Open source as your portfolio

The concept of a “portfolio” is often associated with artists and photographers, where it is used as a tool to evaluate the skills and specialties of a person by seeing what they’ve done in the past. In software development, historically, there hasn’t been this same tool. You most often see employers use coding challenges in addition to credentials from a candidate’s resume or CV to determine the skills and capabilities of a software developer. Sometimes the strategy works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, and into the early 2000s, most software developers were considered “full-stack developers,” meaning they had competence in all areas of application development, from frontend design to backend coding, database management, and server installation and configuration. Software development became more specialized in the 2010s, with developers often more skilled in specific areas...