No. 003: I can't tell if building things reads as prolific or unfocused.
Your problem
I've built four things in about a year. An LLM trained on me, a gumball machine with a spreadsheet inside it, a gamification engine, a price checker. None of them is a job. I can't tell whether that reads as someone who builds relentlessly, or someone who can't finish, or someone with an alarming amount of free time.
The reframe
The question isn't whether to build fewer things. It's whether they have one address.
Scattered across a site, four side projects are hobbies. Collected at a single URL with one visual system and a status marker on each, the same four things are a body of work. The difference is entirely presentational, and it costs an afternoon.
The working theory
Volume reads as unfocused only when the through-line is invisible. Name the through-line and the identical set of objects becomes an argument.
Mine took a while to see, and it was sitting in plain view: every one of them is an argument against the format I'm being evaluated in. The chatbot argues against the phone screen. The public problem-solving argues against the case study. The gumball machine argues against the deck. The index page argues against the résumé.
That's a point of view. Four unrelated toys is not.
What I'd do Monday
Build the index page. One line per thing, same type and colour as everything else, a live marker on each. Then say the through-line out loud in the intro, because a reader will not infer it, and you don't get credit for a pattern nobody names.
Add a greyed-out slot for the next thing before you've finished it. It costs nothing and it changes the read from "here's what I've done" to "here's what I'm doing."
What I'd need to know to be more sure
Whether the through-line I named is real or a retrofit. I found it after the fact, which is exactly how people talk themselves into a tidy story about a messy pile.
The test is the next thing I build. If it fits the pattern without being forced, the pattern was real. If I have to bend either the thing or the story to make them meet, I invented it, and I should say so and drop it.