline income for 16 years. It got me a job in the private sector. It opened the door for a number of large paid projects. I'm now a lecturer trying to pass on my IT curiosity to others. The booking system is https://freeperiod.co.uk.
I built a open source wireless IMU (http://adjacentreality.org/), integrated it into some projects, and posted about it on a hobbyist virtual reality forum in 2012. I sent one of two working units to another hobbyist there to use on the headset he was prototyping called the "Oculus Rift". A few months later, Palmer was looking for an engineer to build a VR tracking system, and the rest is history!
https://github.com/nraynaud/webgcode I got a few contracts in the toolpath computation world out of that. In laser cutting, general machining, and cabinet making.
I wrote a small application for personal use to generate custom ruling sheets for calligraphy practice and put it online. I didn't get a job because of this or anything but I learnt about PDF structures, creating them, overlaying etc.
This knowledge and quick demos I was able to do because of it enabled me to get multiple client projects.
I'm a consultant turned agency, but a side project was instrumental to business growth.
I built Doggypedia.org as a side project, I grew it to 100,000+ organics/month without backlinks or technical BS.[0] I wasn't able to monetize it. It actually made negative profit after hosting expenses.
But the case study was enough to attract the attention of a seed stage startup. I grew them from 0 to 1,500,000 organics/month and added ~100k paid customers [1]. This growth enabled them to raise a Series B from A16z.
This case study led to working with brands like ClickUp.
I hepled jQuery UI which landed me first real job with contract and everything, first side project was react like for canvas where only diff is drawen not all canvas, I have full family eating from this.
I did a few things in my younger days - I used to like playing MUDs, and one day a few of my college friends wanted to create our own. So we created a fairly unknown MUD called "Faereal" which still happens to be used as my domain name for my personal stuff!
I was lucky enough to have a good friend and neighbour down the road who ran ExNet [1], who provided me with space to host my first server, and oh boy looking back, I am surprised I didn't blow everything up! [2] - Windows 98 connected directly into the internet, with a fairly terrible firewall and some random remote control software I found!.
Eventually, though another MUD, we were donated a more up-to-date box, which ran Linux, and we hosted that MUD and the Faereal MUD for a while, eventually adding in my own DNS server, website hosting (PHP), and that is how I ended up hosting friends websites.
That turned into a hobby where I started to write my own PHP, started helping firstly helping out on a game called "PhaseOne" which was essentially a copy of a game we were all playing at the time called "Planetarion" [3] -- (OMG As I looked for this, its still running!). Part of this code I created a "Team based chat area", which eventually became the primary base for something that has taken over nearly 20 years of my life.
The code became the custom-written forum code behind DDR:UK, a Dance Dance Revolution fan website for the UK, which through the founders we created the "official" Sim Packs for DDR simulators such as DWI [4] and Stepmania [5]. This eventually moved into us working at events such as the London MCM ComicCon [6], where we bought in actual DDR arcade machines, including a Stepmania run DDR Machine that used to sit in the Namco Station in Central London on the South Bank. (I would love to say it was a world first, but there was one group in the US that had a temporary setup... I would like to hope we are the world first permanent money-making one :D)
That got me into running a Japanese Culture Festival called Tokonatsu [7] which got me into learning AWS. This festival has now been running for 20 years!
So all in all, how did this help:
* Interviews, it's a great story to tell, and I always get a lot of fun looks!
* Experience, from hardware, to networking, to early days of internet, software, hosting etc etc. I went thought a LOT of sleepless nights when I was younger sorting this out, gave me a whole bunch of experience that I would never would have had.
* Networking, still talk to a lot of people today, and these people are key for where I am.
Honestly, the owner of ExNet, I couldn't have done any of this, if he hadn't of started me on the right path.
EDIT: Totally forgot to explain where I am now! So with all this, through support tech, manager of of datacentres, through lead engineers, etc etc... I am now the AWS Practice Lead for my company, a Principle Consultant, and I am writing this in the airport on the way back from AWS Re:Invent 2023 :D
So yeah, that is my story! Hope someone does eventually read it :D
[2] https://static.colinbarker.me.uk/img/blog/2020/07/faereal-se...
[3] http://www.planetarion.com/
[5] https://www.stepmania.com/
I didn’t do side project. But, I went to college with this guy. We were in the same group projects for a while. At the end of a couple semesters and 1 before I graduated, he told me to forward him my resume for a job he referred me to. I did and got called for on-site round. At that time, the SDE interview didn’t involved phone screen. I don’t remember why. It could be that the company was only 400 people and private. I showed up and did ok and passed the interview. Later on, I learned that this guy was the CEO of such company.
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.
I made a Doom "renderer" (no game but you could run around Doom maps) as a side project one summer. This was 20 years ago and in Flash so it was a novelty.
Later I applied for an internship on a whim. I assumed I wouldn't get it since I didn't have the best qualifications. But the job required Flash experience and the Doom renderer made it very clear I had that much. I got my foot in the door, made a career out of it, changing the course of my life.
I was active in various areas of OpenSolaris, contributing to design discussions, code, and code review. Most of this was in the intersection of zones, installation, and zfs. Some were just scratching an itch, like “manwhich”.
https://www.illumos.org/opensolaris/ARChive/PSARC/2007/688/m...
Once Oracle acquired Sun and hiring started, I was hired into the zones team. While interviewing I discussed my ongoing work on zfs dataset aliasing to virtualize the zfs dataset hierarchy in zones. After being hired I was able to get this feature prioritized to make it into Solaris 11.
During my physics PhD I built my own Segway (and a second one with a power tool company who came to me after first asking tlb) and did a bunch of projects with a high-power laser cutter that I got funding for in our lab. I included these on my resume and they were much easier for interviewers to talk to me about than my PhD work. I think they also helped me stand out a bit. Receiving positive feedback about these projects gave me confidence to sell myself as someone who could build things.
I worked on a VSCode extension for a new Programming language. I then later got a message from its language designers asking if I was okay getting paid to maintain it.
I loved it.
Early in the iOS days I wrote a car lease/loan payment app. Nothing fancy if you knew how to use a business calculator, but it quickly did all the calculations for lease/loan buying. The UI was so-so, but it worked and I had gotten some feedback it was useful. I had only built it for myself and then released it on the App Store b/c why not.
The app ended up referenced in a later interview I had and helped land a job doing mobile development. This was very early days of iOS development, so just navigating the mess of getting an app signed and uploaded was sometimes a challenge.
To get my foot in the door (early 2000's) - I had to bring in "stuff" that I have done for universtity, and personal projects.
After a few unsuccessful interviews, I was going to revisit what would be best for demonstration.
However, another interview came along and decided to try one last time with my existing software and hobby demos.
One demo was a C++ engine/game I wrote in my spare time. It was first person and dynamic lights (it was a thing back then). I was showing the editor side, which had 4 windows... front, side, top, and 3d.
It was fortunate because they had a C++ project, and nobody really wanted to touch it. So I gained bonus points to getting for being open to it.
Surprisingly, of what I presented, he was really interested in the html+js demos, as they are doing a lot of web applications and want to push one of their existing products with more functionality.. animation, drag+drop, images, automation, etc.
Its funny. I felt like I had nothing to really show that would land me a job. On this ocassion, I managed to show things that just happens to link with real projects (in one way or another) they are doing. They pretty much offered me a 2 day trial (on a thurs and fri) to see how I would get on. The good news I passed without issue. They gave me a web project, heavy in javascript -- and to 1) avoid full post back (refresh) and 2) to support drag+drop.
I knew a little PHP at the time (more into C\C++) but they were using VB.NET - so managed to learn a lot in those 2 days, and meet their expectations.
I was officially a Junior Developer on Monday... and they decided to remove "junior" from my job title a few months later.
Built a trinary sorta 6502 emulator and sorta C compiler[1]. This was my resume when I got my first programming job with no formal education in the field.
After discovering Erlang (thanks, Bruce Tate) I started following the community on Twitter and elsewhere, then created the Twitter account ErlangInfo to share news and resources about the language.
Because I was following multiple Erlang-related accounts I saw that Basho was hiring a tech evangelist in my region, and while I doubt there was a lot of competition for the role, my side “gig” as ErlangInfo at least didn’t hurt my chances.
I made a Wiki for the Erlang community in 1999. I wrote that from scratch in Erlang. (That was the conventional way to deploy a new wiki in those days!) That landed me a job at the first Erlang startup, Bluetail.
I'm ashamed to admit that I never got the Wiki up and running again after I relocated from Australia to Sweden. (Not yet anyway, I may still have a backup copy on a hard disk somewhere...)
Some years ago I was on a shitty job - not technically, but the company turned out to be inhumane - at a Ruby shop, and on the side I was toying with mini_racer and I just upgraded to some macOS beta where it failed to build. A shitty +1-1 hack† for a compiler flag later and it was back flying.
A month later I received a cold email from a CTO to chat a bit about that PR, turns out they were using mini_racer heavily and forked it for their own purpose, and also created PyMiniRacer for the Python side of things. Next thing I know I got hired. Two years later the company got acquired.
Of course conditionally adding a compiler flag wasn't what got me hired per se, it only got my profile noticed. Probably side projects such as porting go by example to Ruby by implementing a ~1:1 CSP channel API[1], an Electron desktop client for Mattermost basically on a dare[2], an anti-ORM "why do we keep referencing ever-changing models in migrations" Ruby SQL generator[3], ex mode for the Atom editor so that I could have that frackin' `:w`[4], leveraging Blocks to bolt on object-oriented-ness onto C because "closures are a poor man's object"[5], or reverse-engineering the Xbox One USB gamepad and writing a kext to turn it into a HID device on macOS from scratch on a lonely 7+h train ride with passengers judgementally staring at me sideways[6] probably contributed to it a bit.
My takeaway: luck is when preparation meets opportunity; but don't do side projects to get hired, because if you don't get hired then that time is lost. Rather, of all things, scratch your itch, be curious, have fun, embrace whatever quirkiness you fancy, be proud and put it out; no one can take that away from you.
[0]: https://github.com/rubyjs/mini_racer/commit/2086db1bbf2b5de4...
[1]: https://github.com/lloeki/normandy
[2]: https://github.com/lloeki/matterfront
[3]: https://github.com/lloeki/rebel
[4]: https://github.com/lloeki/ex-mode
[5]: https://github.com/lloeki/cblocks-clobj/blob/master/main.c#L...
Back in 1994 I was a sophomore in college. In our C++ class I asked the professor how GUI programs were written and she suggested the Motif toolkit for Unix / X11. I checked out a book on Motif from the library and I had to type in about 2 pages of code just to pop up a single dialog box that said "Hello World" It also took about 5 minutes to compile on a DECstation 5000 with 32MB RAM.
An older student in the computer lab saw my Motif book and asked what I was doing. I told him and he suggested I use Tcl/Tk. I asked "What is that?" So he pointed me to some documentation on this brand new thing called the World Wide Web.
I spent the entire weekend reading everything I could about Tcl/Tk and had little GUI programs that were wrapper around lots of command line tools with radio buttons and stuff to select options. Then I started drawing circles and rectangles and stuff.
I was also learning HTML and had my own web page mainly to links that I liked but also maintained the FAQ for a popular childhood cartoon that I loved. I had taken the plain ASCII text FAQ and written a Tcl script to format sections into HTML with different header fonts, table of contents, etc.
A few months later I was starting to apply to summer internships. One of them mentioned Tcl as a scripting language for web server development. I put Tcl/Tk and HTML on my resume and got an interview.
The company didn't like Perl for CGI-BIN programming and preferred Tcl. I told them I had my own web page and you could also access the code I had written from my web page. During the interview they actually went to my web site, downloaded the code, and started looking at it.
I was a computer engineering major so most of my classes were on electrical circuits, digital logic, assembly programming, and they didn't ask me anything about that.
All of stuff I learned that wasn't directly related to my classes like Tcl, HTML, and playing around with Linux for fun is what got me the job.
Now 28 years later I'm designing integrated circuits / semiconductors and still write Tcl all the time because it is the integrated scripting language for most of the chip design software. It's not my favorite language but it's weird how this language that was kind of obscure in 1994 helped me get my first job and I'm still using it now.
Messing around with Linux and BSD hosts one my home LAN in the 90's and 00's is how I learned enough to make colleagues believe I actually new something about networks and systems administration. Well, it did teach me - though I still feel like an impostor among academically trained network engineers.
Same with my serious involvement in the Openstreetmap project, where I learned everything I could about geographic data just prior to having a major corporate GIS system dumped on my lap.
Have fun, follow the white rabbit - he'll lead you to the good stuff !
After working for a while at a marketing/digital shop, the topic of crypto came up over a work lunch one day. I fell down the rabbit hole and found a nascent project with some interesting stuff on the tech side.
I saw they had a bounty program for a mobile app, I built an app alpha & claimed the bounty. The foundation running the project saw this and reached out. 6 years, 3 countries & a few wild rides later, I can't thank the guy who was crapping on crypto enough.
Edit: check out some crypto bounties here: https://bountycaster.xyz/
My business partner and I built AsUnit in ~2004. [0]
The first fully functional Unit Test framework for ActionScript. It was great fun and helped get my career off the ground.
Side projects (Github) helped me get a job in two ways, partly I could show deep open source projects in my resume but it was just as much that the side projects increased my self confidence: I actually am good at something. I was in a deep hole and that was very much needed.
I purchased Dell's original Project Sputnik XPS 13 to be my daily driver and was dismayed at how awful the touchpad was. I couldn't disable tap-to-click, palm detection was terrible, you get the idea. I fixed it so it was bearable to use, upstreamed my patches, and ultimately got a job at Canonical thanks to the connections I made in the process.
The side project of a comp sci degree worked out pretty well TBH
During my military deployment in Afghanistan, I brought along a DSLR camera and developed a passion for photography. I spent a significant amount of time capturing various scenes, but I was particularly drawn to photographing troops working out in the gyms.
Upon returning to the States, my photography, particularly those gym and fitness-themed shots, caught the attention of locals in my city. They reached out to me for similar projects, focusing on social media branding and marketing, especially for bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts. This was around the time when Instagram was rapidly evolving into a major advertising platform.
What started as a personal interest in photography and a love for the gym turned into a lucrative side hustle. I found myself immersed in the world of fitness photography, working with influencers and brands in the nutrition and fitness accessory sectors. This experience, born out of a hobby and a deployment, unexpectedly paved the way for a sustained engagement in professional photography, particularly in the niche of fitness and social media marketing.
Voluntary commitment in Berlin Freifunk.
My side project GTAMap.net (not active anymore) helped me land my dream job at Rockstar North.
Long story short, I got into programming by wanting to make my own SA-MP (San Andreas: Multiplayer) server back in the days, I was totally addicted to GTA. I then went on to learn other languages and ultimately built GTAMap.net, a interactive web map for the GTA series.
When I moved to Edinburgh, I realised Rockstar North was based there. I couldn't let that opportunity pass and applied for a junior IT support job. During the interview phase they saw my projects and the maps one in particular. They then got me another interview with the web team for an engineering role, which I ended up getting!
Dream came true, I spent 4 years there surrounded by amazing people and working on some incredible projects, I learned so much there. GTA is what got me into programming and 8 years later I end up working on it.
BrowserBox^0 landed me a couple of contracts related to web scraping, RPA, process integration and dashboards, but there were quite a few more whose contracts I had to refuse because they came with "grabby" IP clauses, like: "we will own everything you work on while engaged with us, including any related work", which completely tried to disrespect and attempted to abuse the IP protections I sought to create by putting my open-source work: 1) out there in the open, 2) under the protection of a C corporation, and 3) with both AGPL and commercial licenses available.
At first I couldn't believe this would be a thing done by US companies (I thought maybe people in other parts of the world would have tried this, but no), but ultimately I had to face the unpalatable reality that indeed they were trying to unethically trick me into surrendering my IP by using grabby IP clauses.
When I pushed back and went through multiple rounds of contract clause negotiation, their grabby language only got more extreme in iteration (to a ridiculous degree), essentially a legal "fuck you" to standing up for myself and my rights.
Essentially a ploy to try to use an employment contract to own all my OSS work, and when I brought up ways to clarify and mutually protect IP on both sides from any such contamination, they resisted, and ultimately refused. SMH disgusting experience.
I think the most offensive thing about this was that they thought I was such a rube that I could be tricked by that, and also that it demonstrated they would try this with others. I hate the idea that little OSS developers out there were seen as inexperienced rubes to be taken advantage of. It's so hurtful. What about all the other folks out there who weren't canny enough to protect themselves, or even read through the contracts?
For reference this is not just "default clauses". I've signed many contracts that had zero grabby "own everything related" IP clauses at all, in multiple US jurisdictions. This is entirely an optional thing and does not need to be included, especially not in the circumstances I was in. The resistance in the face of subsequent negotiations, only strongly supports the idea that this is a deliberate ploy. Please respect that I'm not going to name and shame specifics tho right now, I think there's other more apt responses. Consider the experiences related here a warning enough to be careful with how you protect your IP in your own dealings, no matter who you deal with.
Sometimes the public face a company presents is so different to how they conduct themselves. Disgusting.
My favorite job interview was when we just talked about my project: https://gifmemes.io most of the time. Got the job.
I was early with Twitter and Facebook and became social media manager. I organized webmondays and barcamps and became a event manager. I blogged about the digital transformation and became a consultant for that.
i got a bunch of job offers when i started building del.icio.us, but ended up keeping my job and starting a company a few years later
I wrote a an HTML template for a friend that looked like the Drudge Report (conservative news aggregator that looks a certain way). I posted it online for free and got a number of folks asking for a WordPress version. I coded one up and started selling it online as WP-Drudge. It sold quite well for many years and generated a solid portion of my freelance income making modifications for random sites. I ended up working for Alan Colmes (RIP), the sole liberal on Fox News (conservative news network) and a delightful individual. I built a few more products and eventually sold the whole business several years back. To this day I still get freelance inquiries!
I made an app called Face Juggler. It was the first automatic face swap app in the AppStore. Now much copied and even more outdated.
I had an interview and just showed the live analytics of its use. At that time it had about 50,000 new users per day so the analytics was just a huge stream flying past.
That was fun.
EdgeDNS, a high performance DNS cache written in Rust: https://github.com/jedisct1/edgedns
Another item (HN won't let me post a long reply), is a programming environment called Onyx. (After my grandson in Africa, who has NO interest in it whatsoever as he intends to be a pilot -- but this is OK as, unless she works for Airbus, we're ignoring the ladies for a few more years. Sosongo Abasi as his father would say!) Onyx is a language designed for 13-17 year olds who may not have the best command of English -- we can work in the language of the Igbo, the Yoruba and Erik. Doesn't matter to my parser. And it will all be free, documented, Github'ed and built with free tools. Education is hard over there..
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.
I created the wiki for Path of Exile.
Eventually landed me a job at Curse out in the States.
It’s also just quite a nice thing to be able to talk about in interviews or with colleagues who may be into the game.
I wrote an open source clone of a mini game back in 2015 when it was just released. Mostly use HTML5 canvas and websocket. Not really optimized so the server would start lagging and every player are moving like they’re teleporting every ticks.
Also moved to the US at that time, searching for a job for months after that. Finally, one company was using the same tech stack got interested and we had a good talk about it during the interview, and they offered me the job.
I was close to give up my dream of working as a programmer until that point (you know, when you moved to a new country, with a family to support, you can’t just do interview forever, the most possible option for me at that time was to work at a restaurant or something like that).
After 3 years of graduation, I wanted to go into web development, so I built a few good projects that helped me land a job. I built a Typeform clone, using Vanilla CSS and NextJS, in its GitHub repo, I also added PR GitHub actions check for eslint and prettier, and also added pre-commit checks. I also got 29 stars and 6 forks on that repo - https://github.com/hsnice16/forming-typeform/tree/main
Another project that I built was a component library using HTML and CSS, so I built this to learn HTML and CSS in a better way. Its repo also has 6 forks and 7 stars - https://github.com/hsnice16/PoshUI-Documentation
All of them. But it's not what you think. The experience I gained by working on them simply increased my confidence and THAT always got me a job. To the point where I reached fuck it level and never got stressed out by a work. I set my red lines and that was that. I ended up working the best job I ever had, until I quit working altogether to live off of my investments. Mind you I have worked a full time job only one year in my whole life.
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.
While this isn't strictly landing a job, it was Minecraft that got me into Linux (so I could host my own instances on a VPS), and then from there I got into a small home server and stuff I learned from all that helped in my work.
The home server started off as an ubuntu machine that had everything installed manually. During this it taught me about port-opening and reverse-proxy setups. After I had it go down I then learnt about re-setting it all up with Docker.
Several times in my professional career I have used knowledge I gained directly from the setup and maintenance of my home server in my job. It's pretty cool seeing as my homeserver was used mainly for... umm... hosting a large number of linux isos...
I posted a really stupid trading bot that made stupid non-sense trades that wouldn't have worked in real life like buying a stock and selling it for a penny higher minutes later like a market maker. It got me an interview and I got the job.
My side project was once the reason for me getting a job which was then pulled within 24 hours because I didn't want to give up my side project. Then later, way later, a pull request for a coding challenge I was given for the job interview was merged into the main line branch.
I put this together during a long job search: https://tintalize.co/
For a given photo of a person, it will provide you with lip cosmetics that match those the person is wearing. My wife gave me the idea saying it would be cool to match what celebrities are wearing.
It definitely helped landing a job. My interviewer said it impressed him and that he had shared it around the company. Everyone called me the lipstick guy for a bit after joining. During the interview it helped to have a non-trivial software project to discuss.
Its only relation to my job is that it’s a Python web app based on Django. I don’t touch any of the computer vision aspects in my day to day.
Now that I’m in a position to hire I put a lot of weight on deployed and working projects. There’s no better way (outside verified career experience) to show you can back up your skill claims.
P.S. I built this years ago so wouldn’t be surprised if it has load-bearing issues. This blog post describes how it looks and works: https://blog.kyleingraham.com/2018/11/28/lip-colour-finder/
Leetcode /s
I did some writing and documentation on contract. This led to a competitive analysis contract. This led to a full time job with a partner of my main contact.
https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/bc
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.
In the mid 90s, the rumor was that the company I worked for would switch from VMS to Unix. I figured I would get ahead of the curve and bought a magazine that included a free OS with the funny name of RedHat Linux.It wasn’t exactly Unix but it was close, so I figured I would give it a go. Turns out that was a great decision. The company is gone but my knowledge of Linux has given me a leg up in many job interviews.
Do freelance client gigs count as "a job"? If so, a few projects have definitely contributed to visibility: my end-to-end encrypted analytics SaaS [1], and a lot of the open-source libraries that I published while building it [2].
The "build in public" approach of publishing often while doing a side/weekend project helps a lot in showcasing your skills.
To this date since I started by freelance business, it's more often clients finding me then me looking for them.
This was about 10 years ago, where there was Bootstrap, Pure CSS and little more, so I published:
It went to the front page of Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8315616). At the time I was a student in Spain doing coding just for fun, so any job-related opportunity would be slim and with really bad pay (I had actually already worked a bit as a dev for a pittance).
Someone contacted me and offered some really fun freelancing projects for what at the time seemed like an absurdly ridiculous large amount of money, so much that I got a great designer friend involved and split the money so the project would be even better.
I learned many things from that and as my curiosity pumped me to keep learning. I read about cases of people making 500k+/year as "normal" devs (meaning, not managers, and also not famous). Most of my Spanish peers didn't even believe that existed at the time, and thought I was crazy believing those "obviously fake" blog posts. But I've been working for USA companies basically since then, and couldn't be happier/wouldn't look back.
What side projects landed you a job?
Several actually. Neatly compiled into a PDF and with pretty pictures to represent them.
That said: those projects all had a visual or haptic component that could be captured as a picture.
I handed that PDF in with my applications. Some warned me about that, but overall I got only positive feedback.
While I was in university I was working on this (now abandoned) project https://flyingcarz.io/ which tracks changes in used car prices. Talking about this project helped me get an internship at CDK Global, a company that provides tech services to the auto industry, primarily car dealerships.
Don't know if it's ever landed me a job, but my small Next.js project (https://howmuchadobo.com/) makes for fun conversation during interviews.
Shane Wighton's story of getting hired at Formlabs is interesting.
He wanted to work for the company and didn't have a way in. He built a better version of their slicing software over a long weekend and sent it to the Formlabs team. He was hired very quickly after they saw it.
https://shane.engineer/blog/how-to-get-hired-at-a-startup-wh...
https://shane.engineer/stl-preprocessor
The idea of a very targeted side project seems novel. Build for an audience of 1 specific company. Any other examples?
For a few years I devstreamed on Twitch. I got one of my longest running freelance clients when he watched me integrate Django authentication into VueJS which was a part of a web based game I was making. The game didn't go anywhere but Django has been my primary focus for most of my career and that was what I did for the client!
All of them; Not really the project, but just my github profile, showing that I've been able to come up with, design, implement and market several projects that are useful in their own rights. Such as a few open-source computer games, a hardware password manager, a 3D game engine in C++, some random fun projects.
My github profile is not a polished portfolio, it's not supposed to show my enterprise-level code-making abilities, it's meant as the place where I have fun and hack stuff and try things out. I've explained (and it has been understood) that when coding for fun, I'm not going to focus on the same things as when coding for a long-term enterprise project, and since time (and interest) are limited resources, it would be unreasonable to expect my hobby code to reflect how my work code looks.
Those hobby projects have granted me the job / provided a source of discourse during technical interviews, the openings themselves have always come from people I've previously worked with recommending me.
The first job I landed after presenting my exam project, the censor asked me to come for an interview.
Back in 2005, when I was still living in Poland and working as a developer after graduating uni. I started contributing to a GPLed L4-microkernel-based hypervisor targeting ARM-based embedded devices called Codezero. I was just interested in micro-kernels and it allowed me to play with an actual working project. I've got a job offer from the founder and worked remotely on it for 3 years, when the company was acquired by nVidia and I got a H1B and moved to Silicon Valley, which pretty much changed my life.
2011: A free Cards Against Humanity multiplayer website version using the then cutting-edge iOS lookalike UI. It had a simple, thoughtful interface - cards were clunky so it didn't do that, it was all very careful Clear-style colorful rows, and Evil Apples afterwards made that clunky choice nonetheless - and it was extremely easy to join multiplayer games with code based lobbies, no accounts.
There are a lot of people who can program out there. Being really opinionated mattered more. Perhaps to a fault, I was very opinionated about how card games should work on phones, how people should play multiplayer games, how you should work with free versus paid game content, etc.
A few days after posting maybe even to Hacker News, there was a lot of adoption. A year later, shortly after graduating, Scopely found it on GitHub, recruited me, and I went on to make some big mobile games with the rest of their talented team. A New York Times Flash interactive I made helped too.
I was learning Docker as a curiosity, and trying NxFilter to satisfy my rage towards Advertisements around the same time. That led to me writing a Dockerfile to run NxFilter which led to teaching myself lots of things about automated build pipelines, adding flair and craft to a git repo, and offering best-effort support to random users on the Internet.
NxFilter ended up asking if I would be ok with being the official docker image and listed me on their website and in documentation.
I listed that on my resume for getting into DevOps fulltime and got the job. Now I work with people all over the US, Canada, and India.
I am job searching at the moment. While I adore 99% of the people I work with, the work itself isn't meaningful and I've survived 3 layoffs in 1.5 years. In my job preference list, it's currently only a few steps above HR/Payroll PAAS companies, just above Food/Dining/Beverage/Travel. I'd rather work on something that's improving people's quality of life, or solving the world's problems or making something more efficient for people outside of tech.
I was a QA tester at a transportation company with a PHP stack. My leader was great and allowed me to teach myself web development when tasks were done. Eventually I built a finance calendar in php/symfony modeled after the websites the team built.
I demo'd it to him and I was allowed to start picking up development issues. Eventually became a full time developer. Kept learning and ended up containerizing all our applications and set up a kubernetes cluster, moving us away from VMs. ( responding to a desire from all the devs to start using docker ).
Circled back around and built automation for spinning up k8s testing environments for each the story in the QA queue to simplify things for our testers. By the time I the left the company, they hired a whole company to do everything I was doing, which I held off leaving until they were set up and I was able to knowledge transfer fully to the company. Moved to GoLang also now, don't really do php anymore.
Though still get keepalived alerts when a node goes down.
I did a very simple implementation of WebRTC for iOS. Somehow somebody found that project on GitHub, saw I was from the same country and hired me. Did like a few months of freelance work because of it.
I did a (paid) side project for a macOS app and another one a few years later. The first one very small (but complex, digging through many layers) the second one small but substantial in scope. I got two job interviews because of those.
Moral of the story: keep doing paid side projects whenever possible. You learn a lot from your customers.
15 years ago I wrote a game engine[1], and on my first interview of my life I presented the code and got the offer!
In 2014, I managed to get a fairly good job at a large institutional bank, without a formal interview process because the person hiring (who would be my boss) liked a blog I had written on quant sports betting during my PhD.
When I graduated from uni (end of 2018), I spent about 8 months looking for work. My study was in Chemistry and Mathematics, but I did a bit of programming as a hobby in my spare time. There are only so many jobs you can apply for in a month, so I spent a lot of my spare time contributing to OpenStreetMap. I got quite deep into it, and joined a project to import open address data from my state. In the process, I wrote a Python script to streamline the data processing steps.
After a few months of looking, I realised that there really aren't that many Chemistry jobs in my region, and fewer Maths jobs. The closest I got to a Chemistry job was an interview at a chemical sales company, and I the only Maths jobs I found were either research positions requiring a PhD (I only have Masters), or were at gambling game companies (which I'm morally opposed to). So I started applying for programming jobs. I got a couple of interviews, but no job.
When I applied for the role at my current employer (August 2019), I didn't really understand what the role was. I was hoping it was related to programming, as there was a bullet point about 'program logic models' in the job description. But in fact that was not the meaning at all. Nevertheless, I got an opportunity to talk about my experience with hobby programming, and particularly my experience working on the data processing script for importing addresses into OpenStreetMap. Providentially, my future manager was on the lookout for someone with programming experience, as the organisation was just beginning to understand the importance of good data processes. I'm pretty sure I got the job because of that project.
After a few months, I was able to get my title changed to Data Analyst. Within a year or so I was Data Team Lead of a brand new data team. And now I've moved sideways to a Data Engineer role.
My takeaways: - While you wait, find projects that you're passionate about, and go deep. - Don't be too fussy about your first job. Get in, then make it yours. Or leverage your experience to get the next job. (Either at the same employer or elsewhere.) - Once you get that first job, you get out what you put in. Go the extra mile to understand what people need, then figure out how to give it to them. Try to think about the big picture AND the details. You'll learn more this way, and show people your value at the same time. Find projects that will stretch you and give you hands-on experience. - Knowledge and experience compound. Never stop learning, and never stop practising what you have learnt. - Set hard boundaries for how much time you spend at work. If you are paid for 37.5 hours/week, then don't work a minute more. If there's more work than you can do in that time, it's a sign you either need to take on less, or your organisation needs to hire more people. It's not your job to fill that gap, and you'll burn out if you try, which is bad for everyone involved. (We have a 'flexible work arrangement' which means if I work an hour extra today, I can finish an hour early tomorrow. I write down my extra time on a piece of paper to make sure I remember to take it.) - Rest well outside of work, and keep learning.
I wrote an IRC bot in Perl in 1995 and it was kind of a cool way of showing off what I knew how to do. It had this feature where you could send it a command and it'd hot reload its own code which was kind of cool.
Halfmoon: https://www.gethalfmoon.com
https://audiodiary.ai is a flutter app i’m building atm and it’s helped me get a few contracts. not really a side project and tbh i think it turns some people off
None
Last time I was looking for a job way back in 2016, instead of just making a résumé, I made a free résumé builder. It got on the front page of HN and ProductHunt and got a decent amount of usage.
It's no longer live but here's the archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20160305001753/https://makerslat...
I considered trying to take it further but didn't really see a clear path to any kind of investment or monetization at the time, so I ended up just using it as my résumé. I interviewed at one company and got the job, so I guess it helped! It did get a good reaction in the few interviews I did at that company.
Not exactly a project, but I was very active in IRC between 2009-2017.
I stuck mostly to Linux and network engineering channels. I contributed to open source projects, answered questions, and asked plenty of my own.
One day I helped someone with some weird Docker issue in 2014. He later referred me to the company he worked for in San Francisco. I moved from my small 2,000 person unincorporated town a few months later, tripling my salary.
There were other ways it could have eventually happened, but the serendipity of that was never lost on me. Changed my career for the better — tho I left that company a year later for a unique opportunity at FB.
I made and maintained a geo-based chat app for a friend/client (https://hihey.org, though they took it offline for now I believe). I used Matrix as the basis for it and started putting that on my resumes after finding it fun to work with and experience.
I got a couple of reach outs based on having that keyword on my profile alone on YC's job board and on LinkedIn that led to some paid consulting.
Not as life changing as some of the other answers but I'm amazed when this sort of thing even happens
Venezuela 2009: I'd been posting regularly to my blog El Chigüire Literario (The Literary Capybara)[1], a gamedev blog written in Spanish, since 2006. Some students contacted me by email telling me that they could petition their university to open a gamedev course. I wrote a syllabus, and in September of that year I started teaching a gamedev course at that uni. I later also taught a Computer Graphics course when it became available.
I taught at that uni until 2013 until I left the country. I had to wake up very early once a week to teach the course at 7:30AM, but I did it very gladly. Some of those students are in the videogames industry as well. So, overall, a great success.
Not a software project per say but I started a hashtag on Twitter (and eventually made an account) to share all the job stuff people were sharing during the pandemic (was on my own job search back then). Eventually started doing some Twitter Spaces and started a newsletter for the account as well.
A year later, someone had approached me and asked me to join their start up. No interview or anything at all, just was like "You seem to do good work, I'd love for you to come work for me." Probably the wildest thing that happened to my career at this point, lol.
Pufftygraph [1]
I wrote a Spirograph clone that worked on an iPhone as a Christmas present for my 6 year old, mainly because back then I couldn't find any existing clones where you could drag the gears around to draw, and I thought it would be a fun coding exercise.
It got me over the line in a job interview at the first startup I worked for. Spirographs and toy web apps had nothing to do with the job, but it was a quick way to demonstrate "chops" to the engineering team, in what was otherwise a disaster of an all-day interview.
I was sick, and tried to reschedule the interview, but the company had planned their whole day around me being there, and the CEO was going to travel for vacation afterwards. I put on a brave face and talked with the CEO, then the tech founders, but I was becoming more and more listless as the day went on.
The engineering team took me out for lunch and beers. We sat outside, and I was facing the sun, feeling like hell, and after the first beer I was in no way able to think technically. Rather than invert a binary tree, or whatever they were asking me about, I shifted the conversation to kids and apps, and passed my phone around for them to all play with the Pufftygraph controls and draw some hypotrochoids.
Some combination of sympathy for someone obviously dead on their feet but still trying, and the app, was enough to get my foot in the door. I had a good time there, but if I had it to do over again, I would have just cancelled since they were so inflexible. Now in the post-covid world, the idea of inviting someone sick to breathe all over your team for a day sounds insane.
[1] https://cautery.blogspot.com/2012/12/pufftygraph-html5-spiro...
For current job, when I started interviewing with them, I mentioned a side project relevant to their space. I didn't learn until a few interviews in that they had started to build basically the same project. Now, that's the project I have been working on exclusively for them.
Wouldn't count it as a project but it did help me get a job.
I was avoiding working on my thesis and started diving into the world of OpenWrt. Added support of two devices and got interested into wireless driver. Put the stuff above into my resume. My boss saw it and invited me for an interview.
It seems like the vast majority of these are from 15-20 years ago. A lot of websites from earlier internets, not so many iOS apps. Is the tech industry too developed or formal these days to seek out random programmers who have built something on the side, rather than leetcode experts with degrees?
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.
It's very heartening to see all of the stories here.
I've put the last few years of my life into working on komorebi, a tiling window manager for Windows[1], https://notado.app, a content-first social bookmarking service, and https://kulli.sh, a "bring your own links" comment aggregator which shows you comments from hn, reddit, lobsters, lemmy etc. on an article all in one place.
Unfortunately I was laid off after 5 years with the same company last month, and nobody seems to care about any of these projects when it comes to recruiting. There are people who use them that have reached out to me very kindly offering to make referrals, but the job market and mainstream interview processes value LeetCode more than shipping real code these days.
Built a website for a big student group while I was at Clemson. By the time I left it was a tool to run the entire organization.
In the process I taught myself web development and landed my first job because of it.
going way back: Science Fair in High School landed me summer internships that rolled over into my first job out of college. ("Science and Engineering Fair" project was building robots with microcontrollers) I think it was the proof that I could do that kind of work in a self directed way that made them notice me.
While I was in college, I made a half dozen games and apps for the danger hiptop (branded by T-Mobile as the Sidekick). We had a Microsoft recruiter on campus at Michigan State and it was right after Microsoft acquired danger and lost a bunch of customer data. I think the recruiter liked that I was asking about this issue and not begging for a job. They brought me back the next day to interview and then flew me out to Redmond for an on-site. Not only was the hiptop dev scene a formative experience for me skill-wise, it indirectly led me to Seattle and gave me the chance to work on Xbox, HoloLens, and more.
I modded Starcraft 2 (PeepMode). Helped me get a job at a AAA Blizzard spinoff. The company failed but it was a fun ride.
My work on Flow-Based Programming (https://noflojs.org/) got me a job about ten years ago. The startup founder had seen a talk I gave about it and got in touch. NoFlo ended up being used extensively in that company.
In the early 2000s in college I wrote a basic terrain renderer in C++ and OpenGL. It randomly generated some textured terrain, and had some basic features like you could move the camera and look around. Nothing super impressive.
A few months later I landed a 16-month internship on a team writing an OpenGL ES driver. There were 160 applicants, but the hiring manager said I was the only applicant who had actually played around with OpenGL.
It was a great job and I learned a ton.
Got my first internship building drone navigation systems after building my own quadcopter flight control board (software included) (https://github.com/alextousss/quadcopter)
By the way, looking for a second one March-September 2024 :)
Back in college I coded for a MUD. The owner of the MUD was a manager at a tech company. When I graduated he hired me. The project wasn't related to work.
Marksheet.io, my free HTML and CSS course landed me a job back in 2015. It turned out to be my last office job before turning fully freelance.
In college, I would spend most of my free time building basketball player evaluations, which I parlayed into a sports analytics career.
I wrote and open sourced a program to print guitar tablature in postscript (so it ran on our apple laserwriter instead of on a pc; as a phd student in the early 90s our computers were severely underpowered, but also I wanted to make it portable from Suns to Macs to Win 3.1). It could also process a lot of ascii tablature and turn it into nicer copy - this was what I wanted it for as I was trying to print out tab from OLGA using less paper, and when you scale down ascii tab it just leaves blank space to the side. (I got a mail from someone in New Zealand to say he used this code to publish a book of 5-string banjo music, as it was the only thing he could find that handled different numbers of strings)
Anyway, fast forward a year and I interviewed for a programming job with British Telecom. This project came up in conversation and the interviewer got super interested, and I landed the job. Then it turned out that almost everyone this boss hired was a musician of some kind-including a keyboard player for a chart-topping band (he's back touring with them now), a bass player, a professional saxophonist career changer, a singer in a band... he ran a weekly jam session after hours. So I really think it was the guitar playing that got me hired.
And no, it didn't relate to the job, at all. My phd involved parallel programming on transputers in C, and as it happened, the guy they sat me next to on my first day also had a phd involving C programming on parallel machines. And they got us to write Visual Basic for the next 6 months.
My blog led to 3 major book publishers reaching out. I signed a deal with one earlier this year!
A few years ago, while I was still in high school, I began learning how to create websites purely for fun. One thing I found to be tedious was self-hosting fonts, with existing solutions to improve it completely abandoned. Consequently, I decided to learn a bit more about JavaScript by rewriting and improving these abandoned projects which led to the creation of Fontsource[0].
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 Kibana plugin - https://github.com/sivasamyk/logtrail and a few graylog plugins which opened many doors for me. It also helped me land my last job at Sematext. I lost interest in maintaining the plugin after Elastic's open-source license changes.
Even though I haven't used Perl professionally for about 6 years or so, my Perl FOSS work has driven pretty much my entire career. Starting in around 2000 or so, I started producing a lot of Perl modules (libraries). You can see what I've uploaded to CPAN at https://metacpan.org/author/DROLSKY.
Some of those libraries became _very_ widely used in the Perl community. The number one most used is probably DateTime (https://metacpan.org/dist/DateTime), and number two is probably (https://metacpan.org/dist/Log-Dispatch). But some of the others also got a lot uptake.
I also contributed a lot to libraries create by others, most notably HTML::Mason and Moose, both of which were very widely used in Perl.
All of that, plus speaking at the Perl conferences, really helped me develop my professional network. If I recall correctly, all three of of my most recent jobs came about because of my Perl connections to varying degrees. Two of them were just because I posted on my blog that I was looking for work and someone I knew through Perl reached out.
Today I work in Golang at MongoDB. In 2022, I again posted that I was looking for something new and someone I knew from Perl who worked at MongoDB reached out to me. I'm really thankful he did, because working there has been great!
Nowadays I don't do much Perl any more, though I still maintain many of my modules (bug fixes and small feature requests only, though). I've also done some Golang (https://github.com/houseabsolute?q=&type=public&language=go) and Rust (https://crates.io/users/autarch).
But I think it would be _much_ harder for a young person to do the same things I did. Nowadays there are just so many freaking programmers. Someone invents a new language and five minutes later there are a huge number of foundational libraries for it. By the time I started with Go (mid-2010s), pretty much all the stuff I had done in Perl already existed in Go. And I found the same to be true with Rust when I started using it after Go.
I stopped maintaining a popular JavaScript beautifier/diff/analysis tool 4 years ago that won me several jobs.
Since then I have been working on a file streaming application. Its side items in that project that have been winning me jobs lately, primarily anything to do with full duplex socket streaming and browser test automation.
As a JavaScript developer took me months this year how to sell my experience and skills from my side projects. As a JavaScript/TypeScript developer you can do the same shit everybody else does, which is put text on screen using a giant framework. If that is the kind of employment you are looking for be prepared to degrade yourself to working with newbs that have high insecurity, low self-esteem, and spend all their time talking about how awesome they are. Its all marketing all the time, no original application code, and outsourcing everything to some external tool. As a developer you are a commodity product to hire/fire just like public is to social media. This line of work no longer interested me, so I spent months unemployed figuring this out.
Instead your alternative as a JavaScript/TypeScript developer is niche skills, which is in higher demand than it sounds. It seems almost nobody can figure out test automation in the browser. Having application architecture skills is a huge plus, which typically means Java/C# and HTTP session management with something like Spring, but if you can demonstrate a more generalized approach to application architecture you have a skill that you can adapt to a bunch of different things. It also helps having things like a security clearance and security certifications. There are a huge number of cleared developer jobs that recruiters cannot fill.
I created a system-agnostic router[1], a Markdown parser[2] and a WYSIWYG editor[3] in Clojure/ClojureScript that definitely helped me get Clojure gigs. I was told in the interview process on multiple occasions that my open source work stood out from the competition.
[1]: https://github.com/askonomm/ruuter
I made a small configurable reverse proxy back in 2016 - https://github.com/ianunay/mock-node in an attempt to build my portfolio and to attract recruiters / interviewers. Sure enough in one of the system design interviews the interviewer simply did a architecture / code review of this project and was impressed by it. I like to think that this contributed a lot to the company making an offer. I ended up accepting the offer and my life changed a lot since as I had to move to a different country.
Recently someone reached out because of simdjzon, but I didn't write it, I just made some usage-driven changes and the actual author made me the maintainer on github xd
I built a lot of weird 'inventions' in university, such as an airsoft sentry gun to keep squirrels away from the garden. I was also in a student club.
I don't think any project specifically made potential employers say 'wow, we definitely have to hire this guy', but I think having actual experience doing stuff and demonstrating an interest for the field goes a long way towards landing you those first couple of jobs.
Back in early 2000x, I worked mostly as salesperson and CTO of the small company. Bored with marketing and sales, I decided to find engineering job. To get up to the software development train, I started learning Java and created a small project as the playground. It was time of Web 2.0 / AJAX hype, so I took Java Server Faces as the base and added dynamic functionality to it. I did name project "Ajax4jsf" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax4jsf. When it become less or more functional, I created couple demo applications, wrote several blogs about it, and mention it whenever I did found any resource related to Java and Web 2.0.
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.
I had been working on a Terraform provider[0] for a local hosting company in the weekends. Mostly to scratch my own itch in that I wanted my personal VPS and DNS to be IaC and get some practice in Go and Terraform. It got a little traction with some people using it and I won some nice prices for best project in the competition the hosting company put out after upgrading their API to REST. After the competition I was also able to get an account with no billing for testing purposes, which made developing and integration testing a whole lot easier. Before that I could only test on resources I paid for myself or ask them nicely to refund if I made a mistake as they don't do per minute/hourly billing like other providers.
The project was eventually discovered by my (now former) employer who needed the same provider but did some searching before writing his own and discovered my project on Github. It landed me a job interview and eventually a job. I don't think my project was the sole reason I got the job, but was more likely telling them I was operating in the niche they were looking for. Something that probably didn't stand out as much in my LinkedIn profile to be noticed there. Or I hadn't told it to enough people as there was some shared working history with others in the company. Enough to let them know they should hire me, but not enough to tell them I was someone they were looking for.
One of the contributors to the project also ended up at that company, I was asked about him during his interview and could give nothing but praise because I had been working with him on my project.
My 2ct is that whatever you do, make, patch, write, think up of, just put it out there. Even if it is not finished, create a repo and publish it, write a blog post, post it on a social. You never know who is searching for what and will find you that way. Your project , contribution or code snippet doesn't have to become a (commercial) success, if it just helps people or connects you in a way to someone new w're all better for it.
I was working full time in mcdonalds and when the facebook API launched in 2009ish created a few blog posts integrating the API to php and codeignter.
This lead to picking up a few projects from agency which led to a full time job and the rest is history.
In a way, I owe my current job at Replay.io (a time-traveling debugger for JS) to having spent years maintaining the Redux JS state management libraries.
I got involved with Redux at the start of 2016, and Dan Abramov handed me the maintainer keys that summer after he got busy working on React.
Over the next several years I've put in thousands of hours maintaining the libraries (Redux, React-Redux, Redux Toolkit, Reselect), answering questions, rewriting our docs, and writing articles. That gave me a chance to start doing conference talks.
When I finally announced I was looking for a new position in January 2022, after 14 years at my previous job, I got flooded with companies expressing interest.
The one that actually caught my attention was Replay.io. The culture fit was perfect (smart people building an amazingly useful tool and solving unique techhnical problems), they knew me from my Redux work, the codebase used React + Redux, and it fit my history of working on dev tools that involved time travel in some way.
So, lots of overlap, and I'm having a blast there still :)
During/after dropping out of college, I worked on converting a single player game to a multiplayer game, among other mods to it. That project turned into interviewing and joining the games industry as a junior programmer.
My side project was to remake the Commodore 64 game, ENCOUNTER from scratch in three.js, adapted for both mobile and desktop. I got pretty far.
Then in 2017 I interviewed for an Engineering Manager role at Facebook (now Meta). The role was with a web performance team. I'd barely had time to prepare - at most a week - and my coding interview was not amazing.
In the final interview segment we were discussing web performance and I mentioned the ENCOUNTER project as running at 60fps. We pulled up the game on the interviewer's random Android phone and it worked well! It turned out the interviewer was a fellow C64 nerd and we bonded over shared memories.
I learned later that the project code was used as a tiebreaker to get signal on my coding ability. I'm working at Meta to this day!
Check it out at https://github.com/air/encounter
While being a student I wrote a blogpost explaining what's NLP to laypeople. It was mostly targeted at my friends but I still put it on LinkedIn. Got me a startup job.
The post: arminbagrat.com/What-on-Earth-is-Natural-Language-Processing/
Analysis of direct and special assessments not related valuation of land and improvements.
Is a different millennium did a website advertising a "film" I made with school friends. Hand coded HTML with lots of pre-rendered 3d spinning logos. Total mess that would never have loaded on an average PC but 100% was all that got me my first job.
It worked out pretty well for me.
# Starting OCaml Batteries Included.
(that and my academic research) got me my job at MLstate, no interview.
# Contributing to Firefox
Got me in touch with Firefox devs. One of them suggested I applied to Mozilla. I worked 9 years at Mozilla before moving on.
# Contributing to Rust
Contributing to the Rust compiler and stdlib got me in the pipeline for a few other jobs. I declined most of them (not a bit fan of cryptocurrencies and how they're used).
Also, generally, I find that coding in Rust is good for clarity of mind and purpose. In other words, having solved a problem in Rust helps me write code that both solves the same problem in other languages and has clear, explainable, invariants. YMMV
# OpenBerg
A long time ago, I started one of the first e-book software readers, called OpenBerg. Jim Gettys [1] got in touch with me by IRC to offer me a job working on it full-time for one year. I already had a job, so I declined.
This has happened a few times to me.
First was some downhill skateboarding projects - a bushing recommendation system and a site that allowed me to search all NZ skate shops from one place.
A popular US skate shop posted on Reddit looking for interns, but they weren’t interested in hiring so remotely.
Fast forward a week and the CTO got in touch to say that he’d interviewed a bunch of dud candidates, and meanwhile had been watching me commit exactly the code they were looking for.
Ended up contracting with them for a bit building an internal equivalent of the search tool, as well as bushing recommendations integrated with their listings.
The next is my work in the Cycle.js community (niche FRP JS framework). Mostly worked on trendy dev tools, but also did some valuable work on improving the speed, reliability and clarity of async UI tests that is still arguably close to best-in-class for JS.
That resulted in multiple job offers and an approach from Manning for a possible book deal, but none of it was that good of a fit.
In 2016, my second year at university, I was betting on the US elections. I'd collated multiple sources (FiveThirtyEight and a bunch of publications) to calculate each states swing and decided it would be a democratic sweep.
Unfortunately, I ended up losing a good portion of my savings I'd made developing websites over the years. I choose to take the night off to figure out how the make the best out of this situation, which ended up turning into TrumpTracker.
TrumpTracker [1] followed Donald Trump's Electoral Promises and kept the previous president-elect accountable for all actions and promises he made prior to his commencement. I deliberately open sourced [2] the project so that everyone could equally vote on whether a promise was comprised via GitHub issues. There was also a published iOS app for a bit.
Since I'd completed the project in 12 hours post election results it got picked up by the news cycle.
I enjoyed working on something at scale which collaborated with engineers, data scientists, and economists from all around the world, especially when the codebase was forked and used in other countries for their respective electives.
This project paved the way for a number of projects, as well as my current job, and also helped in securing my eventual O1.
[1] https://trumptracker.github.io/ [2] https://github.com/TrumpTracker/trumptracker.github.io
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.
At a previous job, my interview was mostly me discussing my side project (and having given some folks on the team my testflight). I had a lot more prepared to talk about previous work projects but it wasn't needed. For context this was for a product design role, but I also built the backend and iOS app.
This was the side project that I ended up writing about in more detail later on: https://paulstamatiou.com/stocketa/
Well, non of them in particular. But without side projects i would have lost interest long ago.
Here they are: https://github.com/mosermichael
I got my first job out of school at Amazon after showing them a local multiplayer battle arena game I made in XNA (C#) for Xbox Live Arcade. I practically bombed the harder questions (bar raiser) of the technical interview, but them seeing that made the difference.
I have only worked for two companies so far. I got both jobs through my side projects. The first job was my apprenticeship. The second was with a Swiss sensor developer.
[0] The first was a Minecraft server software with a web interface similar to an operating system. Players could log in, upload items, xp and trade etc.
[1] The second was a note-taking app similar to Obsidian, but completely real-time, based on a CRDT (yjs)
The interview for my current job first went mediocre, but by talking about frugally-deep (a side project of mine) I was able to excite my (now) employer. :-)
I made indie games for about 5-10 years as a hobbyist before joining the games industry.
At my first 2 professional game industry jobs the people interviewing me had been players of a halflife source engine mod I was heavily involved in authoring. I think that was probably the major thing that got me in the industry.
In my case, a MIDI driver.
I got a Mac Plus, and a DX-7.
I wrote a Mac MIDI driver. Worked well.
However, when I was done, Apple released their own, so ... plonk
But it got me familiar with the Mac, and landed me my first Apple job (which I actually got, before it was done -they didn't leetcode, in those days, so I was given a chance most folks wouldn't get, these days).
Weirdly enough, my gaming website seemingly had an effect on getting me a few of my previous roles. For the most part that was because it showed I could code HTML/CSS/JavaScript when starting out all those years ago, but saying I interviewed celebrities and folks with a lot of experience in their industry helped a lot too.
Back in 1992, I was doing a university internship in a large physics research center. I was a physics student 1nd discovered linux at that time.
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.
Looking back, I have realized that I never got a job or contract work through the “normal” methods and channels. I have quite a lot of stories for many of the jobs, but here is one fond memory that changed the trajectory of my career.
Early 2000s, I wanted to work only on and for the Internet. I did my “e-Commerce” course and others, but I was hoping from interview to interview without success. In one particular interview, I was waiting with a few others and started tinkering with an open computer in front of me. Adobe Photoshop had an easter egg where you press some key combination to show the splash screen with a sunset scene (or something like that). I morphed a few images together with that, and it turned out good enough that the boss walking in noticed, “Did you do that?”
That’s how I got my 2nd job in an Internet Media company while applying to be an ASP programmer; I ended up working with the Multimedia team, was challenged to work with Macromedia Flash, and wrote a lot of ActionScript.
I wrote quite a bit of the front-end video decoder for VONGO (a streaming service from STARZ), built a few employee tools for Disney, worked as one of the Creative Directors of Razorfish, etc. None of them through official channels or resume submissions. So, I have an ardent respect and soft-corner heart for anyone I interview and have a side project(s). I love listening to their stories about their side project, hobbies, and open-source contributions/work.
Not a job but I got a contract due to a webapp template I have in my github profile, my customer shared that he wanted someone that wouldn't start from scratch and my template looked good enough to get the job done.
Circa 2005, I'm learning to make a windows game using C/C++ and posted it on local game developer forum. The project was far from a good game but I got an offer from local game dev studio because of it. I worked on that studio for years and involved in developing games for Windows, Flash, and eventually mobile.
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
Lots of people, including me.
Lots of people love being contrarian in theory. If it happened to you for real, no chance youre gonna say no to that
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.
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.
compiler enthusiasts catching stays:(
Not everyone shares your goals or values.
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.
fair enough
There are literally hundreds of thousands of software engineers employed at companies that are of similar prestige and pay as Apple, and many of them will be on HN. If you're getting paid $500k at Netflix/Google/Meta, why work for $400k at Apple?
Uhh no, have you ever dug into compensation that most companies that post on HN are offering? They are offering regular old CRUD enterprise level compensation and “equity” that probably won’t be worth anything
I had a much longer reply. But just read the story of the Mexican fisherman
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?
Would you say the majority of people who claim to be contrarian aren’t actual contrarians, in your experience? I’m not sure you can infer this in general.
100% guarantee I would
My biggest motivator not to work for apple is this post from Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/#!/Apple
I am genuinely unsure if this is a parody comment. I am assuming that you are fairly green behind the ears? The thing about Big Tech companies is that they hire lots of developers. That’s in large part makes them Big Tech. “Having Apple on your CV” is not as prestigious as you’re making out. It doesn’t mean you have The Knowledge that makes you a ‘10x developer’ or whatever anywhere you work. In fact, it could mean that your mind has been poisoned by a Big Tech working style, and you’ve developed a bunch of habits that aren’t nearly as applicable to most other organisations.
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.
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 at Apple because of what you heard about their work culture alone sounds like a quitter mindset. I mean at least try. If its not right, good riddance. Its not like having been there is gonna cost anything besides the time you invested.
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-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.
Good vibes at Meta? That place absolutely oozes phoney hyper-idealized cringey millennial youth culture. It feels like a cult.
I found Apple recruiters very clear and fair.
Haven't noticed it. All of the E5+s I know are real. Might just be luck and selective filtering on my end to not get involved with the... overgrown children.
Apple's recruiters were flaky on comms, rescheduled me a couple of times, and were disappointing for a company I had higher expectations for.
I can’t really trust anything else you say with the absoluteness which you claim Meta is better vibes than the rest.
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
Your values are likely different than mine. You cannot trust what I've written, because it goes against your values. This is fair. I write what I write to express my values, and let those of a similar mettle and spiritual composition get more usable info to navigate their careers. A good example of this is Ludicity. He has values that aren't popular on HN, but that doesn't mean what he's written is untrustworthy or wrong or that his generalizations don't "click" for people who think like them.
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.
Snowflake? You mean the guys who spent 700 million to buy streamlit, a (worse than gradio) python front end.
They’re unicorns for being extremely stupid. I’ll give you that.
They're the only big company that are doing any practical development on database systems (MongoDB doesn't count; and Yandex, while fantastic, is removed from the count for being Russian, in these times).
Every company has their warts. Some warts don't matter to me.
Meta? Out of the BigTech companies I would least want to work for are Meta and Amazon (again).
Parent comment:
Your comment:
You have some weird fetish with FAANG?
You have a very idealized view of BigTech. You don’t work any harder at BigTech than anywhere else. I’m not saying that the work is easy and there aren’t crunch times. But if you can deal with corporate BS - something you have to deal with at large companies that pay a lot less - and you have the skillset, you don’t work any harder there than you do at most other companies.
Well Amazon is a well known shit show (been there done that)
Not everyone on this site is a student with nothing on their resume.
Interesting projection, but to respond to your point: anyone could just put in a decade at Averagecorp inc. or even just hop around and throw together a decent resume. If a random OSS side project lands you an offer from apple thats gotta be jackpot level luck.
Not if Averagecorp inc. pays as much, if not more, than Apple or has better working conditions.
Do you seriously think someone cares if you work at FAANG outside of those student groups on Reddit?
Not really. I have someone reach out every couple months because they saw something I worked on that relates to the technology that team is using. If you take a framework and do something cool with it, and the people who work on it find out about it (say, because someone spotted it on social media) they will often look to see if they can hire you. If you want to improve your chances, pick a technology few people are using and make something cool with that: there’s a lot of people who are experts on UIKit but very few who understand how AirPlay works. To get scouted for the former you have to be really, really interesting.
I'm now with the sibling commenter in that I can't tell if this a troll account.
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.
Getting a developer job at Apple or other big Tech company isn’t a particularly difficult hurdle. If that’s a personal goal of yours treat it like trying to get into a specific college and set yourself up for success. You may not have great odds applying today, but there’s many options for improving your chances with some effort.
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?
Apple has many large offices outside of silicon valley.
But they don't do the same thing in every office location. Certain offices are only niche locations stemming from the other HW companies they acquired over the years. Apple si super diverse with what it does.
So depending on what job you'll want to do at Apple you might have to relocate.
Apple is definitely not “very flexible with this stuff”.
I would never work for Apple, they are an extremely user-hostile company who bankrolls off of child labor in impoverished countries.
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.
I have the one-time biggest computer company, I guess the Apple of it's time, on my CV, and was pretty good (still am, I think!). Currently out of work. Such things are not the panacea you make it seem.
This would make for an interesting blog post.
Could you recommended resources to learn to do the same?
The repository https://github.com/stephen/airsonos has the code and is surprisingly accessible.
The meat for the airplay side is here: https://github.com/stephen/nodetunes
Please excuse the code quality... I think I was still learning how to write js at the time.
Step 1 — study popular protocols to understand how client/server interactions typically work.
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.
I actually forgot that I did in fact write about this! https://medium.com/@stephencwan/hacking-airplay-into-sonos-9...
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.
I remember seeing this published when I worked at Sonos. In fact, I might have been the one who put it on the Slack channel.
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.
I read the parent comment to mean he declined the offer, not that he didn't receive it
Sorry, to be fully clear - i had an internship offer from apple that i declined, and i think i also declined to do the interview process at sonos before getting to the offer stage.
Why is that? I recently bought a Sonos after getting plenty of recommendations. Even though it sounds great, I hate that they dropped support for Google assistant. Also, the Sonos voice commands can't handle Spotify or YouTube music. Kind of sucks.
I see it as problematic as you. Have two Sonos five and two Sonos one and think about switching to another product more often. But now i‘ve already spent so much money...
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.
So, respective teams from those two companies (or even other companies for that matter) are actively searching GH for any mods to their work?
if you use the right hashtags for the right "latest thing", VCs are actively on github
I added a discord link and they joined that too and just watch and lurk, its a weird world
More likely is employees use their own products and happen to see it while searching for a way to do the same thing.
In my experience it's more like people happen to stumble across your work or hear about it somehow, not a systematic search for people working on X thing.
You didn't miss out because Sonos continues to do an awful job software-wise. One of the things I'm most looking forward to as I de-IOT-ize my life is selling that system and running speaker wire like a true G.
The little amplifiers you can get on aliexpress and the like for about $70 can be quite good although pre-covid there were more like $35. They just have simple bluetooth and analogue in and depending on the model support 2 or 4 speakers plus 0 or 1 subwoofer.
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.
There's this guy in my town who is still clinging, somehow, to his life in the as a long-haired metalhead hifi bro and I cannot wait to see the look on his face when I go down there and drop a couple paychecks in his lap and say "enlighten me" ;-)
I’m curious, why didn’t you accept either offer? Compensation? Relocation requirements?
have you written about how you created this? very interested
I too, would be very interestd in this.