Portfolio reflection
Zoom out. You have a folder of real backend systems. Resumable uploaders, auth microservices, seat lockers, event-sourced ledgers, idempotent payment handlers, feature flags, a capstone microservices mall, and a production operations playbook. Every one of them has two solution approaches and a written tradeoff. Most engineers never build a single one of these.
To turn this into portfolio gold: Push each project to its own GitHub repo with a clean README. Write the tradeoff analysis you would use in an interview. Link the repos from a single index page so a reviewer can scan the whole story in one minute. The projects already exist. This is the packaging that makes recruiters notice.
When an interviewer asks you to walk through a backend you have built, pick one of these projects. The seat locker and the event-sourced ledger both work well. Talk for three minutes about the brief, the constraints, the two solution approaches, and the tradeoff you would pick. Senior interviewers love tradeoff talk. It is the clearest signal that you think like an engineer and not like a coder.