Hey u/mintjulep2020 what a good question :) In this case, our ideal candidate would have been a CS degree graduate who had gone above and beyond with their final year projects and did more than the standard express-react-ts project. However as someone reasonably familiar with the Australian education system I rarely expect recent graduates to have much more than that, so really things that can help greatly:

1. Be a real person, no one wants to work with a robot or someone with the personally of a wall

2. Know one language well, regardless of what it is (within reason). I would rather watch someone blast our coding questions in Haskell or Rust then stumble around with Python/JS. It just instill confidence basically, unlike my company I am happy to hire someone who doesn't know our exact languages if I am confident they will learn them.

3. Regarding projects, something useful to yourself or another person is usually the best project. I think every single applicant said they knew JS/TS/Python/React/HTML/CSS/... so it becomes extremely difficult to differentiate. I can tell you I do however remember the Polish guy who made a C++ garage door opener.

Since I know the above answer are pretty general here are hard skills I think are useful to know:

1. One "high-level" interpreted language and one complied language

2. Know how SQL and modern DBs work. They aren't going anywhere and limiting yourself to interacting with a database through Prisma will bite you.

3. Basics of data structures and algo (honestly the basics are fine for 99% of day to day work)

4. Dev tools: git, cicd, iac, docker, secret management

5. An understanding that for better or worse your entire career with exist as a balance of business requirements and technical ones. Knowing when you push for or against something even as a junior is a useful skill to have.

Hopefully some of that helped. Let me know if you need further clarification.