Coding Projects That Got Me Interviews At Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Palantir, and More

in this video i'm gonna be talking about the software engineering side projects that i made during college that helped me land a job at google and microsoft so recently i just posted a video about how i got a job at google and microsoft with a really bad gpa it was a 2.8 i got a d in a class and i almost failed and in that video i talked about how i knew that i couldn't rely on my gpa to get interviews at these big tech companies so i went extra hard in the paint on my side projects let those carry my resume through the recruiting process the reason why i'm making this video today is to give you the viewer the future big tech software engineers some inspiration on some potential side projects that you can work on to make sure that you land your dream job in big tech also if you're new to the channel my name is tonyan kim and i post weekly content about working in tech tech news tech everything tech lifestyle so if you're interested in this type of topic and you want to see more of it please feel free to hit that subscribe button i post weekly anyways enough of a plug let's get into it so just to give you a brief overview of my job history i first landed an internship at microsoft during my third year of college and then afterwards during my fourth year of college is when i got the full-time job offer at google so i'm going to be separating the side projects that i had for the microsoft internship and then for the google full-time offer the very first side project that i had under my belt going into my internship at microsoft was actually a landing page that i did a complete redesign for for a startup in my hometown the way that i found this opportunity was that i found this giant list of startups and i just emailed every single one of them asking if i can do a little internship for like four to five weeks with them or i can do some type of freelancing contract work for them and keep in mind this is after my very first quarter of college where i took my very first computer science course so i really did not know that much and i actually had to self teach myself html css and javascript so i can do some more like full stack web development although i wouldn't really call it full stack web development because i really did not know anything i didn't know react i didn't know any cool technologies i was just doing bare bones html css and javascript and after emailing and applying to roughly 40 companies one of them reached out to me and said hey we need a landing page redesign would you be able to take that under your bill and i was like honestly i'm pretty underqualified to do so but sure why not and luckily with this opportunity i was able to get that first side project under my belt to be able to put a company name on my resume and use this for future applications for future internships and full-time offers in the future the second software engineering project that i had was a little thing called autocal it was a little project that a group of friends and i worked during a hackathon and basically what it was was a smart calendar app that parsed through all of your emails and provided these calendars to let you know what's going on all around your campus at any day and any time and yes is this something that google calendar does automatically yes but i was on microsoft outlook and at least back in my day that definitely was not a thing that outlook calendar or microsoft calendar did so my friends and i thought that this would be a good hackathon project because we were just getting absolutely inundated with so many emails about all the news events going on campus joining this club doing this acapella group i can't sing why are you asking me that this is my very first hackathon that i ever participated in and this is also the very first time that i ever did react i never heard about it before i've never used it before and i learned everything i did at the workshops offered at this hackathon so obviously with my lack of experience you can pretty much tell that this project was not the best it barely worked it was very very very barely ever so functional but that honestly doesn't matter the whole point of a hackathon is not to go out and build a multi-billion dollar corporation or some production grade code but quite rather just to prove that you can take some initiative to go out there and learn and build something on your own and obviously it has to work to some degree which my project did but it doesn't have to be perfect and this project certainly was not perfect at all the third side project that i had under my belt was something called scheduler and obviously in true startup fashion i left out all of the vowels and it was spelled like s-c-h-l-d-r and this is basically a full stack web application that allowed students at my school filter the classes that they want to schedule in a more granular way to get more information out of it and the reason why i built this application was because the class picker at my school looked like it was built out of the 90s and it hasn't been redesigned since then it was really horrible really ugly and it was just an absolute horrible user interface so for that reason i decided you know why not make this a little bit prettier and a little bit easier on the eyes i definitely did not release this to many people out there and i'm pretty sure i was the only one that used it but once again that's the whole point of a side project it doesn't have to be a project that used by millions of people or even thousands of people on your school campus it just has to be something that you actually built from beginning to end to showcase your technical skills and this full stock web application did in my case it served that purpose well and the way that i found time to build this was by instituting like a self-imposed hackathon during my spring break yeah you can say that things got kind of crazy and i was like getting kind of lit and partying pretty hard and what the self-imposed hackathon was was basically just a weekend where saturday and sunday i dedicated those two days purely to building out some type of product that i had in mind you can either do this solo or gather a group of friends to do this with you because honestly it's a great way for you to get a substantial side project on your resume to make it much beefier and to show your technical expertise in a certain tech stack and also you know sometimes hazing yourself by staying up for like 24 hours straight with your friends it's kind of fun too so you know definitely try it out quick pause in this video but if you've been enjoying the content and finding it useful please do me a favor and hit that like button and help support a small channel like me grow into a bigger one and also because i know how crazy difficult and stressful the job recruiting process can be if you are interested in any type of career consulting i do offer some at buying a coffee toyan kim you can book some one-on-one time on my calendar and we can talk about career consulting and career paths forward and as well as providing resume feedback and resume critiques as well so once again if you're interested in some type of career consulting please check it out at buying a coffee slash tony and kim so those are all the side products that i had on my resume leading up to my internship at microsoft but i knew that i had to get a few more side projects under my belt to make sure that the following year my senior year that i will be able to be more attractive to more companies so i decided to have one more side project under my belt and this was something called left on red left on red was initially a full stack web application that basically analyzed your imessages the user would visit the website and they would upload their chat db file which is where all of your imessages are stored on your mac and then we will go and parse through all of the text and return a bunch of fun metrics such as what are your favorite emojis what are your favorite words what are the times of the days that you text most frequently the least frequently how many texts have you sent and received with a particular person and who you have left on red so there are just a bunch of these kind of useless but kind of fun metrics that you can pull up and we decided to visualize this in a full stack web application you can actually find the website at this url right here but the actual data processing no longer happens on the web application due to privacy concerns so the rest of my friends that i worked on this project with actually are open sourcing it on github and it's actually an app that you can download and work on yourself and you can test it out with your very own messages and you can find it at this github link right here is definitely way way more polished than it used to be back when i first built it with my friends and they've taken on to leaps and bounds to something much more refined so if you're interested in checking it out and also checking out the source code please feel free to take a look there alright well that is it for today's video and hopefully after watching this you have some inspiration for some potential hackathon or potential side price id that you can build on your site so you can beef up your resume to make sure that you are as attractive as possible to the big tech recruiters that are out there i know how crazy stressful the job recruiting process can be since i've been through the process many many times and for that reason i'm cheering you on from the sidelines and if you have any questions related to job recruiting and how to navigate the whole process or just tech lifestyle in general please feel free to leave a comment down below and i'll either answer your question in your comment or i'll make a full-blown video answering it thanks once again for watching today's video and if you enjoyed the content please feel free to hit that like button and if you want to see more of my content please feel free to hit that subscribe button as well once again thanks for watching and i'll see you next one

Channel: Your Average Tech Bro

Views: 44,502

Keywords: Clement mihailescu side projects, Software engineer side projects, Side projects for developers, Side projects for software engineers, Side projects for programmers, Side projects for computer science students, Side projects for CS students, Side projects for web developers, Side projects for beginner Programmers, Side projects for resume, Side projects for engineers, Computer science side project, Side projects for beginner software engineer, Best software engineer side projects

Id: IzsD-QZIByA

Length: 7min 12sec (432 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021