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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.
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Civic Auth
Auth in Less Than 5 Minutes. Civic Auth comes with multiple SSO options, optional embedded wallets, and user management — all implemented with just a few lines of code. Start building today.
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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
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I created a system-agnostic, pure Clojure router[1] and Markdown parser[2] in Clojure that definitely helped me get Clojure gigs.
[1]: https://github.com/askonomm/ruuter
[2]: https://github.com/askonomm/clarktown
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I created a system-agnostic, pure Clojure router[1] and Markdown parser[2] in Clojure that definitely helped me get Clojure gigs.
[1]: https://github.com/askonomm/ruuter
[2]: https://github.com/askonomm/clarktown
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bc
An implementation of the POSIX bc calculator with GNU extensions and dc. Finished, but well-maintained.
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.
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backgroundremover
Background Remover lets you Remove Background from images and video using AI with a simple command line interface that is free and open source.
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.
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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.
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SurveyJS
JavaScript Form Builder with No-Code UI & Built-In JSON Schema Editor. Add the SurveyJS white-label form builder to your JavaScript app (React/Angular/Vue3). Build complex JSON forms without coding. Fully customizable, works with any backend, perfect for data-heavy apps. Learn more.
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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 :-)
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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!
1 - https://github.com/skhaz/wintermoon
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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 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.
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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...
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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)
[0] https://github.com/iojanis/creaftOS
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govuk-form-builder
A form builder for Ruby on Rails that’s compatible with the GOV.UK Design System.
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
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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.
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I have worked four jobs related to https://github.com/pion/webrtc and one for https://webrtcforthecurious.com
Two companies used Pion. The other two were just using the protocol (WebRTC)
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I have worked four jobs related to https://github.com/pion/webrtc and one for https://webrtcforthecurious.com
Two companies used Pion. The other two were just using the protocol (WebRTC)
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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.
[1] https://github.com/polpo/ipad-target.py
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equinox
Elegant easy-to-use neural networks + scientific computing in JAX. https://docs.kidger.site/equinox/
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 now have a bit of an ecosystem going.
[1] https://github.com/patrick-kidger/equinox
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diffrax
Numerical differential equation solvers in JAX. Autodifferentiable and GPU-capable. https://docs.kidger.site/diffrax/
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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.
https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-minimal
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I'm working at Meta to this day!
Check it out at https://github.com/air/encounter
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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 (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.
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touchHLE
High-level emulator for iPhone OS apps. This repo is used for issues, releases and CI. Submit patches at: https://review.gerrithub.io/admin/repos/touchHLE/touchHLE
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 if you'd like to give permission for them to preserve the game.
[1]: https://touchhle.org/
[2]: https://touchhle.org/app-archive/
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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 then has since led to a long term collaboration with the Topos Institute where we are building 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.
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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 then has since led to a long term collaboration with the Topos Institute where we are building 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.
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I wrote a Kibana plugin - https://github.com/sivasamyk/logtrail 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.
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forming-typeform
A pretty cool typeform clone with all the animations that typeform supports. You can check the code, and use it.
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
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PoshUI-Documentation
Posh UI is a continuously developing Component Library, built using HTML5 and CSS3 only.
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
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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]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi
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albumentations
Fast and flexible image augmentation library. Paper about the library: https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/11/2/125
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.
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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. 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 [1]. 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 :(
[1] https://github.com/Shihab-Shahriar/scikit-clean
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relm
An open source, browser-based 3D spatial platform for meeting, playing, and working. (by relm-us)
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.
[1] https://github.com/relm-us/relm
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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.
https://github.com/wrboyce/sirious
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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. 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.
[0] https://fontsource.org
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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 :)
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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.
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mock-node
A configurable mock server with an intuitive configuration management interface and a http api
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.
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Blazorise
Blazorise is a component library built on top of Blazor with support for CSS frameworks like Bootstrap, Tailwind, Bulma, AntDesign, and Material.
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.
[1] https://blazorise.com/
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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. :-)
https://github.com/Dobiasd/frugally-deep
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enferno
Enferno is a modern Flask framework optimized for AI-assisted development. By combining smart patterns and Cursor Rules with modern libraries, it enables developers to build sophisticated web applications with unprecedented speed
Enferno Framework: https://github.com/level09/enferno
a little flask based SAAS starter kit.
Got multiple work contracts some little publicity :)
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obsidian-daily-cron
a simple cron script to automatically upload daily changes to an obsidian directory
Same, I've been using this cron script for that: https://github.com/allen-munsch/obsidian-daily-cron/tree/mai...
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skyrack
Skyrack disassemble binaries in order to list instruction gadgets. Those gadgets are saved in a database, allowing fast gadget lookup.
And this guy became Sqreen CEO and my (incredibly awesome) cofounder.
[0] https://github.com/aviat/skyrack
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I got tired of my job that involved 95% meetings and 5% coding so I quit in August 2022 and decided to figure out what's next. But, since I'd spent a few years not doing as much coding as I'd have liked, I felt rusty. I probably could've gotten a decent job if I'd tried (I have lots of years of experience) but I didn't have confidence and had lost the joy of it.
So, while I tried to figure out what to do, I worked on my hobby NES emulator for Apple platforms, Blackbox[1]. It's written in Swift and uses SwiftUI.
When a potential contracting role (100% SwiftUI) dropped in my lap, I had the confidence and skills to go for it. It's been great (my meeting-to-coding ratio has inverted!) and they're wanting me to extend my contract for another 12 months. I know the project helped make them feel confidence in my capabilities, but I think it's possible that I'd have gotten the gig in the first place. But, I would've struggled, and I probably wouldn't have even gone for it in the first place because I'd have known that I'd have struggled.
[1] https://github.com/glhaynes/Blackbox
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In 2017, I wrote a toy language called Goby[1] to learn how Ruby works. A few folks contributed quite a bit to it and one of them later referred me to my previous job (as a backend developer).
Fast-forward to 2021, I got interested in debugging tools so I started contributing to the then newly created Ruby debugger[2]. In less than a year I opened more than a hundred PRs and became the 2nd biggest contributor of it. And that eventually landed me a job to work on Ruby's development tools, like LSP servers, REPLs, and of course, the debugger :-)
[1] https://github.com/goby-lang/goby
[2] https://github.com/ruby/debug
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In 2017, I wrote a toy language called Goby[1] to learn how Ruby works. A few folks contributed quite a bit to it and one of them later referred me to my previous job (as a backend developer).
Fast-forward to 2021, I got interested in debugging tools so I started contributing to the then newly created Ruby debugger[2]. In less than a year I opened more than a hundred PRs and became the 2nd biggest contributor of it. And that eventually landed me a job to work on Ruby's development tools, like LSP servers, REPLs, and of course, the debugger :-)
[1] https://github.com/goby-lang/goby
[2] https://github.com/ruby/debug
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InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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Weekly Developer Roundup #21 - Sun Nov 08 2020