I'm a 20yo college student...definitely feeling inferior for not being this proactive as a high schooler. But I'm currently in my second internship and I can definitely say I got hired because of personal projects such as this that highlight your skills and your interest in using those skills inside and outside of class/work environments, so great job and good luck!
This guy is selling out hard. Coming from a guy with a more active GitHub and projects, I don't see how this guy is any different than any American college kid.
He isn't much different from a run of the mill college kid. He just has a "startup style" website with gratuitous pictures of himself all over it. It's called "personal marketing." Apparently software engineers are supposed to do that nowadays - our code no longer speaks for itself.
code still speaks for itself. it just has to be framed and delivered to an audience. your side project that's sitting on your hard drive or even your unpublicized github account isn't doing you any good.
Um... I am old and I don't have time to work on side projects - I have dying parents I need to spend time with because I won't get that time back. I have friends that live all over the East Coast now and visiting them is very important and now time consuming. My point is this is incredibly superficial and the stuff that matters (his actual work) gets lost in all the needless fluff.
Plus I'm too busy getting my actual work done to "market" myself.