Portfolio projects that survive a fifteen-minute technical interview

Interviewers rarely have an hour. They have fifteen minutes to decide whether your project is yours, whether you understand trade-offs, and whether you can maintain it.

Scope small enough that you can explain data flow end-to-end: inputs, processing, outputs, and failure modes. A crisp README with setup steps beats a sprawling repo no one can run.

Rehearse three prompts: what would you refactor next, what you would measure in production, and what you would do differently with another week. If you can answer those calmly, you sound like a colleague, not a student.