[scarface_74]

Let me tell you about a story behind the advice of “personal projects” and contribution to open source.

Last year after leaving AWS, I had quite a good open source portfolio. When I was working for AWS Professional Services, it was quite easy to put everything we did after we sanitized it through the internal open source approval process and get it published to AWS Samples

https://github.com/aws-samples

And then I forked it to my own profile. I actually used 5 of the 8 projects at my next job after forking them to our internal repo.

I was also a major contributor to a popular open source AWS Solution in its niche

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/

I had both in my profile. The only company that cared was a niche of niche in AWS where it was their specialty.

Companies barely look at your resume. They definitely aren’t going to take time to look at your private profile.

[WD-42]

I’ve done plenty of hiring and I definitely do look at personal profiles and websites. In fact it’s the first thing I look at after experience. I can also say that a personal project of mine was a huge factor in landing a previous job. Showing competency and interest in the industry you are applying for goes a long way.

Sorry your “open source” contributions didn’t get you far. I looked at your examples and it appears to be niche documentation for AWS services, so basically all in the service of amazon? Cool.

[scarface_74]

There are 6700 repositories showing all types of code

https://github.com/orgs/aws-samples/repositories?type=all

I purposefully didn’t call out my 8.

The “AWS Solution” that I was one of the top 3 contributor to has at least 2700 people/organizations who downloaded it and I know it’s used by at least 8 state agencies - I implemented it for four agencies when I was at AWS.

Every single one of my other projects were used as part of real world six and seven figure implementations.

You think in today’s market where every req has hundreds of applications they are going to take the time to look at open source projects?

I didn’t need to nor do I have any desire to work on open source work or any other projects related to computers when I get off of work. I haven’t written a line of code that I didn’t get paid for since graduating from college in 1996.