If you are indeed a good engineer you could do all those things on a single weekend: 1.) Sign up for GitHub, fork a project, and improve it 3.) Answer 2-5 har

If you are indeed a good engineer you could do all those things on a single weekend: 1.) Sign up for GitHub, fork a project, and improve it 3.) Answer 2-5 hard questions on StackOverflow 4.) Profit They just want to see your skill. You shouldn't answer "a ton of questions" on StackOverflow. Just answer a couple hard ones. Somehow prove that you've actually got stuff done over the last 13 years. There are programmers that just started to learned the skill a few weeks ago, with tiny, but active projects in their GitHub. ps. I hate when people say that they don't have something (GitHub account) that takes 30 seconds to signup for, is free, and is very important to solving their current issue. There's usually a deeper issue at that point.