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What do you build to show off your skills?

The majority of the code I've written was for a company which was acquired. When applying to freelance or responding to recruiters I get the "let's see your code" question.

I have built nothing of note.

So my question is, what type of projects/apps could a person undertake to improve their skill set, while developing a repository of showcase worthy code?

( 5 comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:What do you build to show off your skills? by lsiunsuex on Friday September 04, 2015 @11:43AM (#10171167)
Curious how many recruiters actually look at what interviewee's actually build.

I've spoken to quite a few recruiters lately (1 every week or so for the last couple months) and I'll tell them "look at project x - it's the best of what I've done" and their just like "uh huh, uh huh. tell me more about it"

dude - if you'd just look at the site, you'll see. And I know they don't look because I generally monitor the site while on the phone and see no one even resembling them viewing the site.

That said - just build stuff. Take any well established app idea (group chat, restaurant finder, note taking app, etc...) build a clone, and put it somewhere so people can see it. If you want to share the code, put that there also (generally I don't show code until I'm at the interview)

Re:What do you build to show off your skills? by randomnumber314 on Friday September 04, 2015 @11:53AM (#10171222)
Makes sense. I get the feeling that recruiters want the code to pass on to employers for review.
Re:What do you build to show off your skills? by onion2k on Friday September 04, 2015 @11:17AM (#10170995)
Something relevant to the sort of job you want.
Re:What do you build to show off your skills? by randomnumber314 on Friday September 04, 2015 @11:31AM (#10171085)
My move toward freelancing is a way for me to work on different projects to find what sort of job I want.
Re:What do you build to show off your skills? by geoff-codes on Friday September 04, 2015 @11:26AM (#10171048)
I write homebrew formulae.