Ask HN: Which personal projects got you hired?
Which personal projects got you hired? Which personal projects were so good you hired someone else?
GitArena is a GitHub/Gitea/GitLab clone written in Async Rust using Tokio and Actix-Web on the backend and server-rendered HTML with htmx for interactivity.
I commented on the "Who wants to be hired?" thread of this month with this being my main portfolio show-off project. It worked and I have gotten already 2 job offers now.
The bot: https://www.instagram.com/gitfuck/
A water utility in Spain spun off a start up to create a similar web based water modelling application and they used my open source library.
They approached me and I joined them and have been able to maintain the open source library as part of my role.
Then in that job, I expanded on another personal project I saw had application in the company, and now I work on that full time with a full team.
Before I was really struggling to get hired, I worked with a somewhat obscure language for an obscure application, noone in the software industry knew anything about it and it was incredibly hard to get interviews. I'd got sick of the whole thing anyway, so just decided to expand some little personal coding experiments into a full app
In 2012 I had a hard time looking for a job in my trained engineering field, so I’ve decided to do something constructive with the spare time between interview calls and meetings. I took some new tech (back then) like WebGL, Canvas, Workers and combined them with 3D modeling, matrix math, 3D printing limitations. It was a lot of fun and I’ve learned a lot.
The day it went live on production I had this feeling “ok, it’s done, what now?”. SEO, social media, ads, all of them needed some time to kick in. I’ve added to the CV my fresh, new, software engineering experience and sent few of them for frontend developer positions. Got a job the very next day. Even now, when it is already dated, has a lot of technical debt or looks like coded by a 3 yr old, we did had a good laugh at the expense of my younger self, discussing how my craft has changed. It’s a great conversation starter, and a live example that you can deliver, however it looks like. I will refactor it one day. I hope.
Since then, during job seeking, no code assignment was ever needed.
Also, I have two side projects which seem to get a lot of attention from other developers, and they have reached out to me to hire:
- fast sqlite inserts [2] - I am experimenting with inserting one billion rows as quickly as possible for a test database
- caskdb [3] - an educational project which teaches you to build a KV store from scratch
[0] - https://github.com/avinassh/della
[1] - https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar
Got my first job in programming because I had written a website to manage support tickets on an IT support team.
This got me hired as a "Social Media Expert" at a Fortune 100 company in the marketing department, before even graduating college - a position that didn't exist and I didn't apply for, they were just terrified about Facebook and what it meant. Eventually I shifted to their "innovation department" creating many internal social networks, back when that was a thing.
In my latter years at college, I spent Summer & my spare time contributing to the Bugzilla project. My work on that project, and my involvement in the project's IRC, caught the attention of someone who worked at the company which eventually hired me. They were looking for someone to take over admin of their Bugzilla instance (a very large, customized, private installation). The work I did was enough for them to hire and relocate me from Ohio to California.
2. Did a bunch of analytics/etc for a guild in a game.
3. Created a neural net architecture that in addition to some task, also learned its own connective structure....in tf1 :)
Companies hire people who can add business value and work as a team member and part of the larger organization. Personal projects don’t communicate that.
I can see the argument for a candidate seeking their first job in IT needing to distinguish themselves from the rest of the crowd and how a couple of well-executed projects can help with that. However, it's unfair to expect that any candidate must have projects, especially if they're already in employment elsewhere - few of us have the time or the energy to put into projects of passion after we've done our 40 hours and taken care of other priorities.
Code samples are easy to plagiarize so I always ask candidates who have code samples to explain the code, walk me through it. It's disappointing to see how often candidates can't do that, either because they don't actually understand the code or didn't even write it themselves.
If a candidate had a personal or side project that solved a unique and challenging problem I would look at it. When I have seen personal projects they look like programing class assignments or riffs on a language/framework tutorial.
When interviewing I am always most interested in how the candidate will fit into the team and organization, and if they understand the difference between adding value to the business and playing with technology for its own sake. The last time this came up in an interview the candidate had some Raspberry Pi/Arduino code they were proud of, probably fun but not relevant to the job, and so far removed from the business domain that I couldn't judge how relevant it might be.
Not quite a personal project, I know..
One step of the interview process was a feature request / pair programming session.