Comment by anysz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anysz | Hacker News Reader

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PROJECTS !

You should embark on side projects. They will teach you so much more than school ever will, and they will reward you in a way that nothing else really can. If your projects can make money too, then that's icing on the cake. You will be free.

I'm 25 years old with no degree, taught myself to code for the past 2 years and got turned down for thousands of developer jobs. I ended up working in a factory doing curtain assembly, and selling websites door-to-door after work, until last month, where the first day I decide to go back to sports, I tear my meniscus.

Thankfully, healthcare in Canada is free. However, with 250$ to my name at the time of surgery, the future was looking really, really dark. Can't work, and can't do door-to-door sales. Mother Nature has deadly accuracy with those curveballs.

In the hospital bed, I'm having an existential debate of what to do with my life (in the immediate future). I can sell my Macbook to stay afloat, but that means that I can't build iOS apps anymore. I can ask my brother for money, but he's just about the biggest asshole ever to have roamed the planet and we have a trash relationship. After a lot of tears and self-pity, and telling my life story to the nurse, I decide I'm going to throw life a curveball of my own and invest all I have in a new e-commerce venture.

So I set up a quick WooCommerce site selling Pokemon Go apparel and blew 200$ of my 250$ on FB and Instagram ads, and believe it or not, within 3 days, I nailed my first sale, and got approached by 2 Pokemon influencers to sell to their following.

I'm now making about 2 sales a day, which amounts to 30-35$. It's peanuts, but I've survived on less, and honestly, stuck in bed with a full zimmer brace, super high on painkillers, 10 full minutes to do a washroom trip and I am happier than I have ever been in my entire life. I'm trapped in bed for the next month, but I have never felt more free. Maybe with this, I don't even have to go to work again.

So that's my two cents, for your two cents. Find a project with potential and work on it. It doesn't have to bring money, it may be learning to play Californication on the guitar or implementing a hashing algorithm, but as long as it's something you enjoy and makes you grow, this is IMHO what life is all about.

>... and got turned down for thousands of developer jobs.

Over what period of time? No offense, but I'm hoping that's an innocent exaggeration. I'm not very familiar with the market for developers in Canada, though based on that it sounds particularly brutal.

Either way, good on you for moving forward despite all that.

Over a period of 18 months.

Canada is nothing like the US in terms of the developer market. I read all kinds of blog posts about people who learned to code, built stuff and found a job, but it took me a bit of time to realize that Canada is a totally different beast. The amount of junior dev job openings in this country is cute next to New York's. So I started applying there and all over the US, and to Europe, and to Australia, and to South America, etc.. None of those worked out. Those add up to thousands.

I still apply for dev jobs to this day, but only when I have a new project to add to my CV. The way I see it, with every project I complete, I get closer to landing that job. And who knows, maybe one of my projects will eventually be able to support me by itself.

I think it's probably hyperbole.

If it's "thousands" as in 1002 rejections, that's almost 3 years of doing one interview every day, from Monday to Sunday. Even if you assume two interviews per day, that's still more than a year.

Edit: Assuming you only do one interview per rejection.

I wouldn't take it as an indicator of the job market in Canada.

I would think maybe he refers to having a lot of rejections but still I would hope it's in the order of 100 or so at most

Or it could be rejections even earlier in the process, like not receiving a response after sending in your resume to a job posting.

> So I set up a quick WooCommerce site selling Pokemon Go apparel

Can you give us a rundown on how you set up your site, and then marketed it?

I dunno in how much detail you want this but I'm dropshipping using an on-demand printing and fulfillment service. I create my designs, I send it to them, when I get an order, they print, pack, brand and ship.

I marketed my site using fb and ig ads (fabulous conversion rates on fb retargeting) and automated my community building on ig using an instagram bot I found on github

I think my biggest questions are on the line of, "How is this even possible!?" I felt like nearly every part of what you said you just did blew my mind, a little bit, in different ways.

How do you get your designs? How did you sell ads for a service that didn't yet exist? How did you set up a store for which you had no inventory?

Blowing my mind, because your time from idea to execution was so fast, and that would not even have crossed my mind as possible. (edit: I'm not even sure I know the right questions to ask about how to get started on learning to do such things.)

This makes us at WooCommerce very happy!

Dude, your answer is awesome. I've been thinking a lot about starting side projects, but I never started one. It's awful to surrender to your own stagnation... btw, how did you find Pokemon influencers? I hope you'll find the perfect dev job!

Sounds awesome whats your next project?

Humans are designed to make things. I prefer to make stuff with my hands and bits of wood.

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