I'm in my fourth semester of Computer Engineering and I'm unsure how to prioritize my preparation for internships and campus placements in third year. Right now, most of my time is going into LeetCode. I've also built a basic CRUD blog with React and a weather app in Flutter, but I'm not sure how to move beyond small projects or understand the structure of larger open-source codebases. What skills, tools, and types of projects should I focus on next?
2 Answers
Spend time getting comfortable with Git and general version-control workflows. Learn branching, pull requests, resolving conflicts, rebasing, reviewing changes, and writing useful commit messages. These skills make contributing to open source much less intimidating and are also expected in most development teams. Alongside that, keep practicing data structures and algorithms consistently rather than making them your only preparation.
LeetCode is a useful foundation, but interviews usually cover more than algorithms. Choose a technology stack that appears in job listings you’re interested in and build a slightly more complete project with it. A project with authentication, a database, deployment, testing, and a clear README will teach you more than several tiny demos. Also make sure you can explain your design choices and the problems you solved.
I’ve made a React CRUD blog and a Flutter weather app, but larger open-source projects still feel overwhelming. I’m not sure how to understand their structure or where to begin.