Re: How do you show off your work to prospective clients?

[jettero]

I interviewed a few top internet companies (where I didn't get hired...) and I learned that they had downloaded my CPAN stuff to examine. They had meetings about it.

My advice would be to do a little hobby programming to show off your style and skill. Put that on CPAN.

Even if it's not of the same scope and caliber of your closed source work, it will give them an idea. Most likely you will have learned things, in a generalized sense, that you can share with others -- who might then benefit from your showing off.

[Burak]

Yes uploading to CPAN helps I can assure you that, but it must be worthy to upload IMHO. Being served from CPAN.org does not transform crappy code into some beauty. And one can always use the public repositories (GitHub, BitBucket, LaunchPad, SourceForge, etc.) to serve code and have some sort of portfolio page.