I finished the bootcamp in March with no commercial experience and a portfolio that felt very thin.
For the next weeks I applied to anything with "junior" or "graduate" in the title: 47 applications in about two and a half months, mostly through LinkedIn. Almost nobody answered. Some companies never replied at all, a few sent automatic rejections after a few hours, and I started to ask myself if a bootcamp certificate was worth anything in a market full of computer science graduates. The thing that changed everything was a side project that I almost did not publish. I had built a small open-source tool on the Spotify API that creates personal listening statistics. Nothing revolutionary, but I was proud of the structure of the code and of the documentation. I posted a Show HN on Hacker News, mostly to get feedback, and it grew much more than I expected. About 200 stars in the first month, some good comments about the architecture, and a few people opening issues and pull requests. I checked my GitHub notifications again and again, all day. About two weeks after the post, an engineer at a Madrid startup starred the repository and then sent me a DM on LinkedIn. He said the queue management pattern I used had interested him, and that ↓