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🎒 Portfolio & Career Strategy

How this repository converts six months of learning into hireable signal. Update it as you complete each project.

The thesis

Recruiters skim; engineers read code. This repo gives both groups what they want: a clean front-door README + pinned flagship for skimmers, and tests, CI, ADRs, and honest notes for engineers who dig in. The daily commit history itself signals discipline.

What each artifact demonstrates

Signal hiring managers look for Where this repo proves it
Problem solving exercises/, algorithms/, interview/coding-challenges.md
Idiomatic, quality code projects with golangci-lint + go vet green in CI
Testing discipline per-project test suites, -race, coverage, integration tests
Architecture knowledge capstone hexagonal design + docs/adr/
Documentation/communication this whole system, project READMEs, diagrams
Git/professional practice Conventional Commits, PRs, tags, releases, changelog
Consistency & grit the commit heatmap and 180-day streak

Per-project portfolio playbook

For every completed project, fill this in (store it in the project's README.md):

Resume bullets (action + tech + impact)

Use strong verbs, name the tech, quantify where possible.

  • "Built a concurrent web crawler in Go using a worker-pool pattern with context cancellation and rate limiting, processing N pages/sec with zero data races (-race verified)."
  • "Designed and shipped a REST API (Go, chi, PostgreSQL, sqlc) with JWT auth, migrations, and testcontainers-based integration tests achieving X% coverage, deployed via GitHub Actions CI/CD."
  • "Architected a multi-tenant SaaS backend using hexagonal architecture, gRPC + REST, Redis caching, and OpenTelemetry tracing; documented decisions in ADRs."

Interview talking points (per project)

  • The problem & why it's non-trivial.
  • One architecture decision and the trade-off you made (link the ADR).
  • One bug/race/perf issue you debugged and how (profiling, race detector).
  • What you'd do differently at scale.

Skills demonstrated (tag list)

Go · concurrency · REST · gRPC · PostgreSQL · Redis · Docker · CI/CD · observability · testing · architecture

Profile-level actions

  • Pin the capstone and one or two strong projects on your GitHub profile.
  • Write a profile README that links to this repo as your "Go journey."
  • Each flagship project: README with problem, architecture diagram, run instructions, screenshots/GIF, and a "lessons learned" section.
  • Publish 2–3 short blog posts / LinkedIn updates at month milestones (learning-in-public compounds reach).
  • Keep a one-page [résumé bullet bank] aggregating all project bullets here:

Master résumé bullet bank

  • Project 1 — …
  • Project 2 — …
  • … (fill as you go)

Mapping skills → job descriptions

Most "Go Backend Engineer" JDs ask for: Go, REST/gRPC, SQL, Docker/K8s, microservices, testing, CI/CD, observability. The ROADMAP is deliberately built to check every one of these boxes by Month 6.

⬅ README · Prep with interview/