Building a Compelling Portfolio
Suggestions and Improvements to Stand Out From the Crowd
A professional portfolio is more than a resume or personal website. A portfolio describes someone's entire body of public work and experience. It goes beyond a single artifact.
For most people online, visiting Google and searching your name is the fastest way to see broaden your perspective about your portfolio. If you can find references to your likeness, so will others. Of course, we prefer people visit our more curated content, but that isn’t how people browse the internet.
The following outlines the key parts of a technologist's overall portfolio. Over time, they stack up and fill out to form a complete picture of someone’s work.
Claim Your Profiles
Popular Online Profiles in Technology
- Github
- Medium
- Product Hunt
- AngelList
- Stackoverflow
Consistency
Keeping things consistent is the simplest way to improve the quality of your portfolio and make it easier for viewers to get oriented as they navigate through your work.
Almost every profile has these pieces that can be matched:
- Name
- Bio
- Photo
- Username
Are you interested in find a unique username across all platforms? This tool makes finding a unique username fast and simple: https://instantusername.com/
Improve the Look of Your Portfolio
Creating a more polished presentation reflects a level of professionalism. Fortunately, you don’t need to design or create it from scratch. There are libraries, themes, and templates that allow you to increase the visual aesthetic of your portfolio.
Buy a Theme (Instead of building your own)
Add Better Artwork
Improve Your Copy Writing
Write Code and Content
No amount of organizing or decorating can compete with pure output. Building a portfolio involves putting in the work and making meaningful contribution to our craft.
Everyone starts out feeling somewhat embarrassed with what they create but it gets better over time. Excellence follows effort.
A healthy habit that serves early stage professionals well, and helps them stand out, is writing.
Simple Writing Prompts
- From _____________ to Software Engineer
Example: From School Teacher to Software Engineer - Life at the Intersection of _____________, _____________, and _____________
Example: Life at the Intersection of technology, entrepreneurship, and social impact. - My First 3 Lessons as a Software Engineer
- From Code School to Career in Technology
- What Most Employers Miss from My Resume
Provide a Better Experience
Using explainer videos and highlight key contributions provides added value that most people overlook.
- Add a 2–3 minute walk-through for each portfolio item.
- Add a 3–4 minute introduction video that guides people through your personal website.
- Include links to specific commits and pull requests, instead of just linking to source code.
Try Loom, and excellent tool for screen recordings: https://www.loom.com/
Next Steps
Allow the following list to serve as some simple todos to improve your portfolio.
- Film an introduction video and add it to your personal website
- Gather 2–3 references and add them to your personal website
- Push all projects to Github (bonus points for adding repo descriptions and README)
- Claim your username on public profiles
- Update Linkedin to be clear, instead of clever
- Match your Name and Photo across all public profiles
- Setup a Medium account and publish 1–2, short pieces of content
- Add an image of your Github activity graph to your personal website
- Go write more code! (and push it to Github)
Was this helpful? Check more information and suggestions in Code School Book: Overcome Imposter Syndrome and Kick-Start Your Career in Tech.
