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Portfolio Projects
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The single most important section on your resume is your portfolio projects.
Projects are demonstrable evidence that you can do what you say you can do. Admittedly, there are ways to cheat - like generating AI slop projects, or stealing code and trying to pass it off as your own... but for the most part, good hiring managers can tell if you did that after they have the chance to talk to you.
Projects Should Stand Out
Too many entry-level developers build the same old stuff:
- TODO apps
- CRUD servers
- Spotify clones
- Tic Tac Toe games
These are good projects for learning, but they're not remarkable enough to grab attention. And grabbing attention is how you stand out in a fat stack of resumes.
In college I built a Python script that found "loudness spikes" in an .mp3 file. The end result was that a user could play a drum beat into a microphone, and get back the sheet music for it.
It barely worked, but it was a unique project, and I actually won 2nd place in a local hackathon with it. The point is, your project doesn't have to be perfect or crazily ambitious, but it should be interesting.
Your project should make people ask follow up questions like:
- "I wonder what technologies they used to build that?"
- "How accurate is the detection? I want to try!"
Project Types
Generally speaking, there are several main types of projects:
- A command line tool
- A web server
- A web app
- A library
- A game
- A native app (desktop or mobile)
Do not sleep on command line tools and libraries! Many developers think they need to build end-to-end applications to impress hiring managers, but that's not the case. Just solve an interesting problem, and do it well.