I only had one project — but i explained the hell out of it

I thought I needed five polished portfolio pieces. Turns out I just needed one good project with real explanation.

I built a budgeting web app after watching a YouTube tutorial. I made some tweaks, added dark mode, improved the mobile layout, and deployed it.

That was literally all I had.

But instead of pretending it was some brilliant invention, I wrote a long post explaining every decision I made:

• Why I used React instead of Vue
• What I struggled with in local storage
• How I debugged a bug that took me 4 days
• What I wish I’d done differently

That post got shared. People commented. One hiring manager DM’d me and said: “You think like a real dev. Want to talk?”

We talked. I got an internship. Then I got hired.

You don’t need 10 projects. You need one thing you’ve actually learned from — and the ability to explain it like a human.