I'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/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.
What I find interesting is that if you look at my projects on Github, they are not particularly well written and my portfolio/blog is almost cringe-worthy in how pompous it is. But I think that the fact that I'm always dabbling in something and experimenting says something about me as a programmer.
If I had to do another interview, I think I might point them to this: http://mikekchar.github.io/core-wars-kata/ It's me implementing core wars, one pomodoro a day (got up to 65 pomodoros before I got side tracked on something else). It's nothing special. There are lots of problems with the code I wrote and I did lots of stupid things. But it'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.
I should actually get back to that project because it was really quite a lot of fun :-)
What I find interesting is that if you look at my projects on Github, they are not particularly well written and my portfolio/blog is almost cringe-worthy in how pompous it is. But I think that the fact that I'm always dabbling in something and experimenting says something about me as a programmer.
If I had to do another interview, I think I might point them to this: http://mikekchar.github.io/core-wars-kata/ It's me implementing core wars, one pomodoro a day (got up to 65 pomodoros before I got side tracked on something else). It's nothing special. There are lots of problems with the code I wrote and I did lots of stupid things. But it'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.
I should actually get back to that project because it was really quite a lot of fun :-)