Hi guys,

Just thought I'd get some thoughts on this, hopefully some of you can help.

I'm a comp sci student, have spent 2 semesters on C and another 2 on C++ so have learned both languages quite well, although we never escaped console based programs so I've no experience in GUI programming or anything of the sort. Have covered some web stuff - HTML/Javascript/CSS/JSP although never too in depth. Reasonably good with SQL/relational databases too.

My problem is: I've nothing to show for it. I've good grades in college but this is fairly irrelevant to a future employer according to everything I've read, and am at a point whereby I want to start developing a "portfolio" to show future employers.

The biggest issue is I've no idea which direction to go in. I've an interest in security and tbh I think it's the direction I'm ultimately headed in, however next year I've to get an internship and will need to be able to impress the decent companies as a software developer.

So I'm basically looking for suggestions as to the best direction to go in order to maximize my time this summer (I've 5 days a week to myself to work on stuff) and end up with applications/products to be able to show to future employers.

All suggestions appreciated.

"will need to be able to impress the decent companies as a software developer."

What kind of companies, and what kind of software?

It is hard to give people suggestions of what to do. Re-invent the wheel projects get boring and don't show off any creativity.

You said you are interested in security. That is kind of a difficult area because it's not flashy. If it is doing it's job, you don't know it is there. I've been part of a demo where we did pings to show that we were encrypting network traffic. Believe me, while it might be technically challenging, it isn't going to catch anyone's eye.

When this question comes up, I always end up giving the same answer. Think of something that you do every day that is slightly frustrating or you think isn't efficient. Think about why that is the case and how it could be better. Make the thing that implements the how.

When I use to be involved in recruiting, I didn't especially care about personal side projects that people had said they'd done. I didn't have time to look at it until late in the interview process where we were already leaning towards hiring the candidate anyway.

What we did find impressive were actual contributions to Open Source projects. If you manage to get involved and submit real code that gets accepted into a project - that implies a certain level of quality and skill.

Hrm. My experience has been the opposite. Recruiters have asked me about my portfolio and side projects that were publicly available, and it was a major selling point in me getting my new position as a BI architect.

The amount of effort that gets expended reviewing candidates is directly proportional to how senior that position is.

Edit: TBH though, even for senior positions we rarely reviewed people's side projects until late in the game. It's just not practical to examine code when you're at the early phases of weeding out resumes or doing screening interviews.

True enough, I suppose. But I think you can weed out most of the chaff by a simple review of their resume. When you have 7-8 possibilities, I would think that checking side work / open source contributions would help figure out who you want to interview.

This is all FWIW; I have done very little interviewing for technical roles.

Thanks for the replies thus far all.

With regards to side projects/portfolios, everything I've read recently indicates that there's a growing shift towards focusing on candidates with their own portfolios, given that it's never been easier to not only set up your own applications with user base, but to monetize it also. Having such a thing would also help me stand out amongst thousands of candidates who'll be going for these internships next year as we'll all most likely know the same languages, be versed in the same data structures and algorithms, have similar grades etc etc.

One such article here

Guids, with regards to what kind of companies, well, I'll be primarily applying to places like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Zynga (all big companies here in Ireland). They all run software engineer internship positions and are much sought after. Obviously there's quite a spectrum of software there.

Is iphone development still a good route to take? There seems to be a lot of focus on Android and Windows Phone 7 development recently and iphone seems to have taken the back seat.

Smart phone and facebook apps seem to be a "flashy" way to go, along with being an easy route to take into getting a user base, but I can't help feeling I'll be missing out on something if I don't learn to create normal applications that utilize databases or similar.

Mobile development will be a huge component of what makes you desirable in the near future, yes. Android and iOS will likely dominate the mobile industry for some time; I highly doubt Windows mobile has the hold on the market that you think it does. Smartphone carriers are not supporting it with any real enthusiasm at the moment.

You will need to be the best of the best to secure a position at one of those companies, and they will expect you to have created significant impact in the open source community and/or have created your own projects that have gotten a lot of traction.

I will soon be working for a late-phase startup that has a pretty solid hold on a niche social networking opportunity, and I secured the position largely because of my experience as an economist and not a developer. It takes all kinds of experience and exposure to contribute to those types of companies.

I didn't really get that companies are focusing more on hiring students with portfolios out of the article you linked to, but I just skimmed it.

I don't want to seem down on doing side projects. They have lots of benefits: better resume, better knowledge, kind of fun, potential for money making,... All good things. But doing a personal project only to improve your chances of getting a job isn't particularly efficient.

The reasons we mostly ignored side projects (and I should add that we were a small-medium sized software company doing continuous hiring) are:
1. It's easy to put something on a resume. You don't actually have to know anything (or have done anything) to write it down.
2. Most personal projects are less relevant to the working environment than even school projects. At least in school projects the final product is evaluated by someone other than the developer and there's usually a team aspect to the project.
3. Whatever code exists isn't guaranteed to be original or owned by the candidate.

The last stage in our interview process was a small coding project that we defined. By giving out the project ourselves and talking over the solution we got a much better feel for how well the candidate actually did.

I mostly agree with this. The key point being that the project has moved beyond just a fun little project that you wrote.

Although, most of my friends/peers that got positions at the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, ...) didn't have significant personal projects. They were just really smart and had good grades from a good school or had great references and killed the interview.

I agree that doing a side project for the explicit purpose of adding it to your resume. However, it is a great way to learn new languages/frameworks/technologies. You can then use this real experience to list those things on your resume and be able to support the claim by answer questions about them in interviews.

I read the article and that is not what it was talking about. It was talking about companies buy applications that had been developed by students and, in turn, those people getting jobs. Getting an internship and using a side project as an example of your work on your resume is a completely different thing.

Why not get an internship now during the summer?

I agree that employers I have interviewed with didn't really care about my side projects. But I learned more about software engineering/coding from it than any comp sci class. My current job is c++/unix/IPDS almost the opposite from my side project which was C#/windows/Video Game. A lot of it is the same since it's just data structures and algorithms at the heart of everything.

Thanks for the insights guys.

To be clear, it's not just for the purposes of getting a job that I'm interested in developing my own projects, I also want to enhance my knowledge but at the same time, have something to show for it at the end...2 years of console based programs has been a little boring tbh.

IrishThug, part of the problem is that there's so many languages/frameworks/technologies that I'm confused as to which direction to focus my energy on for the next 2-2.5 months. If you had to pick one, after having gained experience in the ones I listed initially, which would it be?

Obviously there's a huge spectrum of technologies and languages to learn, however obviously some are more relevant than others, so as IT professionals I'd be interested to know which ones you think are the most prominent ones going forward/would enrich a CV?

There seems to be quite a push lately towards C#, Objective C, PHP/SQL, .NET, Python etc as opposed to Java, Perl, etc.

With regards to getting an internship this summer, I've looked around but don't have the experience for the majority of those on offer in terms of technologies covered. The exception is Microsoft but they do their recruiting/internship applications for summer way earlier in the year.

If it was me I'd do Objective C. It'll let you do some fun things, be useful, and help you think about programming in a different way.

I'd also never discourage doing some Python work.

Brace yourself for some hardcore nittery.
PHP and SQL are not intrinsically linked, there are SQL libraries in essentially any language you can think of.
.Net is not a language, it is a framework that can be used to run code that has been compiled to an intermediary form (think of it as Microsoft's JVM). C# is the most popular, but you can also do Visual Basic or a number of dynamic scripting languages.
Java is very much still a live. There is this little thing called Android that you might have heard of.
Yes, Perl is ugly and terrible. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
/nit

As for an actual suggestion, C#, Python and Java are all good options.

Remember, you don't have to do an internship at a big name company. People may put more weight to an internship from Google than they do Acme Programing, but an Acme Programming internship has more weight than no internship.