Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

1

ML Background Remover

#Design Tools #Developer Tools #GitHub 12 social mentions

2

Audio Diary

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.

#Social Networks #Note Taking #Instant Messaging 9 social mentions

3

NumPad

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.

#Calculator #Productivity #Unit Conversion 4 social mentions

4

Medium

I actually forgot that I did in fact write about this! https://medium.com/@stephencwan/hacking-airplay-into-sonos-93a41a1fcfbb A bit light on the technical details perhaps... I recall getting stuck on getting the right airplay parameters several times.

#Blogging #Blogging Platform #CMS 2189 social mentions

5

Picnic CSS

This was about 10 years ago, where there was Bootstrap, Pure CSS and little more, so I published: https://picnicss.com/ It went to the front page of Hacker News (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8315616">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8315616</a>). 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.

#CSS Framework #Design Tools #Developer Tools 2 social mentions

6

MarkSheet

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. https://marksheet.io/.

#CSS Tutorials #CSS #Online Learning 2 social mentions

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/.

#Web App #Chrome Extensions #Productivity 3 social mentions

8

LogTrail

I wrote a Kibana plugin - <a href="https://github.com/sivasamyk/logtrail">https://github.com/sivasamyk/logtrail</a> and few graylog plugins which opened many doors for me. It also helped me land my last job at The Sematext. I lost interest in maintaining the plugin after Elastic's open-source license changes.

#Monitoring Tools #Log Management #Machine Data Analytics 1 social mentions

9

Notado

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 values LeetCode more than shipping real code these days. [1]: <a href="https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi">https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi</a>.

#Game Development #Feed Reader #RSS Reader 9 social mentions

10

Yare.io

I'm a designer claiming to also know a bit of engineering. Proving it by building a programming game – https://yare.io – was very useful in all interviews. And I hope that in the current AI boom, building https://meoweler.com will prove at least tiny bit useful when trying to get into AI jobs.

#Indie Games #Strategy Games #AI 16 social mentions

11

Meoweler

I'm a designer claiming to also know a bit of engineering. Proving it by building a programming game – https://yare.io – was very useful in all interviews. And I hope that in the current AI boom, building https://meoweler.com will prove at least tiny bit useful when trying to get into AI jobs.

#Travel #Tech #Childcare Software 8 social mentions

12

Gifmemes

My favorite job interview was when we just talked about my project: https://gifmemes.io most of the time. Got the job.

#App #Meme #Tool 29 social mentions

13

NoFlo

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.

#Automation #Data Dashboard #Business Intelligence 2 social mentions

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.

#Design Tools #Push Notifications #Developer Tools 1 social mentions

15

Pushover

Looks great, what differentiates ntfy.sh from https://pushover.net/ ?

#Push Notifications #Web Push Notifications #API 96 social mentions

16

ProWritingAid

Back in 2019, I made an advanced MS Word add-in spellchecker that integrates the ProWritingAid API to spot all the errors in an interactive way where you just hover over a misspelled word or an incorrect expression and a popup shows at the mouse pointer's position where you can quickly correct the word with suggestions, or open a task pane on the right side of the active document for more advanced features. The issues were highlighted by different colors depending on the type of issue. In short, you can think of Grammarly's Chrome extension. After a short period of time, I saw a job posting by the company that read something like, "We need an MS Word Add-In developer," and from the job's description, it was clear that they want a developer to build a Word Add-in that consumes their API. Yay! I said. I instantly applied and attached a short video showing the add-in I built in action. I immediately got a response from the CEO himself, and I think the CTO or a lead developer was with him. They interviewed me and liked me, but, unfortunately, they didn't hire me because of me! Honestly, I tried to sell them the add-in and ensure some level of future support, but they insisted on hiring me on an hourly basis; instead, I couldn't. I did not decline the offer directly but asked for an hourly rate I knew they would not be able to afford, and well, that was the end. ________________________ 1. https://prowritingaid.com/.

#Grammar Checker #Writing Tools #Spell Checker 65 social mentions