Launch HN: Hatchways (YC S19) – Internships Instead of Interviews
I seriously hope you folks succeed. All the luck to you! Here's my non-traditional story:I've worked on my own personal projects for 10 years, always looking for new challenges. I've dropped out of college after 2 years since it was crystal clear to me that I learned much more when working on my own stuff. I would learn new things in college, but at a much slower pace. I guess it was useful to learn calculus...Anyway. Financially I never needed a fully paying job, so I could spend all my time doing my own research. From web security to docker to bsd to aws/gcp, I've managed to gather a lot of personal experience on many tools. Similarly, I went from PHP to Erlang to Haskell and back. For a brief period I even managed my own team!But now, 10 years later, I just started looking for my first job and boy, do I realize my resume is empty! I have some code on github but none of my projects are famous or noteworthy. So far, most jobs I've applied for said I'm not qualified, and I don't blame them if all they looked at was my CV.To solve this I'm working on (yet another) project, a distributed KV storage with built-in MQ capabilities, automatic clustering and transparent sharding, eventual consistency through the use of operation-based crdts, written in my favorite language for distributed systems (Elixir). Hopefully I can use it to get a job, but I think proving one's experience and knowledge should be easier.Interestingly, if I had gotten a job when I dropped out (~6 years ago), I would probably be a specialist/senior engineer on some specific tool, but I wouldn't have the range of experience I do today.Sorry if I digress, just wanted to share my non-traditional "case" (to be fair, you asked for it!)