Back in around 2004-2005, I was doing contracting work in Australia for a big retailer, maintaining one of their monolithic webapps that was built using C++, believe it or not. At that time, Ruby on Rails was the new hotness, and I was trying to learn that on the side.
When MacOS released their "dashboard widgets" framework back around 2005ish, I wrote a widget for RubyDocs and released it, and it got quite popular.
At the same time, a US company I heard about via the Rails mailing list was investing pretty heavily in Rails and, as a long shot, I applied there and mentioned I made that widget. It turns out they were all using it, and they basically gave me a job on the spot working remotely from Australia.
The experience I got in that job led me to get an job at Microsoft in 2007, and they moved me and my family to Seattle, where I still live to this day, though I left MS over five years ago now.