Mine did, but as a junior as with probably many others. The react based website was a demo in itself and it also was a portfolio demoing my other projects. It

Mine did, but as a junior as with probably many others. The react based website was a demo in itself and it also was a portfolio demoing my other projects. It landed me my first part-time job in the field after I had been in university for around 6 months. At that time I had been really productive with kinda clever and cute projects - for example a desktop app that could search powerpoints and pdf files with keywords and present you the resulting pages in a nice-ish UI. (edit: java to parse the files and an Electron app to orchestrate it and provide an UI. It was shitty but it worked.) After I had been at uni for 1,5 years and a part-timer for a year I got several offers from some pretty cool IT companies when on job search. I’m sure the site with a decently sized portfolio helped then too: I had some nice-ish projects considering my junioirity and could demo them on the site. I took up one of the offers and still remain there. Haven’t updated the site once after I got this job, since I haven’t found that much motivation for personal projects anymore. :(