Back in early 2000x, I worked mostly as salesperson and CTO of the small company. Bored with marketing and sales, I decided to find engineering job. To get up t

Back in early 2000x, I worked mostly as salesperson and CTO of the small company. Bored with marketing and sales, I decided to find engineering job. To get up to the software development train, I started learning Java and created a small project as the playground. It was time of Web 2.0 / AJAX hype, so I took Java Server Faces as the base and added dynamic functionality to it. I did name project "Ajax4jsf" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax4jsf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax4jsf. When it become less or more functional, I created couple demo applications, wrote several blogs about it, and mention it whenever I did found any resource related to Java and Web 2.0. The goal was to find a job in Russia, but no one pay attention. Instead, the project got some traction in US, and company from here made me offer. So I continued the same side project as the full time job. They did all work to provide visa ( and Green Card later ), and sell project to Jboss where it became "richfaces" https://richfaces.jboss.org/ https://richfaces.jboss.org/ . Decent success story, but keep in mind several points that made it happen: - Project targeted a current hype wave. - It was implemented with wide used technologies. - A lot of time spent to promote it. For the moment, there are two possible candidates to repeat : Large language models, and cryptocurrencies. But former is already eclipsed the later, so probably it's the only candidate. There's a little set of technologies used by LLMs, so this choice is oblivious ( keep in mind, the project supposed to demonstrate you skills in areas required by potential employer, so nothing exotic ). When gold rush happened in Klondike, the total cost of the found gold was several times smaller than money spent on food, tools, whiskey, and whores. So it's better to create some useful tools project ( like LangChain ). And promote, promote, promote. Wherever it's possible.