An app I made in college most certainly (but indirectly) led to my current position.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The blog is not up anymore.<p>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.<p>Eventually I brought some of my work to a repair facility as part of my interview & got the first job I ever liked!<p>[1] <a href="http://www.freeradio.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.freeradio.org/</a>
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.<p><a href="https://github.com/vutran/dext/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vutran/dext/</a><p>In general, just being active in the open source community makes landing a job much easier.
My biggest project which led to some networking: <a href="https://github.com/RichardKnop/machinery" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/RichardKnop/machinery</a><p>More projects here: <a href="https://github.com/RichardKnop" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/RichardKnop</a>