In my opinion, picking a library and trying to solve one of the issues in their issue tracker would be more helpful than running credo. It will force you to dive into an unfamiliar codebase and figure out how things work. This is an indispensable skill.

Hi, in that case why not consider contributing to a FOSS project?

I’ve been interviewing devs for many years, @BradS2S, and tend to view this as a very good signal. Modern software development is much more about communication and collaboration than churning out a project solo. OSS demonstrates those softer skills way more effectively than any resume, interview, or whiteboard puzzle.

Man, @dimitarvp has the right idea here. The thing that helped me the most in my career has been learning to sell. If you’re going onto job boards and sending a resume into the void, you’re going to lose, plain and simple. You need to be comfortable playing the role of the door-to-door salesperson and stand yourself up, right in front the rejection.

I’m not saying experience isn’t important. However, learning to write cold emails and talk the talk will get you further in life than any amount of open source PRs.

Learning this will get you interviews with people who wouldn’t even make eye contact with you across the bar. I did exactly that when my resume was complete dogshit(still isn’t great btw) and people started noticing me for the first time ever in my professional life.

If you have any questions feel free to ping me, I actually like coaching people on this shit.

@BradS2S My advice:

If you have been involved with programming in one way or another for almost 4 years now and have some projects you can talk about, just go out there and find job postings for junior engineers. You’ll learn so much more, so much faster by being part of a team. You might even find that you know more than you think and transition to a position as a mid-level engineer in just a year. Not only that, any real life work experience is better than none.

If you don’t have any projects to talk about, you should probably create a project from scratch. Build it up, start to finish, get it running in production, and get some real live users. This will be worth so much more than random contributions to any open source projects. The users can be your friends and family, the project can be fun or kind of silly. But there’s no substitution for creating something. No amount of books and courses can replace this.