How Many Side Projects Are Appropriate for a Junior Developer's Portfolio?
I'm a senior in computer science preparing for the second-half job recruitment season. I have three side projects so far, each with different scopes, and I'm wondering how to organize them in my portfolio.
1) A simple diary app (Flutter, Firestore, 2 weeks of work)
2) A shopping mall backend REST API (Spring Boot, JPA, MySQL, 1 month of work)
3) A real-time chat app (Node.js, Socket.io, Redis, 2 months of work)
From an interviewer's perspective, is three projects enough, or should I increase the number? Also, I've uploaded each project to GitHub with a README—would it be a good idea to make them available for actual code review? I'd appreciate any advice.
4 answers
I think three is enough. Quality matters more than quantity. In particular, the shopping mall backend and chat app have decent scale and a good variety of tech stacks. I recommend writing detailed implementation reasons and troubleshooting content in the README, and also submitting a PR to get code reviews.
I also passed with three projects when I was a junior. But a diary app might be too simple, so it could be better to add more features or replace it with another project. Since interviewers usually dig deep into one project, focusing on the chat app as the main one and improving its completeness is also a good strategy.
Three is a reasonable number, but it's important to emphasize in each project's README 'why you built it and what problem it solved.' Creating an environment on GitHub where you can receive code reviews is a plus, but not mandatory. If you're confident in explaining your code well during interviews, focus on quality over quantity.
I did 4, but 3 looks fine too. However, if you have time, how about adding test code to each project? In particular, having unit tests or integration tests for the backend REST API can leave a good impression during interviews. It would be even better if you also show test coverage in the GitHub README.