Building a Compelling Portfolio

These resources are part of a 1-hour presentation to help software engineers and developers improve their portfolios. Checkout our meetup to catch this topic and more.

Claim Your Profiles

Popular Online Profiles in Technology

  • Linkedin
  • Github
  • Twitter
  • Medium
  • Product Hunt
  • Reddit
  • AngelList
  • Stackoverflow
  • Facebook
  • Instagram

Keep Things Consistent

  • Name
  • Bio
  • Photo
  • Username

Tool for finding a unique username across many platforms: https://instantusername.com/

Improve the Look of Your Portfolio

Buy a Theme (Instead of building your own)

Add Better Artwork

Improve Your Copy Writing

Write Code and Content

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, entreprenuership, 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 Better Experience

  • 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.

Excellent tool for screen recordings: https://www.loom.com/

Take Action Today with Next Steps

  • Film an introduction video and add to your personal website
  • Gather 2-3 references and add 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)

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