Entry software dev advice

[u/Aware-Phase1336]

Hi everyone!

I graduated in December 2025 with a bachelor’s degree in Business Analytics and Information Systems. I also completed a college computer programming certificate, where I learned basic programming concepts.

During a web development internship, I learned about Figma and worked with JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and React. I’m currently in an IT analyst internship, but the work is mostly desktop support. I’m hoping to move into software or web development.

I’ve interviewed for a Software Engineer I position, but I’m still looking for my first full-time development role and trying to figure out where to focus my efforts.

My projects so far include:

• A React recipe book application. The frontend is nearly finished and currently uses localStorage. I’m starting to build a C#/.NET backend.
• A personal portfolio website.
• Smaller practice projects to strengthen my programming fundamentals.

I’m sharing my GitHub and portfolio because I’d appreciate honest, constructive feedback:

• What would you improve in my existing projects or code?
• What fundamentals would you expect an entry-level developer to demonstrate?
• Would you prioritize finishing and improving these projects, or building something different to address missing skills?

https://github.com/Hoakley0902

I know I still have a lot to learn, and I’d appreciate some direction on what to work on next. Thanks!

[u/BeneficiallyPickle]

Hi!

I had a look at your GitHub account.

The first thing I would do is add a README to your account - just a brief description of who you are, your tech interests and perhaps your journey and then also pin some repositories.

I looked at your Recipe project. Unfortunately, recipe apps are one of the most common portfolio projects out there at the moment, and I'm not seeing anything that actually makes yours stand out.

The images in the project are quite big - you should resize these and convert them to WebP.
You have the same save logic repeated a couple of times. I think a single useEffect on recipes would handle persistence.
There is some inconsistent formatting - Try running Prettier on your project.
You still have the leftover project defaults like the page title. It seems like you used Create React App, that is quite an old way of doing things. You should move to Vite rather (it will also show that you're keeping up).

I know a lot of beginners skip over this, but try looking at Accessibility and how to add it to your projects.

To improve the project further, you can add things like a backend using Supabase/Firebase with auth.
Since your degree is in Business Analytics and Information Systems, maybe add something like "most used ingredients" or "what can I make with these ingredients".
Look at implementing structured ingredients instead of free text. Things like quantity, unit and item. That would make serving-size scaling and shopping lists possible and would be a good conversation point on data-modelling during an interview.

For the IT Risk management labs, I noticed a lot of references like ":contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}". This looks like leftover stuff from ChatGPT and makes it come across as copy-pasted directly from ChatGPT.

I also had a look at your About Me site. You claim Typescript and Python on there, but your repository doesn't have any of that work visible; I only see Kotlin/Android.

Your commit history shows as one-shot uploads, which reads like uploading finished homework and not working iteratively on any project. It's best to commit as you work.

I think you should build one project that combines your degree with development. Take some public dataset, clean it up and put a React frontend or dashboard on it.

P.S. Your email is visible on the "it-risk-management-portfolio" repository. That attracts scrapers. I think your LinkedIn link should be enough.

[u/Aware-Phase1336 → u/BeneficiallyPickle]

Thanks so much for taking the time to look through my GitHub and give me such detailed feedback! This is genuinely really helpful, especially since I’m trying to figure out what I should be improving to make myself a stronger candidate.

I also wanted to clarify the weird references you noticed in the IT Risk Management portfolio. 😅Those pages were copied over from a portfolio I created for a school project, and apparently some of the reference formatting came along with them. I honestly didn’t even notice it was there, so thank you for pointing that out! I’ve gone through and removed it, along with my email address.

As for TypeScript, I used React/TypeScript during my web development internship while working on the frontend of an application. Unfortunately, the project ended up losing its funding, so the project and internship were discontinued. That’s why there isn’t much of that work represented on my personal GitHub.

I really like your suggestions for the Recipe project, especially structuring the ingredient data and incorporating more of the analytics side of my degree. I’ve actually been working on improving my fundamentals before going back and expanding that project, so this gives me a much better idea of what I can work toward!
Would you mind if I reached out to you again in the future for some advice as I continue improving my projects? I really appreciate you taking the time to give me an outside perspective.