Same as with any other language, I suppose - it all depends on the company. The best thing one could have is flexibility. Not that you have to know everything out there, but you should be able to adapt to a new stack in a reasonable time.

I would try to at least superficially learn very different things that exist out there and are actually used.

Hmm ok. What about portfolios? What should a killer portfolio project look like?

I think it's also important to decide what type of work you would prefer to be doing. Clojure/Script jobs can vary greatly in terms of the business domain and the specifics of technology. Front end jobs (ClojureScript) are likely to be very different from some back end jobs. Some companies use Datomic but a lot more use some sort of SQL database (or one of the "no-SQL" family). Some companies lean heavily on cloud services, others not so much. Some rely heavily on messaging architectures or some form of distributed computing. Some are heavily data-centric, analytics. Each of those companies is going to be looking for something different in a candidate.

I've been a hiring manager for close to 30 years and the only people I have seen with a "portfolio" tend to be artists/designers, not software engineers.

Refresh my memory on what sort of work you've done in the past @U01KQ9EGU79? Has it been design/graphics heavy or has it been software development?

I would also like to add to the above that it's great to know not only the technical aspect of what you would prefer to be doing, but also its applied aspect. E.g. I prefer to work on projects that have to deal with genetics. Having even a little bit of domain knowledge and inclination to learn more go a long way.

@U04V70XH6 I’m new to Programming in general. My big re-introduction to it was using shell script to do a web scraping task about a year ago. I saved myself hundreds of clicks with that one and I loved the feeling of getting something to work. Before that though, I was hugely into music theory and linguistics (which are pretty similar in certain ways). I’ve sort of been drifting ever since I dropped out of college. I’m really starting pretty close to square one. When I was around 13 I tried learning C++ so I could make games. I was in way over my head and I lost my patience. Thinking programming wasn’t for me.

I’m considering going more towards front-end cljs development. Although tailwind is not industry standard of course, I think vanilla CSS isn’t too big of a jump as a lot of the parameters within tailwind classes are just easy wrappers for particular CSS properties.

As soon as I read "linguistics", something popped up in my mind. :) Just in case you ever need an idea for a small full-stack project to help you lean something and at the same time create something potentially useful for others, I think creating an interactive web visualization tool for Stanford Parser or something similar would be neat.

Oh, I never heard of stanford parser. Imma check it out! @U2FRKM4TW

Oh also, the reason I’m building a portfolio is precisely because I’m not college educated, nor do I intend to be.

@U2FRKM4TW is that generally a useful thing? I've used it a lot myself, but I can't think why a web version would be useful? I mean beyond this one on the stanford parser site? http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/ Not to suggest that you shouldn't do it @U01KQ9EGU79, it's a nice self contained project. I've done a bunch of stuff in this space, so feel free to PM me questions 😃... I'll help if I can! I'm just really curious what @U2FRKM4TW is seeing that I'm missing 😃...

As I said, it is potentially useful. At the very least, the already existing version could be extended beyond what it is now - from the top of my head I can think of navigable results, syntax highlighting, embedded documentation.

That's interesting, thanks 😃...