Building an effective portfolio for junior developer

## INTRODUCTION** There are many junior developer graduating from many technologies bootcamp, so as a junior developer u need to have a great portfolio in order to stand out from a large crowd. An university degree from a prestigious university is one way to do this, but not everyone is privileged enough to be able to attend one. Prior work experience is another way, though there’s a catch-22 here: if you need work experience to get a job, how can you possibly get work experience?! Without a degree or previous work experience, your portfolio is the greatest asset you have. A couple of well-executed projects sends such a strong signal to potential employers. Portfolio projects show that you have the skills required to do the job.

WHAT IS A DEVELOPER PORTFOLIO?

A developer portfolio is a website that showcases the work that you’ve done as a developer. The idea is borrowed from the art world: photographers, for example, will often create a portfolio website that showcases their best work.

Goals for a developer portfolio

The goal of a developer portfolio is to present yourself and your work in the best possible light. Your portfolio should make employers excited to meet you. It should offer a glimpse into how awesome it would be to work with you! Unless you already have extensive work experience, your side projects are the greatest asset you have. They are your trophies, and the portfolio site is the trophy case that highlights all the amazing stuff you’ve done. Building side projects is a lot of work, and we want to make sure to squeeze as much job-seeking value out of them!

STRATEGY FOR DEVELOPING A PORTFOLIO

UNDERSTANDING THE AUDIENCE

Before you start sketching or coding, you need to think about who is going through our portfolio and what you want to communicate to them.

When you apply to work at a company, there are two types of people who are likely to visit your portfolio site as part of a screening process:

1. *HR (Human Resources) hiring managers
2. Software developers *

Both types of people are trying to answer the same question—whether you’re worth hiring but they have very different sets of criteria.

Our job will be to create a site that communicates our awesomeness to both groups of people. To do that, we have to learn a little bit about what they’re looking for. This section is a generalization / oversimplification. Every company has their own process. Sometimes, HR hiring managers are technical. Other times, you’ll only ever be interviewed by full-time software developers. It’s a helpful generalization because we need to plan for the common case, but it’s important to never assume that a real person fits neatly into one of these two categories.

### HR Hiring Managers Unless you’re applying to a very small startup, the company likely has an HR department. Depending on the size of the company, this department might have many employees who focus exclusively on hiring. Generally, the first point of contact you’ll have is with an HR person. This person likely isn’t a software developer.

Part of their job is to winnow the field; a typical junior developer job posting might get up to 100+ applicants, and they’ll want to reduce that number to something more manageable before scheduling interviews.

Here are some of the traits they’re hoping we’ll show in our application:

• Competence. Has this person built professional-looking projects before?

• Enthusiasm. Does this person seem eager to learn, excited for the kinds of work they would do on the job? • Fit. Does this person have the right kind of personality for the company? Have they worked with the languages and frameworks we use here?

Critically, these folks are often very busy, since they have a lot of applicants to get through and many other job responsibilities to fulfill. They’ll likely make a decision about moving forward in the process with you within 30-60 seconds. Our portfolio will need to capture their attention and communicate competence, enthusiasm and fit in a very short window of time.

## Software Developers It’s important that our portfolio also has information that is relevant for software developers working at the company:

• At very early start-ups, your application will likely be screened by a developer, since they don’t yet have an HR department

• Sometimes, HR hiring managers might reach out to a developer to help them evaluate a candidate during the screening process

• At all companies, you will almost certainly be interviewed by a software developer at the company, and this person may visit your portfolio beforehand, to learn about you. The nice thing is that software developers were once in your exact shoes—they remember what it was like, searching for their first job!

Unlike HR hiring managers, developers generally aren’t very interested in what languages or frameworks you know. In fact, for junior roles, developers care much more about your potential rather than what you happen to know already. They want to know if you’ll be easy to mentor. They want to know if you have the grit to work through tough problems, and the humility to admit when you don’t know something.

## Things include in your portfolio

1. introduction - describe yourself(for example- hey, I am Dominic, A Full Stack Software developer in Nairobi, Kenya.. Looking for full-time opportunities)

2. "About me”-section that tells the employer about the candidate.

3. Projects - Your personal projects 4 contact

## PROJECTS NOT TO INCLUDE

### Tutorial / Workshop exercises

Don’t include projects that were created by following a step-by-step tutorial. Same thing goes for workshops or exercises assigned by a bootcamp. There are a few reasons for this:

• Projects are meant to show how you can use the skills you’ve accrued to build things in a self-directed, unguided way. Tutorials are a way to give you those skills, but the tutorial itself is not a demonstration of those skills.

• If you try to pass a tutorial project off as your own, this can backfire if the screener recognizes the project (more likely than you’d think!).

• Projects should be an accurate representation of where your skills are at. If you get hired on the belief that a tutorial project was your own invention, you’ll be assigned work that could be well beyond your current skill level. This is a stressful nightmare scenario!

If you made significant extensions to the project, it might be alright to include. For example, if you were given an assignment to create a Tic-Tac-Toe game, and you decided to spend a week adding online multiplayer support. Or if you transformed it into a Sudoku game. A good rule of thumb: did you spend >50% of the total time on the extensions? If the bulk of your time was spent adding self-directed extensions, then I think it’s worth adding. Just be sure to be explicit about which parts were original.

### Non-Dev Projects In an attempt to “pad” the number of projects, I’ve seen some folks add information about non-development projects like photography or carpentry. There is a place for these kinds of details on your portfolio, but it shouldn’t live amongst your other projects. You can include personal information in your About Me section.

### Confidential Work If you have previously worked as a junior dev / completed an internship, you may be tempted to include features that you worked on in that capacity. This can absolutely be a great idea, but you need to be careful and ensure that you’re able to talk about it. Especially if you work for an agency, you can get in trouble; agencies often do work under a nondisclosure agreement. When in doubt, ask your employer for clarification.

### The Portfolio Site Itself

Some developers will list their portfolio site as a project on their portfolio site. In general, I believe that it’s better not to do this; it gives the impression that you’re filling space because you don’t have other projects you can use. The exception is if you invested time into parts of the site that are non-obvious from a user perspective. For example, did you build an “admin panel” to manage the content, like a mini home-built CMS? Did you code an analytics page to learn about traffic? Absolutely include it in this case!

## HOW MANY PROJECTS TO INCLUDE? At least 2. No more than 5. Something which can be surprising: It’s better to have 1 large polished project than 5 small projects. You want to show that you can complete a non-trivial project from start to finish. Depth is more important than breadth, because it shows that you have the grit and determination to stick through the hard parts and finish a large project.

Thanks for reading...