Just want to say I support your willingness to work and improve yourself. On the part of "a year's worth of weekend projects" might I suggest going for quality rather than quantity.
Back when I had a developer position, when it came time for hiring, my boss would hand-select his "top picks" from the resume pool and ask us (the developers) to give a general audit of their work.
For me, looking through all the apps, there was never anything robust. The codebases proved nothing more to me than the candidates ability to follow a ruby on rails "setting up a todo list" tutorial.
I got accused of being overly harsh but I think you need top standards when hiring.
Anyway the point is its very rare that a candidate will have production quality apps running in the wild. And its even more rare that those apps have any more substance than you'd get following a paint-by-numbers rails tutorial.
Thanks! By 'weekend projects' I really meant two or three projects drawn out over several months. I've started working on one but it's at the bottom of my priority list right now, that'll change in a few months when I'm done with my thesis.
I've also come to realize how skewed your perspective is based on who you're surrounded by. I'm one of the best in my CS department which made me think that job searching would be easy, but now I see that I'm the best of a small group that isn't that spectacular to begin with. Really wish I'd taken the harder path four years ago and gone for a better/larger school.
Back when I had a developer position, when it came time for hiring, my boss would hand-select his "top picks" from the resume pool and ask us (the developers) to give a general audit of their work.
For me, looking through all the apps, there was never anything robust. The codebases proved nothing more to me than the candidates ability to follow a ruby on rails "setting up a todo list" tutorial.
I got accused of being overly harsh but I think you need top standards when hiring.
Anyway the point is its very rare that a candidate will have production quality apps running in the wild. And its even more rare that those apps have any more substance than you'd get following a paint-by-numbers rails tutorial.
Don't be one of those guys.
Best of luck!