metastew

Every morning, I check HN by typing 'Hacker News' into Chrome's address bar and usually find it sitting on #1 spot. Today, it completely vanished from the first page and the #1 spot is occupied by www.thehackernews.com.

Any idea why?

Hi, I'm a student at a technical college for Information Technology program and I'm going to be doing programming concentration for next year. As part of the program, each student is required to do a COOP term, however we can have the option of working on our portfolio instead.

So here's the backstory, recently I've applied to a few tech companies around my area to be their intern, but so far I haven't heard back from them. I probably should mention that this area is somewhat barren of tech jobs. I'm not keen on the idea of working for someone for free, especially when I have bills and school to pay for. So I wanted to get started with a few webapp ideas of my own this summer and put them into production so that I could make passive income while I'm in school, and as a bonus, beefing up my portfolio.

But here is where I'm hesitant to go forward with the portfolio idea, should I keep looking around for tech companies for internship or go ahead and work on my webapp ideas? Would I be hurting my chances after graduation by forgoing internship?

Thanks HN.