tl;dr I need to make a programming portfolio but I'm struggling with justifying it to my brain
Hey, so... there's a thing that's been bothering me for a long time. I've never been able to "fit in" at most jobs. I don't really have "a thing I'd enjoy working in" which, in my case, is a problem because I just can't give up more than a half of my time to something I don't care about, it really messes with my brain and I can't stay in that situation for long.
Programming caught my attention because it relies on stuff I'm quite good at. Solving problems, some creativity, more detailed work too. I have a few online courses done so I'm not totally clueless etc. I have an idea of how searching for a job looks now and other basics.
Now, for the main course: I'm trying so hard to find a field to stay in but for some reason it's weirdly difficult. I think it's because I'm not sure what this or that position really looks in day to day life. I was interested in C# and backend the most but I'm not sure anymore. Is it only working on web pages all day long? I can see it's usually commerce and I don't like that too much. I'm open to other languages too, that's not a problem.
On top of that everyone says "do a portfolio" and they're right because that's probably the only way to showcase the skills a person has but that's where things start to get tricky. My mind just refuses to do a project for the sake of doing it, straight up "nope" and it just doesn't want to cooperate. I tried to look into open source projects to help someone else but they're too advanced, I'm in that weird void between courses and real life applications. I tried to ask people in beginner groups if they'd like to make something together but no one answered, nobody I know needs an app for anything too so it's no use.
I think it's more neurodivergency related thing than strictly tech. Trouble with decision making, motivation, many people don't understand that.
My reasoning behind all this is that if I find a project that's needed by other people, I'd be able to complete it. I haven't found anyone with a similar issue yet though.
oh. I forgot to cover a bit more of the portfolio angle. The closest thing I've probably managed to a portfolio is just this one ancient project I worked up where I was reading lots of serialized publications on websites, but wanted to be able to read them on my kindle, offline, instead. So I worked up a python script that would download the serialization, either from the main table of contents, or by feeding it the first page and then having it track down the "next" and just scrape the contents. So I've this project that ballooned a bit, that is basically just a web scraper to epub python script.
Then I've several times done Advent of Code as a problem solving thing, although I've never made it past about 10-15 days. I enjoy the challenge for a bit, but generally pick a language I'm not super comfortable in, and then learn more about that language while working through the problems. I greatly expanded my python library knowledge one year, and have worked on building up comfort in Haskell and Rust via those challenges.
Those are really the closest things to a portfolio I can offer, since I put all of them on my github. So finding a set of puzzles you can program your way through in various languages, or some other problem that you have that you can use programming to solve might be ways to shortcut the logic on building up something public to display.
I participated in AOC last year, I think I made it to day 5, 2 stars for each puzzle. I have the solutions on github, I wrote a description for each of them and tbh I'm proud of myself that I did the puzzles and the notes too. It's pretty neat.
Nice! I would definitely suggest referencing that as your current available work when prompted for a portfolio then.