Step 0: A Developer Portfolio
Plan for building my software engineer’s resume

Divide the process of landing a job into 4 stages:

1. Standing out
2. Landing an interview
3. Passing the interview
4. Getting up to speed with the team

Dividing the first stage further would look something like this:

1. Standing out
   • Building a well designed front page
   • Showcasing coding projects
   • Driving recruiters to my front page through the resume

In short, the problem of landing a job lends itself to a sub-problem of standing out which finally lands me at one of the most effective tools at this time: an online portfolio.

Since the average number of qualified candidates per hire in Canada & USA is a whopping 34¹, any potential advantage must be highlighted.The best kind of advantage at this stage is competence. The other facet that is evaluated in the hiring process, form what I can tell, is interpersonal communication skills in the behavioural interview process. The reason is fascinating and I will surely come back to it in another post ².

Definition: A Portfolio is a tool that serves 2 purposes:

1. standing out
2. demonstrating competence

Approaching a portfolio as a product is a half answer, the other half is I am the product and the portfolio is merely the front end. Now that the product is identified, I would rather an iterative process which is proven time and time again as the best way to approach building products³. But how do I build one? The obvious part of this answer is a website in HTML/CSS/JS the other part is what is the spec?

The first part to any website is a hero page which is a theatrical hook to the website. In this part of the spec, I aim to have it animation and design heavy in case it is an HR representative I’m trying to hook. This part of the spec should contain a call to action button (i.e. a contact me link) in case the recruiter needs no further convincing.

A simple interface lends itself to speed here since a recruiter would want to get the gist asap. So a simple grid with some way of highlighting the most prominent projects is ideal. But there is the issue of how to showcase a project? Is a simple live site enough?

Landing an interview is the sole goal of this project. So, it follows that the call to action is a contact me with something like ’I love your profile, interested in an interview?’. So a button with Contact me should suffice.

With graduation around the corner, I am squeezed for time to say the least. I have found it easier to think in quarters rather than semesters when it comes to projects unrelated to school.

Roughly, the Schedule should look something like this:

In Q1, I am taking the last of the ’hard’ courses @ the university. As such, bulk of the work is later on when the semester is about to end. If all goes to plan the portfolio should be ready for an entry level interview at the end of Q2. Hopefully, it does not take long to break into the market a that point. This resembles water fall of separate projects and that is only an idealistic representation of what is going to probably happen, an iteration pops every now and then for a previous project.

At first I spun up an OpenBSD server on a hosting site and deployed the server to. Turns out GitHub pages is free…Could have saved a full day’s work. Another thing I spent some time building on that day that ended up thrown away was a PHP form that turns out can cost me $0 to operate with formsubmit.co

Although dev tools has a responsive simulator of sorts, viewing the website on hardware was a tiny bit different, and in one instance completely different. I guess if I ever have to build a front end to anything again, double checking on hardware is a must.

The front end has all the characteristics of a portfolio I’m confident putting on my resume. However, the back-end i.e. my skills and projects still need a ton of work.