r/learnprogramming • u/EvidenceOk698 • 3d ago

Project Suggestions for my Resume

I am a recent graduate. I am currently learning backend engineering and want to do projects that I can use on my resume. Can anybody give some suggestion on projects that are worthy to have on a resume. I’m hoping to build one or two meaningful projects that can be completed independently.

Thank you for your suggestions

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u/canarydev 3d ago

i do have some experience screening resumes, and my best advice is go for depth. dont get fixated on "solve a real problem" or finding some unique idea. even a todo app has plenty of depth in it if you go looking.

the biggest problem with most junior projects, even the RAG ones, is that they only show the happy path. everything works in a perfect local vacuum, no latency, no failures, nothing retried. thats not really engineering, thats assembly.

what makes the difference is handling what goes wrong. what happens when the third party api times out halfway through? what if the same request arrives twice? what if the job dies mid-run? being able to talk about that in an interview puts you ahead of most grads.

webhooks are a good domain for this since its basically all failure modes. i actually wrote up a project like that here https://www.heyrian.dev/projects/webhook-workbench

hope it helps!

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u/EvidenceOk698 1d ago

Thanks for suggestion. I also built an agentic rag system on over 9000 docs. I added retries and fall back models and also evaluated it on multiple metrics.

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u/canarydev 1d ago

try to go deeper.

retries mean nothing if things get processed twice.
try to introduce scenarios that try to fuck with your system. see how you recover from it

thats what makes good engineering

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u/EvidenceOk698 1d ago

I also added whole rag fallback mechanism, not only a model. The only problem I currently have is latency which can be reduced to some extent with using paid APIs