Your portfolio site is not a project

"Portfolio Site Syndrome"

Back in 2017, long before I knew about QA, I wanted to be a web developer.

I started learning HTML, CSS & JavaScript on freeCodeCamp.

I found Tech Twitter shortly afterward, and fell in with the #100DaysOfCode crowd who were doing the "build in public" thing, showing off their "learning to code" journeys.

My first project was the same as most: a portfolio site.

But you can't build a portfolio site without finding out how crazy complicated some folks make theirs.

It's like everyone's out there making these innovative gamified websites just to make you feel bad about your simple portfolio page.

So you think yours needs to be super-special-awesome too. And it ceases to become a portfolio.

Now it's a sandbox for all your dev skills. You get to show off your coolest coding tricks to the entire world...and sure, they can find out more about you in the process.

Your ego goes wild trying to build your own personal corner of the internet into a digital palace of luxurious designs and features.

But this is not the point of a portfolio site.

Trophy cases

Imagine you're an athlete.

You've won a few trophies and want to display them in a trophy case. One of your favorite hobbies is woodworking, and you know you could build the most beautiful trophy case.

But you're still a full-time athlete, and you need to practice if you want to win more trophies.

So what do you do?

You have 20 hours of free time every week.

Which makes more sense?

1. 15 hours building the trophy case / 5 hours practicing

2. 19 hours practicing / 1 hour hiring someone to build the trophy case

Obviously #2.

You're getting paid to win games, not show off your trophies.

Software professionals are like athletes. They get paid to solve problems.

Your projects are like trophies, and your portfolio site is your trophy case.

It's how you tell people about your achievements.

It isn't an achievement on its own.

It is not a project: it's a marketing tool.

Thinking like a business owner

Whether you're a QA, web dev, or something else, you can think of yourself like a business owner.

• You offer a service.

• You need to market your service to people who want to pay for that service.

But marketing is a solved problem, and we've already established that your porfolio site is a marketing tool.

You don't need to re-invent the portfolio site. Just borrow a theme.

I set up my own portfolio site this week.

These were my steps:

1. Create a shopping list of features I wanted in my site

2. Find one of Astro's free portfolio themes that had what I wanted

3. Clone the theme to my GitHub account

4. Deploy my clone on Netlify (free tier)

5. Buy a new domain on Squarespace Domains

6. Assign the custom domain to my clone

7. Make it my own (add content, remove some features, etc.)

Portfolio site themes are the productized version of hiring someone to make you a website.

That's why some portfolio themes cost money. It's a product performing a service.

The "service" is all the features included in the theme.

To a business owner, the word "feature" is another name for "thing I don't have to waste time on."

By treating my portfolio site as a marketing tool instead of a project, I was able to not waste time on implementing all of this:

Imagine spending time on any of that instead of building projects that matter.

Building what matters

Imagine you want a simple weight-tracking app without the bells and whistles of big apps like MyFitnessPal.

You know you're not the only one who wants an app like this.

You get to work building it, marketing it, and gathering user feedback.

Maybe you even make a few bucks off of it.

Then you go back to your portfolio site to proudly display your new trophy.

...and then you move on to the next project.

Because it's not about the trophy. It's about what the trophy represents:

• Your ability to solve problems for other people

• Your communication skills

• Your "owner" mindset

And if your projects don't solve problems, they're just toys.

And no hiring manager is going to take you seriously.

If you're a QA, this means demonstrating that you can automate tests for an app.

Not just making an empty template for an automation framework.

Actually doing the hard work:

1. Finding an app you want to test

2. Determining what the critical user paths are

3. Building a test automation solution that can automate tests for those paths

4. Writing the tests

5. Running those tests in CI

6. Making it easy for a hiring manager to run your tests on their machine

7. Including documentation in a README to describe the project and educate users

Now go make your site

Once you're able to fully appreciate the time that goes into making a great project, you'll never over-engineer a portfolio site again.

That doesn't mean it should look like garbage.

But it does mean you focus on the content, not engineering or designing the site.

If you don't like to mess with HTML/CSS/JavaScript, use a website builder like SquareSpace or Wordpress.