It wasn’t until I was reaching the end of my college career that I started to look more closely at the developer job search process. That was when I discovered the coder’s tradition of the personal portfolio site.
The importance of showcasing your creations as a developer was clear to me, but I hadn’t the slightest clue on where to start.
At my college computer science program, much of our time was spent learning theoretical concepts, and the projects we coded were very “assignment-y” in nature (command line apps written in C++/Java to demonstrate classroom knowledge). As important as the internet is, we only took a cursory glance at web technologies.
Without much foundation or idea on where to start, I began completing codecademy tutorials on HTML, CSS and JavaScript whilst trying to build a personal site on github pages. However, the gap between the barebones websites I was creating from scratch and the professional products of other developers felt discouraging. I needed to be able to showcase my work within a reasonable timeframe, and just aligning div boxes was proving to take up more time than I wanted it to.
Eventually, after scrapping several websites made from scratch, I moved on to try Jekyll to build a blog and now this site.
Jekyll is a static site generator built using Ruby that can create static pages using Markdown files. The tool is very easily used with Github Pages, which allows users to host a static site from their github respositories at the url “yourusername.github.io”. Using Jekyll, you can write content pages (i.e. blog post) using markdown, commit the changes on github, and then see the results immediately on your github pages site.
Jekyll also has a large selection of community made templates that can be used to adapt into portolio websites. These can be used by simply forking the template repositories, changing the name of the forked repository to “yourusername.github.io”, and then adding content. For this website, I used the template Beautiful Jekyll.
This post will be on my experience building my personal portfolio (this site), and will have guide content to help aspiring coders create a portfolio. I hope to update this blog post/series as I build up this website and discover new tools.