Professional portfolio feedback

Here is feedback on your professional portfolios. Note that I am just sampling various projects and not providing comprehensive feedback. Most portfolios exhibit one or more of these problems; don’t assume that because your portfolio is not mentioned, it’s OK. Conversely, I am only showing one problem per portfolio—if yours is mentioned, it may have additional problems beyond the one I singled out!

1. Lack of detail on projects and essays.

One of the benefits of a professional portfolio over a resume or LinkedIn profile is that you can provide more than a couple of sentences of detail about projects. Project descriptions and essays should be roughly a “page” of text in length–think 2-3 significant paragraphs, or 5-6 shorter ones.

Make Bagel. What are the “unfortunate uncontrollable circumstances”? What did you find easy and hard about modeling? What would you do differently next time, both technically and organizationally?
AcePW. How are the abilities of Java and MS SDLC “leveraged”? What were your responsibilities? What did you learn? What would you do differently next time?

2. Only one essay.

You are required to complete two essays:

https://ba-bbage.github.io/essays/.

3. You should have some interests.

Lack of interests is uninteresting:

https://andyyu824.github.io/

4. Bio section should not contain “empty” commas and bullets

If you don’t have any work, activities, or awards, then delete those sections:

https://krnkev.github.io/bio/

5. Images should add value.

It’s tempting to just google around and throw some images into your projects and essays that are pretty generic. Resist this temptation. Images should be directly related and add some value. If you have a generic image, there should only be one:

Learning to code with coffee. This essay contains three generic images which add no value to the essay. On the other hand, there was not an image of the author’s FreeCodeCamp page showing an example of the JS tasks the author was learning (which would have added a lot of value.)

6. Make images inline and small if they do not contain a lot of detail.

TechFolios provides some simple formatting commands to make images small and inline. Use them to make your essays look better:

Learning to code with coffee. The three images in this essay could be small and inline.

7. Proofread your site for spelling errors.

At the least, your site should not contain spelling errors. After it is deployed, read through it carefully.

https://rileyts.github.io/projects/micromouse. See the last word (link) on this page for a misspelling.

8. Use gradients carefully.

If you use gradients, be sure to provide CSS so that it doesn’t “repeat” if you need to scroll the page.

Back to Basics

Alexander Lum and Jackie Wong provided recommenations to make gradients work correctly on pages that require scrolling. I have not tested this personally.

background-attachment: fixed;

height: 100%;
margin: 0;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-attachment: fixed;

You can DM them for more details.

9. Think carefully about your image.

First impressions are, unfortunately, important.

https://tikenaga.github.io/. I worry that this headshot might turn off some future employers.

10. Headshot should be a square.

If your headshot is a “lozenge”, it’s because the image needs to be cropped to be a square.

https://shengt-jin.github.io/.

11. Don’t include default projects.

This is presenting other people’s work as your own. Not cool.

https://duhkneelow.github.io/projects/

9. Make sure images are legible.

For example, this project description contains an image that I can’t decipher:

[https://buccatm.github.io/projects/project-1](https://buccatm.github.io/projects/project-1}

10. Project summary images must be square.

Please crop your project summary images to be square. Otherwise the summary page does not look good.

https://danieltrupp.github.io/projects/

Don’t forget to review the guidelines.

It’s always good to check the guidelines: