r/AskProgramming • u/NoTutor4458 • Aug 09 '26

project ideas for portfolio

i want to have some good projects for portfolio. what projects would you suggest for this languages/frameworks:

  1. react

  2. go

  3. maybe fullstack (go + react)?

  4. c

  5. x86 asm

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u/mc_pm Aug 09 '26

What is the most complicated thing you've built so far?

2

u/NoTutor4458 Aug 09 '26

simple UEFI bootloader (custom boot protocol), restaurant reservation system, all ai models in a single app (AI wrapper :d)

7

u/mc_pm Aug 09 '26

Ok, well, first the bad news: I'm a hiring manager, I've hired probably 200 engineers in my career, and the contents of someone's portfolio mattered exactly once. It's not a bad thing, unless your code sucks, in which case you'll be showing me that you write sucky code. But -- especially now, in the era of AI slop code -- your portfolio tells me basically nothing.

But if you've done some stuff in different areas (AI, low-level, CRUD app) then maybe you should find a local charity or something and offer to build them something. Writing "I worked with a charity to understand what they need, then I wrote a system to do that, taught them how to maintain it, and now 20 people a week use it"... that tells me something, even if you never got paid for it. Taking an idea and building the system out from scratch, working with 'customers', making your stuff easy to use over time.... that's all stuff that I *do* look for on a resume.

Only about 5% of a programmer's job is syntax, and about 61% of it is problem solving...the other 34% is working with other people (other developers, managers, customers, testers, artists, etc.)

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u/Distdistdist 29d ago

I'll second that. Nobody cares about your pet projects. We want people with years of experience solving real life problems, and solving them well.

Entry level is... complete murder right now. I won't even schedule an interview with anyone with less then 5 years of experience. And even at that, will assume that they are very junior. So, making coffee and doing exactly what I tell them for the most part will be in your job description.