I would love to have your honest opinion on my portfolio

Career Advice
#1

Hi everyone,

I would love to have your feedback on my portfolio website.

I don’t have many major projects (like full stack MERN apps), but I am looking to build them and add them to the portfolio website in the coming weeks.

More than anything, I would love your opinion on the layout, colours, and if you see any bugs at all.

The link is: https://portfolio-aburto22.vercel.app/

Please be brutally honest!

Thanks a lot for your help!

Cheers!

Alejandro

#2

Hey there! I think it looks top-notch but I found your project list far too long. I suggest only putting your 3-4 best projects on the homepage and then have a separate page for ALL your projects. Other than that it looks great :+1:

#3

i might have to steal some styling tricks and effects :wink:

#4

Thanks, great idea. Will definitely create a separate page for all projects.

#5

I did a quick skim of your resume, and found it pretty solid in terms of UI/UX.

Your portfolio states you are a MERN/full-stack developer, but your main project looks to use Firebase. I skimmed through your other projects, and didn’t see one that used MongoDB. Maybe I just missed it?

Firebase’s Firestore and Real-Time Database’s are more of an API service rather than a full-on traditional database. The biggest difference being those 2 are locked into Google’s platform and control. Where as a traditional database (like Mongoose, or a relational one like MySQL) can be installed locally, and managed by you or someone else, as they are software.

Furthermore, both of Firebase’s “database” offerings are incredibly limited in terms of functionality and are charged on a per-use basis. This limits their use in a few key use-cases, such as analytics and reporting, where large scale reads are unfeasible as you pay for each item read. This also means you can easily fall into a Firebase horror story if you’re not careful.

I’d suggest building out a true full-stack app in place of the Firebase one if you want to sell yourself as a full stack developer. If not, your still a flexible and capable front-end developer with solid design skills.

I love the dark mode, it’s a shame it doesn’t carry over when clicking on “learn more about this project” or survive a page refresh. (I’d use localStorage to save what theme is set.)

Keep building, keep learning :+1:

#6

Thanks for your comment! I will take a look at the dark theme, it should carry over as I am using local storage. Maybe there is something I got wrong somewhere in the code.

Thanks also for sharing the fire base horror story, it is terrifying indeed! I do to polish some minor full stack apps and put them on the site, and of course the next step is to build a proper full stack app. I might have gotten a bit ahead of myself with the text in the website.

Cheers!

Alejandro

#7

I rechecked and realized that it was due to me using an incognito window making the theme go away on redirect between your portfolio and the project page, which forced page refresh.

Without incognito the theme stayed :+1:

#8

Looking on mobile and the portfolio site looks excellent,

Only feedback is better to have one or two substantial projects rather than lots of small fcc projects

#9

Thanks for double checking! but actually there was an error on the code, so now it should work (I was not checking the localStorage value when loading…).

Thanks for the feedback. You are right, it makes more sense to keep all small projects apart. I will create a separate page as recommended by you and Cy499_Studios.

Cheers!