Portfolio repos prove you can build. Upstream merges prove you can collaborate with teams that maintain the tools production platforms run on. Over roughly ninety days I ran both tracks in parallel — portfolio releases, Dev.to writing, and OSS contributions to Prefect, dbt docs, Airflow, and Meltano — without backdating history or republishing private employer work.
Portfolio: br413.github.io · 90-day plan: github.com/br413/br413
Why upstream, not just portfolio
A strong GitHub profile needs more than greenfield demos:
Hiring signal — judgment inside someone else's codebase, not only your own repo boundaries
