Logistics: Creating My Developer Portfolio (Part 1)
Over the course of the Summer, I had two major realizations regarding my future in CS. The first was that I didn’t have that many projects that I had worked on, and the second was simply that I didn’t have anywhere to display the projects that I had worked. A bit of thinking combined with a bit too much Medium convinced me that the next step for me was to create a portfolio.
I am have been working on this for the past a couple of weeks, and I no even close to being done, but I think that sharing my progress can help me to figure out where I am currently, and what I need to do next; all with the potential of helping other people. I have two main goals for this project, this first is to hopefully gain a better perspective of the things that I have worked on. Being the type of person I am, I just around a lot from project to project, working on everything from Game Development, to Web Design, to Machine Learning, and as such I am trying to currently figure out what career path I want to pursue. The other thing I hope to get out of this, is to have a place that contains projects that I feel proud of and want to share with others. While I haven’t accomplished these goals, this is what I have done so far.
Research
I started out this project by first researching different examples of portfolios that I liked. Searching through the general internet along with sites like http://bestfolios.com I slowly began to compile a list of portfolios that contained elements that I liked.
After a couples days of searching, I was able to create the following list of portfolios that I liked:
This portfolio I was able to find by searching around online and coming across a Medium Article similar to the one that I writing now. I really liked both the way that the projects were presented along with the in-depth descriptions of said projects.
Somewhat the gold standard for a well-designed portfolio, this one can be found in almost every top 10 portfolios list on the internet. Even so, I really admire the simple use of colors along with the mastery of white space.
I really loved the way that this portfolio was able to handle colors along with some of the subtle animations that can be found throughout the page. Coming from the creator of the Bulma framework, this site really did a fantastic job of demoing the experience of the creator.
Web Technologies
At this point, I knew what I wanted to create but it was a matter of how I was going to create it. I needed to figure out how I was going to host it along with what I was going to use in order to create the website.
Figuring hosting was somewhat easy as having practically no money really limited my options. Already having a domain I simply needed to find a cheap place to host the site that I would allow for me to use said domain. A bit of research led me down to two options, Github Pages and Netlify. Both free options, these would not only save me the cost of hosting it, but also the hassle of setting up a server, even though I had worked with the cloud before.
I eventually chose to work with Netlify for two main reasons. The first was that it seemed to offer some cool extra features such as site analytics that were not provided by Github Pages. The second reason, however, was just that most of the internet suggested using it.
At this point, I only needed to figure out what I was going to use in order to create the website. I already knew that I was going to hand-code it rather than using CircleExpanse or something like that, but it was a matter of what I was going to use. It wasn’t actually that hard of a decision, and I ended up choosing to work with Vue.js to build the site. While this is overkill for a static website, I had worked with it before and creating my portfolio with it will just give me more practice.
Projects
Know I needed to figure out what projects I was going to include in the portfolio. There is all sorts of information about this on the internet about what projects to include, but for me, I choose to only include projects that met two criteria. First, I had to feel proud of it for an expressible reason. Second, it needed to be an in-depth and unique enough project that I could write about 1,000 words on the process of creating it. This left me with the following list:
- VRKit: A Combination of GVR and ARKit within Unity
- Neural Network: A ANN that I built using only Numpy
- Driveline: An application to help manage drop-off and pickup at my school.
- Snake: A game of snake that using Q-Learning in order to play the game.
- Portfolio: This very portfolio!
Taking a page out of Tony’s portfolio from earlier, I wrote a “post” about each of these projects. Doing this was important to me, because I really wanted to make sure that any reader would be able to understand the nuances of the project not just what I present. I came up with the following hierarchy:
- Link to Code
- Overview (Why & What I Learned)
What is the application? Why did I create it?
- Timeline
Research, Building, Finalization
- Challenges
What were the difficult parts of creating this application?, How did I overcome the challenges that I faced?
- Takeaways
What new skills did I learn, and how am I going to apply them moving forward?
- Future Steps
What improvements need to be made to the application?
Once creating this list, I went and filled in all of the questions for each project. This left me with a 1,000ist word count for each project, which I thought might be a bit to much for each project.
Next Up…
Now that I had finished with figuring out the logistical side of the project, now needed to move on the UI/UX design.
