Built a tiny CLI tool nobody asked for and it's the thing every interviewer actually wants to talk about
Made it to fix a dumb personal annoyance — renaming a batch of screenshot files with actual dates instead of the OS default. Two hundred lines, no tests for the first month, nothing impressive on paper. It's mentioned on my resume as one line and it's what every single technical interviewer asks follow-up questions about, way more than the "real" internship project I spent way longer polishing.
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AnonymousAnon Not the OP but did something almost identical with a screenshot renamer and never open sourced mine either — honestly think the interview value comes from being able to walk through your own decisions out loud, not from someone else reading the code later. Wouldn't bother polishing it for GitHub.
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AnonymousAnon Is it open source anywhere? Kind of want to see how you handled the edge cases on file collisions.
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AnonymousAnon The renaming-files-with-dates one is such a good example because it's small enough to explain end to end in ninety seconds, unlike "contributed to a large internal platform" which nobody can really follow. Small and finished beats big and vague every time in an interview.