Ask HN: Developer portfolio? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Developer portfolio?

15 pointsdennybritz9 comments

Hi HN,

I'm thinking of working on a "portfolio as a service" for developers as a side project and I would like to get some feedback.

I've always wanted to build a small personal portfolio website but the thought of having to constantly maintain it has kept me from doing so. I know there are several portfolio services out there but personally I have yet to find one that suits my needs. Most services seems to aggregate data from various social sites and automatically build my page. By doing so they basically duplicate my LinkedIn profile without adding much additional value. My hypothesis is that there are a few key elements missing that would be especially useful for developers:

1. Timeline-based. Instead of having a static page with a list of skills and projects I want to understand how the skillset and interests of someone have developed over time. What did you work on 5 years ago? 1 year ago? How was that influenced what you are interested in now? You may have a lot of Java projects on Github, but if you haven't touched Java code in 5 years there probably is a reason for it. Even though sites like LinkedIn and Github contain some of this data it usually isn't presented in a temporal manner.

2. Incorporating real-time data such as commits, posts, comments, etc into the profile to get a true sense of who you are and what you are interested in right now. Think of aprilzero.com, but for developer/professional data.

3. A project showcase. I think this is a pretty important (perhaps the most important) part of a portfolio, but hasn't received the proper attention on many portfolio sites.

4. It should be beautiful. If I use such as site as part of a job application I want it to look good. This may go without saying but many of portfolio services I looked at were not aesthetically pleasing enough for me to consider using them.

What are your thoughts? Are you using any portfolio websites/services? Why or why not? Would appreciate any feedback.

I use careers.stackoverflow.com as a portfolio and am pretty happy with it; but it does suffer from the lack of functionality that you point out (it mostly aggregates and links to data).

The issue I have in general is that most people just wanna see pretty websites in your portfolio; which (as a server-side guy) is increasingly outside of my domain. Linking to a github instead of live-projects solves this except that:

1. Most my github repos are private (and so invisible to most visitors unless I invite them to the project)

2. There's no good way to highlight certain files/directories in github. There's no way to say "I wrote this class over here, and these unit tests over there, and all these controllers, so check those out".

I would love a portfolio tool that solved both issues: Allow me to pull highlights from private and public repos that show off key elements that I'm proud of (and if it's a private repo, don't give access to anything I didn't explicitly highlight). Highlight it in a beautiful/graphical way, allow me to comment in it and guide the viewer through a tour of code, of sorts. That kind of tool would be amazeballs.

Great feedback, thank you.

That's a good idea - and sounds a lot like ... Documentation. Or possibly "Literate Profiles"

I don't mean that crassly, just I think that Sphinx is close to that, and could just get tipped over the edge if we try hard.

I like the idea and it should be doable with a few tweaks to something like Sphinx.

Good points, but I was thinking of something more curated and streamlined than documentation. Perhaps Sphinx meets Bespoke.js (http://markdalgleish.com/projects/bespoke.js/)

Glossing over the private repo issue for a moment, and bein totally GitHub centric

1. Have each repo contain a 'presentation.rst' file, and they have simple format - header, '.. literalinclude' directives (done right) and commentary. Other highlights can be comments on issues, comments on pull requests etc

2. The presentation is formed in js/doco style with two columns - code on one, commentary on another.

3. Timelines that show where the literalinclude was committed, and along which are the other highlights in some rollover form

4. The whole timeline is created from all the presentation.rat files in all the listed repos.

5. Why not link in blog posts as highlights too? Any URL could easily be linked, with a commentary

This is looking fun

Very nice, and I love how it's github-centric (and you could incorporate it into your workflow).

OP: whaddya think? Is this trending in the direction you were thinking?

Yep, this is great. I'm drafting up some specs now :)

I think this would be really interesting, however I would think you need it to have a lot of customizability. ie: not all my github projects are relevant, or something I would want to marked extensively over others, so you would need a way to filter the content of the feeds.

And I do think it's important with integration to github/bitbucket etc, linkedin with more. If I am to use yet another portfolio site, I would want to do the least amount of work as possible in setting it up.

I'm very interested to see where this will be going, and wish you the best of luck. :)

Thanks! I totally agree that selecting which information/projects get included is a must-have that I forgot about.

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