From a hiring manager's perspective what Ravi Bhavnani recommended (build a site) would impress me most. My main worry about the 5-year gap would be that you didn't find the technology interesting, especially with something as relatively simple as HTML/CSS, so it would be hard for me to hire you to do it at my firm. Building a working MVC site would go a long way - especially if you did some cool stuff with it, and double especially if you are able to say "look at the cool parts of my demo site - I really had fun learning how to do that." Smart people know that smart people can learn to do almost anything relatively close to their existing skill set in a week or two, that's why I hire developers who really love to code and show that by what they do in their free time.

Very cool :). When was this?

TRS-80 Model III in 1983. 8" floppies, 16K RAM. Got it from a business office when they upgraded - altogether ~$3K worth of gear + software. Learned QBASIC, got exposed to databases, had an outrageous non-WYSIWYG word processor lol. The printer was a mega-industrial very fast daisywheel unit which came in its own very large acoustic enclosure and still sounded like a truck going through when it ran.

I'm sorry that I seemed angry. That was not intentional and I do apologize. Of course I have also pirated much software in my lifetime. In fact my computer now is probably my first fully legal machine ever. It is good that you tell students about copyright respect, and also good that open source solutions are growing so the entire question of ownership can become moot. This is a discussion which has become very important to have.

I'm curious, how do you think it's cute to steal the work of others? Is it really a joke to you? What if you worked all day for something and then the boss didn't pay you? Would that be cute too? I suppose he could then go post on a blog "I stole the work of all my employees today :p" ... right? Stop it. Not only is it wrong, and you know that it's wrong, but stealing copyrighted material is drawing the attention of powerful authority whose solution to this very real problem will NOT be a solution any of WE PROGRAMMERS will like. By the way your post here was referenced in my regular email from CodeProject.com and I sent them an email that they shouldn't promote software piracy. Hopefully they will contact you or at least remove your posts - if they want to be known as serious, ethical professionals.