Ship something which proves you have actual coding ability. Have it ready to talk about at interview, ideally in a fashion that can be demoed. I'd suggest sco

Ship something which proves you have actual coding ability. Have it ready to talk about at interview, ideally in a fashion that can be demoed. I'd suggest scope along the lines of "single-function web application which has a front-end, has a back-end, consumes an external API, and does one cool thing." Be able to talk about all of it; steer the conversation to whichever is your strongest suit. An interview is a conversation: if they don't bring up "Hey have you built anything recently?" you should bring that up. Personal opinion: the biggest problem with bright young engineers with substantial academic CS experience is not that they can't write heapsort on command. It's that they frequently have never built anything outside of "fill in this 5% of a toy problem" for undergraduate labs. It is possible you might be having an interview with someone who values hazing more than they value shipping, in which case you have my sympathy. If you think that is extraordinarily likely, be able to apply your knowledge of big-o and hash tables to decrease the run-time of an arbitrary problem which screamingly needs a hash table. If you have extra time, brush up on quicksort or heapsort.