Peerlist: A simple but powerful portfolio

Hello folks,

In this blog, I will briefly talk about building a clean portfolio and how Peerlist does the job perfectly for our needs. If you have not heard about Peerlist you should visit the website right away.

Developer portfolio

Nowadays every engineer should have a portfolio website. Be it a basic HTML portfolio or an animated visually attractive portfolio, everyone is supposed to have one. Especially when you are a developer, a portfolio website is asked in resumes, interviews, freelancing, etc. Many people also use the GitHub readme page itself as their Portfolio showcasing the different repositories as the projects.

As I am a frontend developer, I was looking for a neat and simple portfolio that can be used to showcase my work. After the recent introduction of Github readme profiles, I updated the same with my details. This does the job to some extent.

I joined Peerlist when I came across a post on my Twitter feed that had an invite to join its beta. I visited Peerlist and the UI was catchy. The design of the portfolio suited my requirements. I just started creating my profile on the Peerlist. Also, I referred a few of my friends to Peerlist.

Here is the link to my Peerlist profile. The profile/portfolio can be accessed by anyone on the internet without the need for a login, unlike Linkedin which asks you for login or registration sometimes to view the profile. Above you can see the hero section, designed in a simple way highlighting the skills and the social media links.

The best part about the portfolio is that it integrates well with the Github account. You can provide the username and list the important Github repositories to showcase on the page. Peerlist portfolio also supports adding your custom project and blog integrations.

Resume

Many of the above features may not be present in other social profiles but are not something new. What is unique in Peerlist is the authenticity of the profiles when it comes to your work.

You should be able to see a green tick mark displayed in front of my latest work experience in the resume tab. Peerlist helps to increase the genuineness of the profile by verifying my current work email address. Similar things you would have noticed against the Github profile as well. It is very easy to create a fake profile by adding the top companies to one's profile. This is a very good feature to have on any social media platform and Peerlist is one of the earliest adopters of this.

Jobs

Peerlist has also added a new section called "Find Jobs". This is for searching the jobs suitable for your skills. You have the option to save the jobs to which you think you can apply in the future and also can track the jobs applied to, in the "Applied" tab.

You can mark if you are open to the opportunities along with your other job preferences. You can also opt for posting the jobs in your company but at the moment only allowed if you are having an invite for the same.

What can be different?

As we know there are a lot of social media platforms out there, and it is not easy to have an edge. A few of the things which I feel Peerlist can do differently are

• Client details in the resume

Many of us would have worked or known the people who work on a contract basis or as a consultant. Such roles require working for a specific client at the client location with the payroll from the parent company which is the consulting firm. Usually, in such cases, the client company is more popular than the parent company. Also, the chances are that the person might have worked for multiple clients from the same parent company. In such cases, it would very helpful to have the feature in the resume to have the client and parent company details.

• Advanced filter for Jobs

Peerlist has recently added the Jobs section. A must-have feature for a website like this. When I was actively searching for a job, it was hard to get the right match. The major issue I faced was that the proficiency of expected skills was not aligned with the proficiencies I had. Either it was too low or too high.

Let me take an example to explain this. The skillset for an open position might be React, Redux, TypeScript, JavaScript, and CSS. I may be having knowledge and experience in all of these. But the proficiency levels are not known. The position may demand the highest level of expertise in React and Redux which is not known to us. Let's assume I have the highest level of expertise in JavaScript and CSS. Though there is an exact match in the skillset I may not be the best suited for this position.

Having such an advanced filter where the candidate can search the jobs depending on his/her expertise level in the expected skills may be hard to have as a feature but it is definitely a good feature for job seekers to get a better and more accurate match.

Final words

As a Peerlist user, I know the team is working on a lot of new features and also taking feedback from the users to improve the existing functionalities in the web application. I am also glad that I could have a conversation with one of the founders and get to know some challenges which a startup faces.

If you are not already a member of the Peerlist, go ahead and create one. Thanks to Yogini and Akash for creating such a wonderful social platform. I hope to see the product growing exponentially in the coming days. We are all excited !!!