Details for Portfolio

My portfolio is super lackluster. I have gotten my first developer job, worked on freelance projects, but I find it incredibly difficult to sell myself on my portfolio site. Are there some ways to find examples of what to put here.

My portfolio site is here. http://jbull.co

I know it needs more details, something, I don’t want to spend a ton of time on it, but you know.

To be perfectly honest, I’ve been a developer for years and I don’t even have a personal website, let alone a sexy portfolio.

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I used to have a portfolio site as well, but I have found that it was difficult to maintain. Any typo found on your portfolio site (which, with a quick glance at yours, I sadly did find a few) can come to betray you to a future employer. Everything, absolutely everything, you give to someone and say that you have built is used as a way of judging your abilities as both an employee and a programmer. Even if your programming is spot on, if they find extremely incorrect grammar or constant typos in work you give them, they are going to view that as an extremely bad sign. This is especially true in a portfolio. Mostly because a portfolio is viewed as “current work.” Which means everything they see on the website itself (not necessarily the projects) is what they would expect from you if they hired you tomorrow.

So, in my mind there are two very good options for developers to showcase their work:

  1. An extremely well-done portfolio that is constantly updated and showcases everything perfectly (no broken links, typos, etc.).

  2. A Github account with a slew of projects for employers to look through and evaluate.

I have opted for the second, which has done me good in my career so far. It allows employers to focus on my coding specifically and not my ability to maintain an updated picture, flashy CSS, and up-to-date links on my website. Since making this switch I have gotten much more attention from employers. This is not because my portfolio was bad, but because it distract them from what really mattered. Which was: Can I code? My Github answers that better than my website did.

I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions about it. My Github is github.com/zzbrent.

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I would agree that having a GitHub site is a great alternative, but if you want to reach out to non-technical people such as freelance clients or business managers, having a website that shows projects is great.

For my website (https://isaacabrahamson.com), I did a couple case studies and linked some freeCodeCamp projects I did on GitHub. It’s really simple,–nothing more than case studies, project links, and a contact form–but I get a lot of compliments about it.

So, if you are interested in just getting a developer job, I would go for GitHub. If you want to reach people who aren’t developers, be ready to put a couple weeks-months in to make a decent portfolio.

Now to your actual question not just replying about needing a portfolio.

The internet is literally full of examples. I’ll let you in on a secret, I steal ideas from other people’s websites all the time.

Look at my website. Then look at this one (I have it in wayback machine as he built a new one shortly after I started on mine). You’ll notice the layout is similar, but I didn’t blatantly copy his site.

In fact, you will find that most people copy layouts and design from other people. I could almost guarantee you Mr. Farley copied ideas from his site from others, or he used ideas he learned in the past that he copied from others. That’s how we all learn. There’s nothing wrong with taking things others come up with and twist it for your own advantage. For example, Fortnite basically created the Battle Pass. How many other games now have “Royale Passes” or “Rocket Passes” or whatever. It’s not limited to the software or design industry either. Take a look at this article:

So, don’t be afraid to steal some ideas from others. It’s really perfectly fine unless you go against copyright laws. Here’s some great places to get you started:

As to selling yourself. Just be honest. State what you know and what you are passionate about. Show what you have completed. You don’t have to make yourself more than you are. As to your current website, your info is great. I think you sound like a pretty cool person, and anyone one else that is normal (or even not-so-normal like me) should like it.

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