Ask HN: Should I create several small projects or one medium-size project?

2 points

6 years ago

I would like to demonstrate my understanding of different subjects like graphics, systems, networking, web, machine learning, and algorithms. If you were hiring, would you recommend someone have in their portfolio several toy projects or one large project showcasing all of the skills in unison? It seems my peers have taken the former approach, making public their experiments and copy-paste "hello-world" type SPA applications under fancy names and banners. I feel like this is largely a waste of time because hiring managers don't care about how well you can write chat application clones in different frameworks -- am I wrong?

I spend weeks evaluating and learning different technologies but I rarely if ever actually make these experiments public. Sometimes I create full applications but end up deleting the source code because they don't seem valuable enough to keep or share. I mean, why should I push yet another project that few people will ever use or want? They really serve no purpose other than indicating that I had enough time to perform an intellectual exercise.

Should I be making my experiments public for exposure? Would anyone believe me if I said I had experience with technology X but had no public code to show? I currently spend my time working on a single project composed of several smaller modules. I enjoy writing tests and documentation for it, cleaning its commits, and just making the whole thing presentable and high-quality. But if spending my time on a single idea is going to negatively affect my ability to find gainful employment, I think I should just stop preemptively, no? Maybe I could start by porting https://github.com/bradfitz/iter over to Rust.

I'm not really smart enough to quickly pump out dozens of high-quality projects and so I'm getting anxious because the market is struggling and my portfolio is looking... very bare. Honestly the anxiety is making me wonder if I should give up on software development altogether.