198 How Do I Make My Portfolio Better?

How do I make my portfolio more attractive? What do employers want to see in a portfolio? What if I am building desktop applications? How do I show off what I can do? What if my employer does not allow me to put anything in my portfolio? These are the questions we will cover in this episode of Dev Questions. 

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey. Join us each episode as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development, understanding the industry, and new technology. If you're just starting out or you want to grow stronger as a developer, this is the place to get your questions answered. Now, here's your host, expert developer and online educator, Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

How do I make my portfolio better? This is a question I was asked on the suggestion site, and it's one that I want to tackle in today's episode of Dev Questions. Now, I have some thoughts because I've been going through developer resumes and portfolios recently, and there is a list of things that I think could make portfolios better. So, number one, have one. Okay, I hear this excuse a lot. Well, I worked on everything everything I worked on was was confidential. I couldn't put anything in my portfolio. That's not your employer's job. Your employer's job is not to give you some of your code to show off. In fact, it might be detrimental to do so. How many people here work in an environment where the code's a bit of a mess? You want to do things differently, but you're conforming to a system or you're doing the best you can, or you're so rushed that you're writing not great code because it's fast code. That happens a lot. And you might not want to put that in your portfolio and say, that's my best work. So having a portfolio is important, but that does mean you might have to do some work outside of work in order to put something in your portfolio. But here's the deal: you should be learning and growing outside of just what you absolutely need to do at work. And even then, if your job says, hey, we need you to build a minimal API, and you've never done that, you should practice it first, right? Well, where do you practice it? You should not practice in production. Stop that. So where should you practice? Well, practice in your own little GitHub repo. And then make that part of your portfolio. That practice where you've learned things, you've tried things out. Now, make sure that you put things in that portfolio that are relevant to what you want. And we'll talk more about that in just a minute. So, number one, have a portfolio. Number two, focus on the job you want. So if you want a job in.NET 8 and you're currently working in.NET Framework, your portfolio should have.NET 8 content. How do I know that you understand how.NET 8 works or how to build apps in.NET 8 if you only show me.NET Framework projects, or even worse yet, you show me React projects. That's not helpful. So show me how you know to solve problems in the area you want by showing me things that are relevant to the job you want. So build that minimal API in.NET 8 and try some things out and put that in your portfolio. Number three, your portfolio, solve some problems. Show off how you've solved problems. Not just, you know, bland, hey, I built a to-do list, but solve some kind of problem with your code. Because when you do that, you tend to write better examples, better code. Now make them small, but when you do that, what happens is you start to do things more than just tutorial-like. You start to create something that has all the features that you would need to solve that actual problem that actually has some logic to it, not just a boilerplate API that has, you know, get data from a database, update data to the database, delete data from the database. That's boring and doesn't really show anything. Solve a problem. Build some logic there. Number four is take out your old projects. So if you this doesn't really apply if you have GitHub necessarily, although it might. On GitHub, if you have old projects that you're kind of embarrassed about that they don't really represent who you are today, maybe take them off. Make them private or delete them. But especially if you have a separate portfolio, take out the old projects. Focus on the stuff again that you want for the job you want to get. So if you have a bunch of.NET framework stuff, but you have some.NET 8 stuff too, well, focus on that and take away the old stuff. That way your potential employer isn't looking all over and seeing.NET framework stuff and getting confused that you don't know how to do.NET 8 work. Number five, don't just add tutorial code. This is what I see quite a bit. And it's you follow along with a tutorial, which is great. That's great to do. And you've built something. Cool. But that probably shouldn't be your your portfolio because it's not you who did it. Yes, you followed along, but that's not really the same as building something yourself. And that's not really showing off what you can do. That's showing that you can type what a person says to type. Or even solve little problems inside of a framework you've been given. Create something that's your own, don't just add tutorial code. It makes me wonder if any of this code is yours. Number six, add a README or a space to explain your portfolio. Explain what the various pieces are. If you have, like say, running web apps, cool. Then put links in there to the actual running version of the web app. You don't have to, but that's kind of cool and it's kind of helpful to see the end result. Put pictures in if it's a desktop app. So make sure that in one place the potential employer can read through and see what this portfolio is about and how to navigate it. And then number seven, make it look good. And that doesn't mean you have to have a great design eye and have this really ultra-designed portfolio. Just make it clean, organized, and easy to read. Don't make it cluttered. Don't make it a joke. Don't make put joke things in there. I came across a tutorial a portfolio where I think they were having fun with some old technology, but I can't tell. It didn't add to the experience and actually took away from experience. It made me wonder are they just so out of touch? Because I can't tell. So don't do that. Make it look good. Make it look clean, organized, and easy to read. Okay? Those are my seven tips for really elevating your portfolio and really standing out from the crowd. Because that's that's the whole point. You want to stand out from the crowd, and there are ways you can do this without adding a whole lot of effort. The biggest thing is that when I say you should practice, you should practice. And when you're learning something new, you should practice. And the thing is, you can reuse that practice in a portfolio. So you have the ability to not add any extra effort or very little extra effort and yet build out your portfolio if you are practicing appropriately. If you are just watching tutorials and then going right to production, you don't have that opportunity. So don't skip steps. Practice and use the practice things that you've built that maybe a little bit more complex. Put those in your portfolio and show off what you can do in order to get the job that you want. All right. So those are my thoughts on how to make a portfolio better. Thanks for listening. As always, I am Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_02 8:33

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Dev Questions. Tim is committed to making it easier for you to become a developer. If you would like to help make more content like this possible, please like, subscribe, rate, and share Dev Questions. You can also send your questions to questions at IamTimcorey.com. Until next time, remember, you are too smart and your time too valuable to waste it making all the mistakes Tim did. When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to Iamtimcorey.com and enroll in a course.