I finished the bootcamp in March with zero commercial experience and a portfolio that felt embarrassingly thin. I spent the next few weeks applying to anything with "junior" or "graduate" in the title: 47 applications total over about two and a half months, mostly through LinkedIn. The response rate was brutal. Most companies ghosted me, a few sent automated rejections within hours, and I started to wonder whether a bootcamp certificate was worth anything at all in a market full of CS graduates. The thing that changed everything was a side project I almost didn't publish. I'd built a small open-source tool on top of the Spotify API that generates personal listening stats. Nothing revolutionary, but I was proud of how I'd structured the code and documented it. I posted a Show HN on Hacker News mostly to get feedback, and it took off unexpectedly. Around 200 stars in the first month, some nice comments about the architecture, and a handful of people opening issues and pull requests. I was refreshing the GitHub notifications like a slot machine. About two weeks after the post, an engineer at a Madrid startup starred the repo and then DMed me on LinkedIn, saying the queue management pattern I'd used had caught his attention and that ↓
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