Ask HN: What are your personal projects that helped in landing a job?

An app I made in college most certainly (but indirectly) led to my current position.

In college I made an app that did some simple calculations to determine the availability of parking spots at my overcrowded commuter school. It was not very advanced at all; it had a label and traffic light for each parking lot and was based on the timing of classes to change the color of the light.

When I showed it to a recruiter, I got an internship that lasted 8 months at a well known software company where I gained enough experience to move on to a better and more organized company.

I didn't receive the best education, and certainly am not the brightest amongst my colleagues, but I have no doubt that developing and publishing that specific app in school led to my current position.

I had a (programming) blog that was mentioned as almost the direct reason I got my first job. I believe at the time I was going through a lot of the Euler problems, and my boss hired me because he could see my thought process etc.

The blog is not up anymore.

It had no readers or visitors, but I mentioned it on my resume.

After learning you could swap out chips in CB radios for extra features my senior year of HS, I discovered Free Radio Berkeley [1]. Spent a summer building their kits & had a great time figuring out how to do it all.

Eventually I brought some of my work to a repair facility as part of my interview & got the first job I ever liked!

[1] http://www.freeradio.org/

My most popular one has to be an Alfred alternative I made back when I had to use both Windows/Mac for work. It was actually my first full Electron/React application so it may have been over-engineered like most side projects.

https://github.com/vutran/dext/

In general, just being active in the open source community makes landing a job much easier.

Don't know for sure, but definitely think having some high-quality projects helped out:

+ Notational (https://notational.co/) (https://github.com/tmm/notational)

+ Gifsearch (https://github.com/tmm/gifsearch)

+ Some others on GitHub (https://github.com/tmm)

My biggest project which led to some networking: https://github.com/RichardKnop/machinery

More projects here: https://github.com/RichardKnop

Games and 3D engines.