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what kinds of code projects to put in a portfolio

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-1 comments, last by Samith 10 years ago

I've been an engineer at a company in the game industry for about four years now, and I'm starting to think about looking for a new job. I've done some good work at my job, and I've got what I think is a respectable resume, but as I've only worked at one company it feels a bit thin. I'd like to fill it out with some personal projects to lend credence to my work experience claims.

But I'm not sure what to put on a portfolio website. My main personal project right now is a work in progress "game engine" that I sort of idly work on every now and then. While some small portions of that project are kind of interesting (the asset building pipeline works pretty well, IMO) the entire project is probably too large (and too incomplete) to post online and expect anyone to gather any meaningful sense about me from it.

So I have a few options:

  • I can post the whole thing online, even though in its entirety it's large and the amount of incomplete features would dilute the project's impact
  • I can take parts that I'm proud of and post snippets of code (ie: "Here's my asset building tool, it has features X Y and Z" or "Here's some shader code, it implements the X lighting model")
  • I can work on some smaller, completely self contained projects and post those instead (ie: "Here's a gamma correct mipmapping tool" or "here's a simple voxel based GPGPU raytracer"). My idea is that these projects wouldn't be world-shattering, but small and mildly interesting to prove I'm not lying on my resume. My main problem with this idea is that it's hard for me to tell what's too trivial of a project to be interesting

What do you think? Perhaps a combo of option two and three?

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