Building a QA portfolio from scratch — what actually got me interviews

I spent 8 months building a QA portfolio while working a non-technical job. Here's what got callbacks vs what was ignored: **What didn't work:** - Automating a fake to-do app from a tutorial - A GitHub repo with 50 tests and no README - "Skills" sections listing 15 tools I'd touched once **What worked:** - A complete test framework with a real open-source app as the target (I chose Gitea). Full README explaining decisions, CI that runs on every push. - A written post (on my personal site) walking through a specific debugging session — a flaky test I investigated and fixed. Companies could see how I think. - A contribution to an open-source test framework (small PR, but real) **The portfolio that got me hired:** 3 things: one complete framework, one written piece, one open-source contribution. Quality over quantity, ruthlessly.