I&#x27;m not the OP, but my portfolio and side projects have outright given me jobs before.  Quite a long time ago I had a small project done in Java, but I built an XML file format for tracking all my stories, and an XSLT script for generating a burn down chart, calculating velocity, etc, etc.  OK... XML and XSLT... I said it was a long time ago ;-).  I provided a link to the Java code as proof that I could do some basic Java&#x2F;Swing stuff, but everybody who saw it commented on the simple project tracking.  In the end it got me a job with a small group who were having difficulty with that kind of stuff.<p>What I find interesting is that if you look at my projects on Github, they are not particularly well written and my portfolio&#x2F;blog is almost cringe-worthy in how pompous it is.  But I think that the fact that I&#x27;m always dabbling in <i>something</i> and experimenting says something about me as a programmer.<p>If I had to do another interview, I think I might point them to this: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mikekchar.github.io&#x2F;core-wars-kata&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mikekchar.github.io&#x2F;core-wars-kata&#x2F;</a>  It&#x27;s me implementing core wars, one pomodoro a day (got up to 65 pomodoros before I got side tracked on something else).  It&#x27;s nothing special.  There are lots of problems with the code I wrote and I did lots of stupid things.  But it&#x27;s an honest exposition of how I write code.  I recorded everything with asciinema and if you increase the speed 3 times you can watch a pomodoro in about 5 minutes.<p>I should actually get back to that project because it was really quite a lot of fun :-)