You often hear that "a to-do app will not impress anyone", but that is not quite right. The problem is not the subject — it is having nothing to say about it.
The four things people hiring look at
- Does it run — it works locally by following the README. That alone puts you near the top
- Traces of judgement — you wrote down why you chose that technology
- Commit history — built up gradually, rather than uploaded in one go
- Awareness of operating it — error handling, tests or deployment; any one of them has had attention
What your README must contain
What problem the app solves, how to run it, and where you got stuck and what you chose. With those three, the impression you make before anyone reads the code changes enormously.
"I considered implementing authentication myself, but weighed the learning cost against the security risk and adopted an existing library." Writing that alone marks you as someone who can make a decision.
Growing a small subject
Even a to-do app becomes plenty to talk about once you stack multi-user support, search, tests, CI and deployment on top of it. Going deep on one project is vastly more efficient than hopping to a new one.
How to get experience of working in a team
Anything you build alone will inevitably lack experience of reviews and conflicts. 4peiron's Team Development plan exists to fill exactly that gap.