The IT job market is tough right now. What are your best tips to create a developer portfolio ?

Hiring managers and interview panelists don't spend more than a couple minutes looking at a portfolio. Two reasons: 1) They don't have much time to evaluate you or your projects, and 2) most portfolios look the same (short bio, a few stock photos, links to some clone sites).

So in most cases, the portfolio evaluation is about two things: "Does the portfolio exist?" and "Is there anything off in the design or content of this portfolio so I can disqualify the candidate?"

A portfolio should be simple and functional - introduce yourself and your work, very few bells and whistles. Make the design crisp and with personality, but professional.

I'm working on a separate post about the types of projects developers should have in a portfolio. But if you've built something with active users, or to support a client's line of business, that beats a practice project any day.

I wrote about this a while ago, but I think the ideas are still valid today. To maximise the chances of getting hired, a portfolio needed to include:

0️⃣ A custom domain name. In my case, damiandemasi.com was available, so I took it. I also registered the colo.codes domain, as it's my nickname on social networks.

1️⃣ A catching hero section with immediate calls to action in the way of a “contact me” button and an option to download my resume.

2️⃣ A projects section with at least two projects. This section should also include links to the live versions of the projects, as well as a GIF or video of the project being used (a sort of demo), and a description of the process I followed to create the project. The objective of all of this is to show how we approach coding challenges, the decisions we make, and how we deal with problems.

3️⃣ A blog section with at least three articles. These articles should display how we address the description of technical concepts, and how well (or bad) we communicate in English (when it is not our native language).

4️⃣ An about me section, with easy and clear ways to access our LinkedIn profile, as well as the resume, GitHub profile, and Twitter/X. Even though our resume could have been accessed from the hero section, I believe having redundancy (without spamming) is a way to ensure the important parts of the portfolio (like the resume) aren’t overlooked. In my case, I went full-on honest mode in this section and presented myself as I am. By doing so, I could push away employers that were not compatible with my personality and attract the ones that really liked how I am, thus speeding up the job selection process. I also briefly highlighted the technologies I was familiar with. In the end, this proved to be a correct approach, because both, the COO and CEO of the company that hired me mentioned that they loved how I presented myself online.

5️⃣ A social proof (reviews) section to demonstrate that we have a proven track record as an employee and team member. We can I use our LinkedIn recommendations as the source material for building this, and provide links to our LinkedIn profile so potential employers could see we are not being dishonest.

6️⃣ And finally, a contact section. In it, we could offer three different ways of contact: an email address, a LinkedIn link, and a completely functional form (using Netlify, for example). People have different preferences when it comes to contacting a potential employee, so we want to offer as much flexibility as feasible.

You can read more about this here: dev.to/colocodes/how-ive-got-a-web...

This is going to sound rough or horrible, but a portfolio doesn’t really matter. Hiring managers don’t have the time to look over your portfolio for a majority of positions. They just don’t. They have real work to do and they get your CV in an email from HR saying take a look and let me know if you want to interview them. They glance your CV to look for anything that immediately disqualifies and then your skills.

The more important thing to land a job when the market is how it is right now is networking. Intentionally connecting with individuals and cultivating conversation. Don’t just blast out connections and ask for help getting a job. Intentionally connect with people at companies you want to work for. Comment something you like about the company or product or something you are interested in about the company and actually build a connection with individuals. If you have skills that are good they can help connect you and refer you to positions. Cold applying and hoping do not work like they used to.

I'm on a mission to build the BEST dev portfolio/resume with Skills Over Paper (free)

I'm still adding features, but currently the system:
-Aggregates complex skills from projects/experience and courses
-Vets your skills against common dev roles and awards certificates. For example "Senior AI Engineer" or "Junior Web Frontend Engineer"
-Allows you to export your resume in a ATS readable format (.pdf)
-Allows you to apply to gigs with lower competition if you pass vetting.

I have a informal portfolio of various artifacts I've created over time to present if I find the hiring manager is accepting of such materials. Examples of what I have in my portfolio:

• Publicly available Github Projects which focus on demonstrating specific competencies, like TypesScript & 100% code coverage.
• Documents I have authored providing guidance for adopting new technologies, or style guides to conform engineers work when implementing a feature
• Policy documents for corporate governance

I think it depends on the country, now there are a lot of vacancies in Europe due to companies moving from Ukraine due to the war

I understand where that comes from but I respectfully disagree.

What happens is that when the job market is fine, you get in touch to a list of maybe 30 companies where they could be a fit, you have a discussion with 10 of them, and get a job offer at one of two or those.
When the job market is tough, you contact the same 30 companies but can only talk with 0 or 1 people.
So you have to broaden your search with companies that are less and less likely to be your ideal buyer.
At some point you get desperate and send every day 5 CV randomly.
That's where you get the impression that there is a usual number of unqualified applicants that far exceed their skill levels.

The alternative story that the average level of developer skills would have gone down brutally at the same pace as economy is hard to backup.

There are two conflicting things here. On the one hand, I'd love to publish a production-level application but it takes lots of time and it should also be marketed somehow. On the other hand, I can make many simple pet projects but they do not provide real value and do not distinguish me from my competitors. 🤔

Doing both at the same time — that's the answer I see at the moment. And involving other people in the production level app development.

I think properly documenting the projects will have a lot of value. Creating good readmes and publishing blogs about their structure and why certain technical decisions were made.

Also, I found this video by @alexhyettdev helpful.

It's not about Portfolio. It's about whatever works.

I've had interviews with good startups without a portfolio, and always gets a reply, so I don't really think that's an issue.

I will make a portfolio till next month, but because I've a lot to showcase rather than just development which my GitHub can handle well.

I made my CV a static HTML page because I liked the idea that I can easily share it via a link, it looks fine on several different devices and I can easily keep it up to date without the need to fiddle with one thousand files (e.g CV-2023-01-06-final-02.pdf).. Later I got feedback from recruiters that a PDF version is mandatory for some companies, so I went ahead and added print media styles to my HTML but it was not perfect. So in the end I just re-made the CV in Canva and exported to PDF..