Is this enough for a junior backend portfolio these days?
Hello. I'm scheduled to graduate with a CS degree from a four-year university and am preparing for junior backend full-time hiring in the first half of next year. I'm posting to get advice on the direction of my portfolio.
What I have prepared so far:
- Spring Boot + MySQL board CRUD (JWT authentication)
- A side project where I applied Redis caching and improved read performance by 40%
- Deployment experience with AWS EC2 + RDS (not Docker yet)
- Information Processing Engineer certification
What I'm concerned about:
1) I've often heard that my projects are too common, so do I need something to differentiate myself?
2) Do I absolutely need to include experience handling high-volume traffic? (I've done load testing with nGrinder at least.)
3) How deep should I go into CS knowledge?
I don't have anyone around to ask, so I'm asking here. I'd appreciate opinions from people currently working in the field.
3 answers
Why demand experience handling high-volume traffic from entry-level candidates? That’s a conversation for experienced engineers. It’s far more realistic to run load tests with nGrinder, identify bottlenecks, and clearly document the improvement process. The issue isn’t that a board CRUD is common—it’s that you can’t explain why you built it that way. If you can talk about a 40% improvement with Redis caching, how you measured that 40%, and what the cache hit rate was, that’s more than enough to make a strong impression.