If you have been following me for a long time, you already know that I have been holding off on my Portfolio review for several months.
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I am simplify my portfolio/cv:
Creator of mordorjs and TifY also pipeline-operator fanatic.
Those legacy tech sooner or later outdated. Make some fun until singularity!
Thanks Peter! Will look into it further and will let you know on this thread! :)
You are make me crazy, so my next project is create my github portfolio which is now try to show my ideas |> repos map. So I connected to my dev.to posts. This is not the finall format but at least hold much more information as ever before. It will be also great backround layer for my upcomming sci-fi book.
Meanwhile I making too much activity because my GPT-6 plus subscribe on 2% credits. Maybe those information also able to represent my activity level.
pipes is always lead to flow
Look man. Busy times lol.
I checked it out! Its really good and that animation of balls when you scroll up is great. I'll have to understand that implementation, I don't know why but I tried it for several minutes😅.
One question though, what does portfolio actually include?, cause I'm a student and I have an internship experience which I always refrain from talking about in public for obvious reasons and I've got some good OSSs.
Thanks Dhruv! The ball animation took me 2 planets of resources to implement for some odd reason (mainly I was bad at explaining to the AI at that time lol).
For your question, it depends on what you want to show to the recruiters. You have to think about what they are looking for. In your case, I would include your work experience, projects, and DEV blog as a nice touch.
I would recommend seeing what other people's portfolio looks like and go from there. As a bonus, see videos of people roasting other people's portfolios. A good channel to start is Anthony Sistilli where he made a series or roasting people's portfolios. He also give good tips on them along with Resumes as well!
Hope this helps!
I agree with you on the "Simplicity beats complexity", that's why I generally showcase and build my professional work and profile over the LinkedIn. It's good to follow the KISS Principles in general 😀
I agree! Always keep it simple. You will be surprise on the result you will get than overengineering it! Thanks Ranjan!
You don't need a portfolio. That simply isn't true - a total myth. They're generally just curated vanity projects that tell a potential employer next to nothing about the reality of a candidate's abilities. Far better is an active/interesting GitHub/GitLab/whatever - warts and all - false starts, finished projects, unfinished projects, contributions to other projects, unvarnished experiments... the more the better. Anyone hiring devs who knows what they're doing will glean far more from that than they would from any portfolio site.
Over thirty years as a developer I've never had a portfolio site and it's never been an issue. I also don't attach much weight to candidate portfolio sites unless they're truly awful, or exceptional/original (which is rare) - there is very little point to a cookie cutter HTML-ified CV.
In a few cases when a candidate has had a portfolio site, it has actually been the reason that they did not progress further in the hiring process... over-engineering, errors, inappropriate use of technology etc.
Hey Jon. Thanks for sharing!
I do have seen people having without portfolios and still got into jobs in this brutal market. Some of my friends who graduated didn't have a portfolio but still got a job through networking, so I see where you are coming from.
I say "need" in this case because I feel like it's a good start of having at least something to show as a good starting point in your developer journey. Of course, your first project doesn't need to be a portfolio, but it's a good starting point and it's a friendly way to showcase your future projects (if you decide to put them there). I can see where if you already have experience, then having a portfolio is just a nice thing to have, not something you need.
I believe if you are freelancing, then having a portfolio is a great thing to have because it tells you that the client not only see that this developer has experience, but also the style of the website and credibility of their work to clients. It's suitable for Front-end web developers for sure, though having it as a freelance developer in general is a must. Though, I never did freelancing before so take this as a grain of salt, but that is based on what I have seen and heard.
I am not expecting everyone to have a portfolio, but based on my experience as a beginner/mid level (in my opinion of me being a beginner/mid level) I think having a portfolio is a must and a good starting point to show your work to all audience, more than just recruiters. You may never know if the person that you share your portfolio with is impress and sharing it to their other networks.
I do have a question. When you mention "when a candidate has had a portfolio site, it has actually been the reason that they did not progress further in the hiring process... over-engineering, errors, inappropriate use of technology etc.", do recruiters or general people tend to figure out during the hiring process? How do they determine if they are using the wrong technology? I guess this is more of an elaboration?
Thanks for sharing on your view Jon! Let me know if anything!
The problem with a lot of tech recruitment is that the people doing the recruitment are non-technical. Doing it right should involve technical people from as early as possible... who will actually look in more technical detail at what is presented by the candidate.
Recruiting teams worth their salt will not be moved by sparkly nonsense that is often just 'lipstick on a pig'.
I agree with you 100%
But I still don’t have my portfolio site 🤣
All good lol. I appreciate you reading though!
Nice portfolio Francis! Great to see it live!
Thanks Julien!
Great article, Francis! You are so right
Thanks Ben!
no problem, Francis :)
Thanks for sharing Francis! I used Brittany Chiang a lot for inspiration when I was building my first portfolio. 😁
It's pretty well known (in my world lol) of her designs. Very clean and simple! Thanks Gift :)
🥳 IT'S ONLY BEEN AN ETERNITY IN THE MAKING, BUT THE PORTFOLIO IS FINALLY SEEING LIGHT!
Yea but to be fair, it's on my dev.to for a LONG time. I just never talked about it till now lol
Well yeah, but it's different when you talk about it 😂 It's good though! A portfolio goes a long way and if you wanna up it, add specifics, so people know what specific region in the codebases you had a hand in. Eg. I work on ERP systems, that's a pretty broad spectrum... But I specifically implemented the AR, AP, GL and Stock journals and ledgers, the manufacturing module, the dashboard, log-sink and cashbook modules. Knowing those details adds far more insight than 'I work on financial systems'. I really need to prep 1 tbh...
Awesome portfolio!
After seeing it, I kinda want to update mine too 😄
Glad it inspired you! If you want to share, feel free (you don't have to ofc) :)
Thanks Pavel!
Nice work! I love the animations and interactivity!
Thanks Joseph!! :D
Planning to work on mine soon and I’ll share it once I’m done! Also, loved your portfolio, Francis 😀
Thanks Hema :D
Looking forward to your Portfolio!
Really cool portfolio! I especially liked the bouncing ball 😸 It gives the page a lot of personality.
I also agree with your point that even in the AI era, actually building something solid still matters a lot.
Especially deciding what to build and how to shape it, that still says a lot about the person behind the work. Really nice article!
Here’s my portfolio too 😹
nyaomaru-portfolio.vercel.app/
I tried to keep it as simple as possible, and there’s even a small game in it 😸
The phrase 'addresses the rising AI noise in hiring' hits right at the core bottleneck of tech recruitment today. When code execution is cheap, documentation and structural rationale become the only real moat. Anyone can tell a chatbot to compile a multi-column layout, but your website portfolio is where you prove you can manage complex systems, write semantically clean code, and actually reason through architecture bugs. Looking forward to reading your full review!
I portfolio is also simple! It is based on one of the yearly themes from WordPress. I can get accessibility out of the box and it can also be fast if configured right.
My Website
this hits hard, especially the "simplicity beats complexity" point.
i’m 12 and i code entirely on a $150 android phone. i literally can’t vibe-code a heavy 4MB react portfolio with crazy animations because my device would crash. constraints forced me to build differently.
instead of a traditional portfolio site, my "portfolio" is just the live product itself: a 92kb single-file ai web app with zero npm dependencies that loads in under a second on 3g. plus the dev.to articles where i document the architecture (like benchmarking my edge-worker harness against claude code).
no templates. no vibe coding. just raw vanilla js, cloudflare workers, and shipping in public.
do you think a live, shipping product is a better portfolio than a static site for a junior dev? would love your take! 🐯
Very cool portfolio, Francis!
Even before the AI/LLM boom, I was reluctant with the idea of having a portfolio. After some years into this industry, I thought that a good LinkedIn profile/CV was all that I needed. But I was asking myself, why not have my own domain? Something that I can have some control over. So I created my portfolio on carlapaiva.com. It's super simple, but it's mine ;)
The shift toward vibe coding definitely changes how we present our work, but a portfolio serves a different purpose than just showing a functional UI. When you rely heavily on AI to scaffold projects, the "vibe" can often feel generic or lack a cohesive architectural soul. I've found that recruiters and senior leads aren't just looking at the final product anymore; they want to see the decision-making process behind the code. A portfolio that documents why you chose a specific state management pattern or how you handled a particular edge case is much more valuable than a perfectly polished, AI-generated landing page. It proves you actually understand the underlying mechanics rather than just being a prompt engineer.
ohk here is my portflio would love everyone reviews aarishmansur.in/ 😁
love this
I made mine around an year ago, haven't updated it with any of my latest projects and work tho- but would love to hear anything to improve
mannu.tech
nice discuss breakdown
I agree! I’ve been working in software development for 2–3 years, and I still don’t have a web portfolio, I refuse to do it with AI 🤣
solid write-up on discuss, thanks for sharing