I think you're missing the "stand out" part of this. I've done a lot of tech interviews lately, which is where I get at ability to do the work. But when a hiri

I think you're missing the "stand out" part of this. I've done a lot of tech interviews lately, which is where I get at ability to do the work. But when a hiring team is trying to pick among the people who do approximately as well on that, then other factors can help. At that stage, I definitely like to see things that indicate people are excited about something enough to just make a thing (a library, a small project, a blog post). If that's related to our domain or tech stack, even better. But even without that it's a plus in that it's a sign I can just give them a user problem or a technical issue and trust they'll go off and do something good with it.