Software development is all of those things. You need the engineering experience to know what to do. You need the science to know ways to / not to do things. An

Software development is all of those things. You need the engineering experience to know what to do. You need the science to know ways to / not to do things. And you need the creativity to put them together. Is your "portfolio piece" spaghetti code or well-thought-out modules? Is it doing something recursively that shouldn't be? Do you have elegant code or brute-force solutions? Is it write-only? All of these can be seen in a portfolio or side project if you choose to look.