It is unclear to me whether this "landed me a job", but in advance of working at big tech, I made a presentation about Smithy (www.smithy.rs), in which there wa

It is unclear to me whether this "landed me a job", but in advance of working at big tech, I made a presentation about Smithy (www.smithy.rs), in which there was an engineer in the audience (employed at the same big tech co). I believe he lobbied for my candidacy with the hiring committee. Secondly, before taking my most recent job (at Pinterest), I had just secured a conference talk about Isograph (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO65JJRqjuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO65JJRqjuc). At both companies where I eventually got offers, I spent a good amount of interview time nerding about Isograph with the interviewers. Ultimately, it's unclear if this tipped the balance in any case, but the side projects seemed helpful. ---- Previously, while interviewing at a previous place, I showed off a side project to the interviewers, ran into a bug, and deployed a fix in real time. I was later told that they had never seen that. I think I would've gotten that job anyway, though.