The HD Job fair is not a programming contest. Prepare a simple demo. There are in excess of 50 companies; you won't have time to explain complex concepts or demonstrate really cool features which require more than a couple sentence explanation. A cool feature which is considered state of the art is not necesssary to achieve credibility.

You can assume part of your audience will be at a hands-on engineering director level but a large number of participants will be HR staff who are identifying candidates for further contact.  They have a list of job needs which you can determine ahead of time by going to their websites. 

Here is an example of what some people are presenting and how to make the preparation easy.

I developed a search engine using Lucene, JS for the front end, and many many hours of cleaning data; reducing the dataset from 1Tb to approximately 5Gb.  The goal is not to demonstrate the entire project trying to explain the technical architecture and merits of design decisions in the system, nor is it a competition to try to show anyone I am a genuis programmer, which I definitely am not. 

I am going to demonstrate a simple extJS FE for reviewing emails, nothing fancy, about the same level of difficulty one would expect to see in a homework assignment. I developed this in a day and am using this for a demo. It demonstrates I understand the core Javascript programming idioms like event handlers, cross browser compatibility, css style rules, some cross site scripting issues and some server programming.

This is meant to show I have some competence with Javascript. It doesn't mean I am an extJS or Javascript expert, I have maybe 2 weeks of experience with this library; but I am willing to show I can get something done quickly and am open to questions about JS in general. I teach a basic Javascript programming class here at the Dojo on the side. 

If you don't have the time to do a demo but still need/want a job, feel free to come to the job fair. Please do register so we have an accurate count for breakfast on Sat.  Nobody here will tell you to leave if you don't have a demo nor will they ask you to pay. You are welcome to talk to recruiters and more importantly other people who are working in the field you are interested in for career and project advice. Feel free to use the dojo to work on your own project after the job fair is over. Set up a structure to help accomplish your goals.  Feel free to come to the dojo to take or teach a class. Even if you don't feel if you are a guru in a field try to teach a class to practice and develop your expertise. Partner with someone else here to help spread the workload.  The dojo is about practice. There are other ways to practice and have fun besides just working longer hours.

If you are a  student looking for an internship,  take the class project from your favorite class or in the field of interest closest to what you want to work in and present that! You can create a posterboard( get one from office depot ~$15), make some powerpoint slides and tape them on there. You can explain what your contribution was if it was a group project or you can present one you did yourself. The key is to explain the scope of what you did and be clear to your prospective hiring manager that you understand the scope of what you did.

We will do this job fair again so if you like you can visit on Sat and use it to get more information to prepare for the next one. Job hunting isn't a test of who is smart enough, it is all about the preparation. There are people at the dojo who are willing to help! And more importantly we are always looking for people to come and pitch in to help others!!! Good luck and feel free to come on by for moral and technical support. We are here!!!! 

dc