I interviewed a developer once who was super junior on paper but had a side project of a fully featured desktop anime episode to watch/watched tracker with lots of library feature features.

Hire.

Interviewed another Dev who made arcade sticks as a side project.

Hired.

You can't teach passion. Hire all that passionate people you can. Tech stacks are irrelevant compared to the love of building things.

Also a great filter from the other side.

I was not hired once because I didn't have React experience, despite having years of both Vue and Angular and having led teams building non-trivial apps in both. IME focusing on such a minor detail like that means either a) you're going to be so pressured to get stuff out of the door they can't handle slightly lower productivity for a month while you learn the different syntax, and/or b) the person hiring you isn't technical enough to know this is a minor detail.

Either way, better off somewhere else :)

I actually quite like it when this happens from the candidate side of the table. I don't want to work anywhere that is so short term focused on "you need to have X years of experience with this exact language/framework or we won't even consider you." It saves us both a lot of time by realizing our values are clearly not aligned early on in the process.

I made something similar but for adult videos. I personally think it's technically impressive but it's obviously not something I'd be willing to put my name to.

I landed my first software job when I was 18 years old. I didn't have a degree or any professional experience in their tech stack, and the recruiter told me later that I was hired because of "my passion for Legos and foreign languages" (I was learning Swahili at the time, and one of my interviewers happened to be a former volunteer in the Peace Corps, who conducted most of the interview in Swahili).

I had a great experience at that company while I was in college, which also launched me into an exciting professional career. All of it wouldn't have happened without people like you.

The only thing I can imagine is that they were up against someone making a partyparrot generator.

Must've been this person: https://parrotify.github.io/

Hahaha, genuinely laughed out loud, thank you! (also, big fan of partyparrot, of course)

They realized OP would put them all to shame.

Thank you! Yeah, I totally understand and not taking it against them. It's impossible to always get the right impression and fit for the candidate (even if it was based on a few interviews and trial, like here). So I figured I'd make the best of the situation and share the project with others! Hoping to make some new connections this way, and maybe find an even better opportunity!

Yeah, this is pretty cool and they can fuck off.