Portfolio
Both beat sitting idle. But contributing to open source and building your own product prove different things to an employer — and which is right depends on what your CV is missing.
When you're trying to build a portfolio without a job, two routes get recommended constantly: contribute to open source, or build your own product. People argue about which is "better" as if there's a universal answer. There isn't — they're good at different things, and the right choice depends on the specific gap in your CV. Let's compare them honestly so you can pick deliberately instead of by vibes.
Contributing to an established open-source project has a genuine, specific strength: it shows you can work inside someone else's codebase — read unfamiliar code, follow contribution guidelines, respond to maintainer review, and ship a change that fits an existing system. That's close to what real engineering jobs feel like, and it's hard to fake.
But it has real friction. Getting a meaningful contribution merged into a serious project is slow and competitive; many newcomers spend weeks on documentation typos or never land anything substantial. And from a recruiter's quick scan, a thin contribution history can be hard to distinguish from a tourist's. Open source rewards persistence, and it can be a frustrating place to start when you need proof quickly.
Building something yourself has the opposite shape. Its strength is that it shows end-to-end ownership — you took a problem from nothing to a working, shipped thing, made all the scoping and design decisions, and finished. Finishing is a rare, prized signal, and a live product with real users is concrete in a way a merged PR sometimes isn't.
Its weakness mirrors open source's strength: it doesn't prove you can work in a team or in an existing codebase, because you controlled everything. And solo projects have a notorious failure mode — they sprawl, never quite finish, and a half-built personal app proves less than nothing. The discipline to actually ship is the whole game, and it's easy to lose alone.
Diagnose the gap. If your worry is "I've only ever worked on toy projects and never touched real, messy code," open source addresses that. If your worry is "I've never shipped anything complete that people actually use," your own product addresses that. Most job-seeking juniors actually have both gaps — which is why neither route alone is fully satisfying, and why people bounce between them without either one quite landing.
The shared blind spot. Both routes have the same weakness: nobody vouches for you. An employer still has to take your account of a solo project on faith, and a merged PR doesn't come with a person who'll speak to how you work. The missing ingredient in both is a credible voucher — and that's the thing that most moves a hiring decision.
There's a third route that captures what's good about both and fixes the blind spot: real work on an existing live product, with a team and a mentor. You get open source's "work in someone else's real codebase" and your-own-product's "ship a complete, used-by-real-people thing" — plus the one neither offers alone, a credible person who watched you and will vouch for it.
That's the shape of The Academy. You join a live Irish software project, take a bounded piece of an existing codebase, ship it under a mentor over about four weeks, and graduate with a public reference at a verifiable URL. It proves you can work in real code (like open source), that you can finish and ship something used in production (like your own product), and — uniquely — it comes with the voucher both routes lack. Free, and faster than grinding for a merged PR or hoping a solo app gets noticed.
Open source and building your own product aren't rivals; they're tools that prove different things, and either beats idleness. Pick by the gap you're filling: messy real codebases point to open source, end-to-end shipping points to your own product. But notice that both leave the same hole — no one vouching for you — and that the highest-value move is the one that proves teamwork, shipping and earns a reference at once.
Real work in a live codebase, shipped and used, with a public reference at the end. Free. Cohort 1 is forming now.
Apply to Cohort 1 →