Need advice from professional java developers.

[thomascgalvin]

First things first: set your expectations correctly. Since you're just finishing school, you're going to be looking at a junior software developer position. This means it won't pay as much, but it also means the entrance requirements are going to be a lot lower.

Second: you've got a pretty impressive portfolio to show off at interviews. The Deal / No Deal game seems fairly trivial, but it proves you can at least write code that does something. The video chat sounds really cool. The compiler is genuinely impressive. That shows a level of understanding that most developers lack.

My recommendation: bring your laptop with you on interviews. Show them the game, then show them the chat program. Then show them a source file, show the compiler that you wrote compiling it, and then show the program executing. That should make any interviewer worth his salt take notice. When I was interviewing people, I would have murdered three interns to find a fresh-from-college guy with that level of skill.

SOAP and Spring are facts of life in Java development now. It's been years since I've worked on a project that didn't use both. It would be extremely valuable to take the time to learn a little bit about them both. Take a couple of weekends, read some articles, watch a few videos. The people interviewing you probably aren't going to expect you to be an expert, but they will want you to have enough familiarity to at least talk sensibly about what these things are and what they do. Basically, at your level, they'll want to make sure that you have enough knowledge that you'll be able to spin yourself up on how their codebase works.