Five years back, my Della [0] project got me hired. It was a Secret Santa app built using Django. They also noticed Rockstar [1], a joke project, and I wasn't expecting anyone to bring it up. However, they liked how I was managing the issues and pull requests.
Also, I have two side projects which seem to get a lot of attention from other developers, and they have reached out to me to hire:
- fast sqlite inserts [2] - I am experimenting with inserting one billion rows as quickly as possible for a test database
- caskdb [3] - an educational project which teaches you to build a KV store from scratch