These famous tech careers all started with tiny side projects

Side projects usually seem like a hobby, but they can be the most powerful career launchpad available. While traditional metrics like university degrees and years of professional experience still hold weight, a well-executed side project acts as a direct, unfiltered view of your technical capabilities, your problem-solving approach, and your passion for creation.

These projects didn't just fill space on their creators' resumes. Their work created new standards and established them as indispensable thought leaders in their fields.

Kim Swift and Portal

The video game Portal originated as a student side project called Narbacular Drop. It was created by students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, including Kim Swift, for their senior project. The core idea was a 3D platforming mechanic where players used portals to move through the environment. The team showed the game to recruiters at DigiPen's annual Career Day, where it was seen by Robin Walker from Valve, the company making the Steam Machine . This led to an invitation to present at Valve's offices.

They had no idea that Gabe Newell, Valve's co-founder, would show up, but they presented it to him anyway. Around 15 minutes into the demo, Newell stood up and called for it all to stop. He offered the entire seven-person team jobs on the spot. They were hired to rebuild the game as Portal.

Ari Weinstein and the Workflow App

Ari Weinstein built Workflow with a team during the MHacks Winter hackathon. Weinstein, a Thiel Fellow who dropped out of MIT, designed Workflow to automate complicated tasks on iOS devices, filling a huge gap in mobile automation. The project quickly gained critical acclaim, winning an award, and led to Apple acquiring the Workflow app in March 2017. This got Weinstein and his team hired.

This "acqui-hire" let Apple integrate the technology directly into the operating system. Workflow was transformed into the iPhone shortcuts app . Weinstein was a software engineering manager at Apple for six years, overseeing the development of Shortcuts and other proactive intelligence features until he left in 2023.

Kenneth Reitz and Python Requests

Kenneth Reitz, a photographer and developer, started the Requests library as a side project. Frustrated by the complexity of HTTP interactions in Python, he struggled with the standard urllib2 module while building a Convore API wrapper. That module required unnecessary hoops and abstractions. He built the first prototype of Requests in about two hours.

The developer community immediately loved the project, and it became one of the most downloaded Python packages. This success was a catalyst for Reitz's career. Heroku, a major cloud platform, hired him as a Python Architect for his open-source contributions. Given the freedom to pick his own job title, he famously chose "Python Overlord." In that role, he was in charge of the entire Python experience on the platform, continuing to build supporting tools.

Dan Abramov and Redux

In 2015, Dan Abramov wanted to give a talk at React Europe titled Live React: Hot Reloading with Time Travel. His problem was that he didn't know how to implement the time travel feature. To solve it, he sought a state management pattern that would allow replaying actions and swapping code. Taking ideas from the Elm architecture and existing Flux libraries, he created Redux as a proof of concept for his conference demo. The presentation was a massive success, demonstrating a new model for state management that quickly overtook existing Flux setups.

After his talk, Abramov met Jing Chen, a member of the React team, in the audience. When she asked about his interest in working at Facebook, Chen suggested the London office and immediately set up an in-person interview for him at the conference hotel in Paris. He joined Facebook's React Core team, and his side project became the industry-standard library for managing state in React applications.

Francois Chollet and Keras

François Chollet created the deep learning library Keras in early 2015 as a side project for his research into Recurrent Neural Networks and Natural Language Processing. Chollet prioritized developer experience and low cognitive load, designing Keras as an intuitive, high-level interface capable of running on different backends.

Soon after Keras's release, Chollet was hired by Google for computer vision research. Keras remained his personal project until Google publicly released TensorFlow. Chollet refactored Keras to support TensorFlow as a backend engine, which led to the TensorFlow team lead Rajat Monga finding him. In 2016, Monga offered Chollet a position on the TensorFlow team to officially integrate Keras into the platform. Keras is now the official high-level API for TensorFlow, making it the frontend for one of the world's most dominant machine learning platforms.

Chris Lattner and LLVM

Chris Lattner started the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) project as part of his master's thesis and doctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the early 2000s. It was released as open source in 2003, providing a novel, modular alternative to the monolithic GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), which rejected LLVM as a backend.

Lattner's work on this complex infrastructure caught the attention of Apple, which struggled with limitations in its existing compiler tools. His open-source efforts built relationships with Apple engineers who saw the revolutionary potential for their developer ecosystem. Apple hired Lattner after he finished his Ph.D. in 2005 to develop LLVM full-time. Apple integrated LLVM into its core development stack, and Lattner created the Clang compiler and the Swift programming language.

Sebastian McKenzie and Babel

Sebastian McKenzie started the project that became Babel while he was a high school student in Australia. He wanted to figure out how parsers and compilers worked. It functioned as a transpiler, letting developers write new code using the upcoming standards and converting it into the widely supported ES5 JavaScript format. The project took off immediately because it let engineers use modern syntax without waiting for slow browser vendors to implement support.

The project's rapid adoption and quality gave him a powerful portfolio, attracting the attention of major tech companies despite his lack of a university degree or professional experience. After working at Thinkmill and Cloudflare, McKenzie was hired by Meta in 2015. The company brought him on board to maintain Babel and handle their internal JavaScript infrastructure, effectively paying him to develop his open-source tool.

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The overarching pattern is that these projects weren't unified by luck, but a relentless commitment to great design, and not worrying about whether it would sell. Sometimes, a project being useful is enough for a company to take notice.

So if you have a side project, it's probably a good idea to treat it like it really matters. Stop waiting for permission to build and instead, choose a problem that genuinely frustrates you. Solve it with excellence, put it out into the world, and your code may become the ultimate career launchpad for you, too.