this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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What's Better For A Project Portfolio: Build From Scratch Or Library Knowledge? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/programming
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I'm currently working on a project in C where I have a choice between using a library for hash tables or simply creating my own hash table from scratch.

What would look better on a Github portfolio from an employability perspective?

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Bad advice in this thread. As someone who spent half a decade building what (was) a quite impressive GitHub (github.com/dginovker), no interviewer or recruiter ever looked at it. This was after ~600 applications.

I also volunteered to be part of resume screening at two major companies. Not a single person in either company looked at GitHub repos.

To answer your initial question, use a library. Make cool things, learn good tech that is useful in the real world. You will never have a job where you have to reimplement a hashmap.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Almost my entire career I've worked in open source, so it's very easy to see what my technical work looks like. No one has ever looked at it.

When I have been on the other side, I have looked at the GitHub "portfolio" of junior applicants, but TBH, it didn't bring me much. There will always be lots of opportunities for improvements in those examples, but that's the point - I expect them to improve on the job.

More experienced developers will almost never have significant work on GitHub, and if they do, it's not a "portfolio", but just their past work.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Hmm, they've looked at mine. But it's not intended to be impressive, and I've switched to self hosting my version control anyways