Man, the job market for software engineers is rough right now. I'm back on the hunt for a new gig. Second time in just a couple of years. It’s a grind. The ghosting, the rejections… it never gets easier.
But earlier this week, I got a little lucky and found some inspiration. I saw a job posting that mentioned they were open to video applications. That got me thinking: why not use on of my own project to make interactive video applications? Figured it’d be a cool way to stand out, connect with the company, and show off what I can do in a more creative way.
So, I gave it a shot and sent out a few of these interactive video applications. And so far, the response rate has been shockingly high. Fingers crossed it keeps going like this.
If anyone else out there is struggling with the job search and wants help setting something like this up, just hit me up. Hang in there, everyone—we’ll get through this.
Really cool. Hoping to try this on my project. It relies a lot on chopping down vids programatically. Hoping this will help with workflow. Nice work. Great video demo too.
Many of us enjoyed the "If YouTube had actual channels" Show HN post last week. As developers of a similar project, we wanted to share our approach to building a simulated live experience. We’ve spent around 18 months working on this and have managed to add some advanced features, including content-based interactivity. We are super excited to be releasing both the live stream and the code behind it.
Our idea was to combine the communal watching experience of television with the modern trappings of the interactive web. If you go to the stream, you will be watching along with everyone else. You can click around, get more information on what’s in the shot, and even purchase what you see without leaving the page.
On the tech side, we learned a ton along the way. Today, we are sharing the code so others can hopefully learn something too. To be totally honest, the code embarrasses me. It's way too early to share this and far from a completed open-source project. It’s an extreme example of “doing things that don’t scale” so please do not expect to just fire this up and run it in production. However, it does demonstrate solutions to a number of hard problems we faced—for example, handling graceful updates to streams that are currently live and supporting reliable timed metadata.
We would love any feedback and will be hanging around here to answer any questions that may come up.