I’ve become aware of how important it is to provide a portfolio of things to share with prospective employers. Having a Github profile that shows off all the Gists and public repositories you’ve contributed to serves as a perfect portfolio piece.

Most of the work I’ve done has been on private systems however, and I’ve discarded the code, because I don’t own it and don’t want legal trouble. So what can I do that is practical, helpful, and/or fun!?

Here is my list of pet project ideas that I plan on doing in the future.

• Pop Culture Faker - There is a tool that outputs fake names, business names, phone numbers, addresses, etc. called Faker. Often I find myself using names like ‘Bob Barker’, or ‘Joffrey Baratheon’ in my tests. It would be cool to make an alternative version of Faker (or FFaker) that pulls from common names of celebrities, fictional characters, etc.

• Gemfile Annotator - I remember hearing about a gem that would annotate your Rails models. I want to make one that adds the name, description, and Github project URL for each gem inside of your Gemfile, like so:

  # Figaro
  # Simple Rails app configuration
  # https://github.com/laserlemon/figaro
  gem "figaro"