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What do you build to show off your skills?

2 points by randomnumber314 ↗ HN
The majority of the code I've written was for a company which was acquired. When applying to freelance or responding to recruiters I get the "let's see your code" question.

I have built nothing of note.

So my question is, what type of projects/apps could a person undertake to improve their skill set, while developing a repository of showcase worthy code?

5 comments

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onion2k
Something relevant to the sort of job you want.
randomnumber314
My move toward freelancing is a way for me to work on different projects to find what sort of job I want.
lsiunsuex
Curious how many recruiters actually look at what interviewee's actually build.

I've spoken to quite a few recruiters lately (1 every week or so for the last couple months) and I'll tell them "look at project x - it's the best of what I've done" and their just like "uh huh, uh huh. tell me more about it"

dude - if you'd just look at the site, you'll see. And I know they don't look because I generally monitor the site while on the phone and see no one even resembling them viewing the site.

That said - just build stuff. Take any well established app idea (group chat, restaurant finder, note taking app, etc...) build a clone, and put it somewhere so people can see it. If you want to share the code, put that there also (generally I don't show code until I'm at the interview)

randomnumber314
Makes sense. I get the feeling that recruiters want the code to pass on to employers for review.