

Ask HN: What do I include on a portfolio site if I'm not a designer? - mcrittenden

Most portfolios I've come across are for web designers or photographers, and as such they have lots of images of designs or photos as the main feature of the portfolio.<p>If I'm mainly a coder, what do I do in place of that? Bits of source code? Just keep it simple and link to some Github projects? How can I present my coding skills in a portfolio-ish way? Are there any developers' portfolios that stand out to you as particularly successful at this?
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th0ma5
I would link to the Github, for sure, unless your github is mostly all just
hobby stuff that you don't necessarily do your _best_ work, but even then I
think that would be good.

I would present any screenshots of any ui, even if you didn't design the ui,
you can say "but i made this thing work"

I have only seen developer resumes, not portfolios, and they listed languages
of course, but also things like design techniques or methodologies they've
followed, classes taken and certifications received, and also user groups they
attend. List any open source projects you've contributed to, or even just
repurposed toward some goal (and describe what you did to it to make it work
for you)

Now, you might, if you have some particularly complex object that you're proud
of, maybe perhaps create a Processing sketch or similar data visualization
type example, and perhaps post screenshots of that.

But outside of that, it is ultimately intangible, and I think you have the
right idea. I have not seen _portfolios_ per se, but I have seen lists of
these kinds of things. I've also seen employers ask for snippets of code.

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us
1\. A Web Base Resume that doubles with a link to download a clean PDF
version.

2\. A list of projects you've worked on in the past. Interactive and ones
people can play around with are better.

3\. Definitely link to Github.

