
Personal Website for Programmers - naresh1318
https://github.com/Naresh1318/Topaz
======
userbinator
Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for
a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same
obviously distinctive style of site showing pretty much a subset of the info I
can already see from your GitHub account, except the latter doesn't require JS
to view.

If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look _personal_ \--- not
"I cloned someone else's I found on GitHub and changed the names and details
to mine."

~~~
whycombagator
> Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make
> for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with
> the same obviously distinctive style of site

> If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not
> "I cloned someone else's I found on GitHub

To me that seems petty and I feel you'll end up isolating a good portion of
the talent pool. Anecdotally, I can only recall a handful of personal sites
that appeared to be truly personal (by your definition) and not all may have
been.

For whatever reason this reminds me of:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/67e0hl/whenever_i_ge...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/67e0hl/whenever_i_get_a_stack_of_resumes_i_throw_half_of/)

~~~
_hardwaregeek
I don't think that parent comment means "you need to spend hours slaving over
a personal website for me to look at". A unique site could be raw HTML with
some links to projects. Or you could just not have a site and let your
GitHub/LinkedIn/resume speak for itself. A cookie cutter site like this is
arguably worse than no site because of how generic and uninspired it is

~~~
kreetx
Exactly, and it is actually the content, i.e text, that matters, not the
design (unless the person is a designer, at which point the homepage should be
really good).

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tasuki
If the point is that it's not necessary to have a _static_ website to achieve
reasonable simplicity - point taken!

From a graphical point of view, it looks a little off to me (I'm not a
designer, so take with a grain of salt). The whole website is flat while the
boxes have these little shadows. Too many things are centered: the menu on the
left, the boxes on the right. The headers on the right side are too close to
the left-hand menu.

Also I can't see where the links are pointing by hovering on them.

~~~
naresh1318
Thanks for the feedback. I'm not a designer either. So, I'm not quite sure
about the psychological effects centered content has on people. It looked
aesthetically pleasing, so I kept it. In fact, you can modify the entire home
page if you just want to keep the grpahQL and database part.

~~~
speedplane
> Thanks for the feedback. I'm not a designer either. So, I'm not quite sure
> about the psychological effects centered content has on people. It looked
> aesthetically pleasing, so I kept it.

This thinking can be dangerous. Aesthetically pleasing != good design, too
often it can be the opposite. You definitely need to understand the
"psychological effects" your page or app has on its users. First, you have to
put yourself in their mind, then can you start building, then go back and
iterate.

I know this may be a hobby project without much budget, so find a designer
friend and bring them on board. It's very difficult to do this in a vacuum.

------
_hao
I use Hugo. It's easy, static and there are large number of themes. Also
writing content in Markdown is great.

~~~
martin_a
I switched to Hugo from WordPress. Best decision I made this year so far. :-D
But I still need to look into theme development.

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ajnin
The design is broken, on desktop below a certain width the menu disappears,
and there is no hamburger menu either so once you're in a section you're
stuck. Also the links are not links, you don't know where they are going and
the url does not get updated which makes it impossible to have incoming links
other than to the root of the site. It also behaves unusually, if you drag a
link it just behaves as a click.

Honestly if I came across this site in the wild I'd quickly pass to something
else.

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flukus
The demo site ([https://naresh1318.com/](https://naresh1318.com/)) doesn't
work without javascript loaded from CDNs, it just renders some empty
(moustache?) templates.

Is over complicating simple web pages the impression you want to send?

~~~
naresh1318
I am working on removing on all the CDNs and also reducing load times. CDNs
over here get vuejs and other libraries that make my work easy. I was planning
on getting something working rather than spending time optimizing.

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ahaferburg
When I hover over some of the "links", my FF 67 doesn't tell me where the link
points to. I don't really like clicking on links if I can't tell what they're
doing. Too spooky for me.

~~~
naresh1318
Lol. Thanks for pointing that out. I have fixed it now.

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arvinsim
Thinking about this, I think designers have it easier when it comes to
personal website branding

Web Designers can show the full range of skills by designing their website
well.

Web Developers can't exactly cram all their elegantly designed components into
one website.

~~~
onion2k
You don't need to show everything in order to show you're capable. A handful
of great components demonstrates ability.

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rudiv
The hamburger menu opens automatically on mobile, which is a little jarring as
it blocks all content.

~~~
naresh1318
I'm working on fixing that!

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attilakun
The live example loads 25 megabytes of resources. Why?

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sciencewolf
Looks like it's mostly from one `ui_gif.gif` file.

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DoreenMichele
"Resume" and "About Me" overlap on my cheap Android phone.

Other than that, I think this is nice, clean and attractive. Devs aren't all
designers and shouldn't be expected to be.

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mutatio
I recently made a super simple personal website in Rust
([https://github.com/martingallagher/website](https://github.com/martingallagher/website))
it's basically just a markdown renderer. I think markdown input with some CSS
provides a nice balance in terms of simplicity and aesthetics (subjective of
course).

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salusbury
Thanks for posting this. I think it's good to learn from others work.

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tansionline
Look like spotify desing but colored

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patientplatypus
Ummm....shouldn't a programmer make their own? Dumb question I know.

~~~
ochenvoysim
The website isn't representing their work, the portfolio within is. There's
the opportunity cost of the construction vs pre-built. I write smart tv
applications for Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, etc. I'm not a web dev nor do I
pretend to be one. However, I would like videos and descriptions of my work
displayed in the nicest way possible, like this. If every dev had to only use
the code which only they created, this entire industry would grind to a halt.
All of these criticisms about looking down on people using the same theme for
a portfolio site just sends up all kinds of flags about their understanding of
the software industry in general, and their hiring practices / company
culture. I'm guessing many of you "can't find good devs" or keep devs for very
long. It's like judging a job applicant on their tie instead of their resume.

~~~
ChickeNES
Yes! You made my point, but much clearer. You want employees who can and will
use every available resource, instead of making everything from scratch.

------
natrik
Showcasing my personal website here: [https://purohit.me](https://purohit.me)

I’m going for a very minimalistic look and it’s still a work in progress, but
I’m aiming to keep load times fast, minimal JS, etc.

Features I’m thinking of adding - a links page showcasing interesting links on
the internet

Also checkout my 404 page :)

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numlock86
I don't see anything but your name and three external links. Your 404 page
shows your e-mail as base64, but it's cut off half the way (or rather bugged
out) because of the CSS. From the JS my first guess would be some relation to
LGBT. All put into 328 kilobytes. The cert is from Symantec ... and soon to be
distrusted by all major browsers. It uses Google Analytics (yuck). Mixed
script tags in body and head. No CSP present whatsoever. Same for HSTS. And
more things. At least the TLS related problems I would get sorted out first
before going online, even for a work in progress.

~~~
onion2k
This is an unnecessarily aggressive response. That's not how you give good
feedback.

~~~
martin_a
I don't find it aggressive. It's honest, without any digressions or trying to
be more than a list of mistakes and bad decisions that were made.

~~~
onion2k
It's very opinionated, it offers no help or pointers about how to fix any of
the problems, and it wasn't asked for.

~~~
martin_a
> it wasn't asked for.

Well, it was kind of "public" to begin with, so you have to expect that people
will tell you what they think about it. I don't see anything wrong in that.

