E05: Experience a professional portfolio

Your “professional persona” is your online presence that is visible to potential colleagues and employers. A key component of your professional persona is your professional portfolio site, where you can present your skills and accomplishments in a useful and engaging manner. By having all members of the class create professional portfolios using the same technology (TechFolios), each member can learn from others and thus raise the quality of everyone’s portfolio. Prior to beginning this assignment you should have watched both screencasts in the Resources section of this module, and reviewed the Professional Portfolio Style Guide.

Task: Design and implement your professional portfolio.

First, following the instructions in the TechFolios Quick Start, create an initial portfolio website.

Note: I have just implemented a desktop client called TechFolio Designer that is intended to make it significantly easier to manage your professional portfolio. While not required (you can continue to use the browser-based interface if you want), you might want to give it a try.

Second, create at least three projects illustrating your own technical accomplishments.

Third, create a technical essay (approximately 3-4 paragraphs) that discusses your interests in software engineering and what kinds of skills and experiences you hope to develop in future.

Be sure that:

  1. Your site conforms to the guidelines in the Professional Portfolio Style Guide.

  2. Your essay conforms to the guidelines in the Technical Essay Style Guide.

Getting help if you encounter problems

A variety of syntax errors can prevent the portfolio from building entirely (or not displaying your updates). Later on in the semester, you can learn how to run Jekyll locally to more easily debug these problems, but at this early point I am happy to provide debugging assistance. To do that, you first need to grant me permission to commit changes to your portfolio repository. To do that:

Then send me a message in the #professional_persona Slack channel with the link to your github repository and the problem you are having. I will take a look. Generally I can find the problem pretty quickly once I have a chance to look at it.

Submission instructions

By the date and time indicated on the Schedule page, submit this assignment. Your submission should be the URL (starting with http:) to your online professional portfolio (i.e. http://johnsmith.github.io).

To receive credit, you must submit this assignment in two ways:

  1. Through Laulima (the normal way)
  2. By posting the link to your portfolio to the #professional_persona channel. That way everyone can take a look at everyone else’s portfolio.

Your portfolio must satisfy the following minimal requirements to receive any points:

For full credit, the portfolio must satisfy the additional guidelines in the Professional Portfolio Style Guide.