I'd recommend actually doing both. Find a good project and make it work well. By this process you will hopefully uncover and learn practical details, skills, p

I'd recommend actually doing both. Find a good project and make it work well. By this process you will hopefully uncover and learn practical details, skills, programming language, how to write high quality code... And learn Computer Science (algorithms, structures) to show that you are smart and can learn stuff and when given a problem you can solve it efficiently. When hiring, - we definitely check if you have something interesting on github - we ask both computer Science questions and then some more practical questions (e.g. if you are Web FE, then rendering some interesting situation, maybe optimizing page speed...)