If I can't judge you by your code, how should I judge you? Now, that's not to say that I shouldn't take other things into consideration, like your experience at the time. Obviously I'd never expect a junior dev's code to look like someone with 10 years experience. And yes, if you're working at a place with terrible coding standards, and for some reason I have access to that code (most of the time those places aren't producing open source code), you can explain why everything is static public or whatever. That's fine. It's not like you can't still write good code that is static public... show me how you write code that is still clear and concise and isolated etc etc even within the restrictions of the coding standards.

Definitely, you can and should tack on some personal information about the circumstances around the code you show to people. I have stuff in github that is half-baked. No big deal. Instead, I say "here, this is an example of my work that I consider to be high quality, and is an example of the code I would write for you if given the chance. That other repo is just some stuff I was messing around with, and I never fully put in the time to make it correct, because it was just a proof of concept."

And as for personal issues.... sorry, but this is life, and you might have those when you're working for my company. And I need you to be able to at least do an acceptable job regardless.

I'm hiring a coder. I'm going to look at your code. Just like if I'm hiring a cabinet maker, I'm going to look at his cabinets. If he says "sorry I was tired that week" and shows me crappy cabinets, I'm going to worry that he might be tired on the week he builds my cabinets.