Choose a project that can run

A portfolio is more convincing when another person can read the project and reproduce the core result. Start small. A local DuckDB project is a good first choice because it does not ask a reviewer to create a cloud account or request warehouse access.

Good beginner projects answer one clear question:

• Build a daily revenue model from public ecommerce data.
• Ingest a public API and create a weekly activity report.
• Model taxi trips and add checks for duplicate IDs and missing fares.
• Compare a raw event table with a cleaned reporting model.

Use public, synthetic, or anonymized data. Never publish a company export, customer data, production credentials, or confidential SQL.