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)

• https://creativemarket.com/
• https://themeforest.net/
• https://themes.getbootstrap.com/

Add Better Artwork

• https://undraw.co/
• https://unsplash.com/
• https://icons8.com/illustrations

Improve Your Copy Writing

• https://hemingwayapp.com/
• https://app.grammarly.com/

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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