Ask HN: Should I focus on building apps or practicing coding tasks to get a job?

Problem solving is a pretty important skill; very few whiteboard interviews address the day-to-day issues you'll see in a large production environment. Task organization is an extremely close second.

Get yourself a (public) cloud account of some sort (AWS, Azure, Google, etc.) and work on having some functional infrastructure (containers, DNS, applications, content delivery) along with the requisite monitoring and security.

Anything you do from that point should live atop that infrastructure, with the same expectations that a prospective employer might have when working on a production team (DevOps, pure dev, pure ops, whatever).

If you're young and beginning your career, start with coding practice. As you gain years of experience, the incentive and time you can afford to scruff your way through it keeps declining.

Keep building apps/websites/tools/scripts on the side (after works, weekends, day offs, etc.)

If you can pre-verify the need for your app by getting people to sign up for a mailing list or otherwise, then go for the app, otherwise get a job.