I had a bunch of school projects and some personal projects. The key thing I think was that I put up a website with screenshots of the programs / games and had code samples. Some of the code was really good and some of it was hacked together. The programs ranged from simple 3d games, CUDA vs CPU benchmarks, to graphical quadtree implementations. I didn't post all the code just samples, say a class and interface. Know your OOD! There are tons of jobs out there for programmers, if you're half way decent you shouldn't have too hard of a time finding a job. Also stay the fuck away from 3rd party recruiters. Also dice.com is your friend.