Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?
I can't speak for every company out there, but for us, we've discovered that resumes and whiteboard challenges are bad predictors of great engineers. So, we simply come up with a small project that's related to what we would have you work on if you were hired and give you around a week to finish it. You can use other people's code snippets online as well as any libraries you see fit. As long as the end result is good enough, we'd move you to the next step, which is to just test if you're a good culture fit. I know quite a few other startups are doing this as well, so maybe the method is becoming popular. I would recommend you research the companies a bit and see if it's even something they'd care about first. We wouldn't even ask you to explain a gap in the first place.