I see a lot of people suggesting that one should build a github/bitbucket portfolio. What would be appropriate projects/code to put on there, considering the fact that I doubt my skills are enough to make any non-trivial contributions to the major open-source projects?
Pretty much anything. Even if you're just working your way through some tutorial on $SOME_TOPIC, put the code in a repo. Later, if you're applying / interviewing somewhere, it will still be of interest, even if it isn't some standalone, super-fancy, gee-whiz, flashy $WHATEVER.<p>If I were interviewing somebody who had only tutorial or exploratory code up, I'd just use it to seed the conversation. "I see you used a while loop here... is there a way you could do the same thing with a for loop instead?" or "You did this tutorial a year ago, based on what you've learned since then, how would you rewrite this bit?" and things of that nature.<p>Over time, as you start writing bigger and more functional apps or systems, you'll obviate the need for that stuff, but use what you've got.
I also have this question. I'm not contributing to open source (yet). It is because I have more fun in developing my personal projects. But most or all of them are not in Github (well, they are in BitBucket, but in a private repo).