Hey everyone,

I will get my computer science degree in less than a half year, and I will need to seek a job in that field, so I am looking for getting a job before it to get some expirience.

The main purpose of this topic that I need some advice from you guys. I noticed people like boxboxbox, AbduCt, waraholic, carteblanche and few others are very educated in this field and might tell me how was it for them in the begginning of job applying.

I tried to google stuff like this, but I always end up on some idiotic site\video where some guy is explaining programming in layman`s term, and concluding that coding is easy, everyone can learn it in weeks and get a job same day after passing online tutorial. (yeah, right!)

So basically, below is my knowledge at the moment.

Have worked in following:

C - (most experience in it so far, had it from highschool, where I learned basics, on university I expanded it on some bigger level)
C++\Java (oop) - Had a subject in those, passed it without problem, learned basics of abstraction, can pass standard interview questions (what are classes, objects, methods, instances..), but never had actually liked OOP and never went on further than this.

Web-based:
HTML(5)\CSS(3) - Had some nice expirience with it, like most of the people, so I am good with it.
JS\JQuery - Passed the EDX tutorial, made just one project (website with bunch of menus, gifs, other possibilities, nothing special to someone who is working with it daily. But I am pretty sure I understand concept of it, and what I do not know I know properly how to google\stackoverflow things

Database:
SQL - Also basics, can write E-R diagrams, work around in pgAdmin, know most of the commands in it. But problem is that I have never connected any of my programms with database like this


With basics I mean that I worked in any of those 30+ days, not that I have read something on internet. Non-mentionable things are the ones that I spent less than 10days in (php\apache, python, C#, ASP.net , other frameworks...)


Projects:

This is the thing that I am worried about.
Applying for a job now implicit uploading some projects, and I dont have any of it that I am proud.

Web:
So far I have made some basic web-site, non-dyinamic , not worth uploading something like that.
Applications:

Not long ago I started a project, but didnt managed to finish it due the lack of knowledge (or ideas). I wanted a script that will be on browser, and whenever I watch some stream movie, it get name of the movie, remember the link of the website\movie, and would remember exact time mm:ss where stream was on before shutting down the explorer. I failed to complete it because on different sites, the movie name would be located in some other tags (fixable) , but didnt have idea how to remember minutes\sec on actuall video (only idea was to print screen it, but that is not user friendly ). Might get my hands on it during winter breaks.

Unix Shell implementation in C - well I implemented a shell if any of you worked in UNIX, that I had an application where you could write "cd, ls, kill PID, who, mkdir, rm, mv..." and it would simulate exact the same thing if you were in some unix OS.

Compiler - stable one , used it as a summer project, had a lot of help from stackoverflow, but I did it on my own way.

Also , done many mini-projects that simulates multithreading, pipeliines, hash tables, search algorithms in 100k items, etc.

I think none of this projects would interest future boss\company, and I will need to think of something bigger.


Also to add on this up, I have good math knowledge ( instead of doing projects , I would spend up my time solving problems (more than 50+) on "Project Euler" site, and have a lot of expirience in data structures (big O , linked lists, hashed array tree, binary tree, B-tree\red-black tree...).
I am also familiar with agile software development and know how does organizing in scrum, xp, kanban works.

Last 2 years I am working for a telecomunication company. There I have learned a lot of about computer networking (projecting them and how do they works in lowest level).



What I would hear from you, is what should I definently improve?
Also ,I am looking forward to see how much knowledge did you have before getting your first job, what projects did you show.

Also when you applied, did you know all the stuff they have set as requirement?

Thanks everyone that will leave response, looking forward to read them.

If you created your own compiler which analysed and lexxed source code and produced by recode then that is a pretty big project that an employer might be interested in. If it was just some wrapper around gcc, not so much.

Think of something that people could use in the real world. Bots are huge at the moment so why not a modular bot framework which accepts hooks/plugins for different networking protocols.

Or take a problem and solve it. For example distribution for hash cracking. Many hash crackers don't have the ability to spread the workload among many hosts.

There's lots of things to choose from.