cft

No one cares about your custom portfolio site

Building a custom portfolio site is a procrastination honey trap that takes you away from focussing on what can really add value.


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Simon Barker

3 years ago | 1 min read

The purpose of a portfolio site is to showcase your work, point them to other places you hang out online, and provide an easy way to get in touch with you.

It is important that it looks nice, works smoothly, and feels professional. Investing tens (or even hundreds) of hours into handcrafting your CSS animations and using the most semantic HTML tags is a waste of your time.

“But Simon” I hear you start, “you don’t understand, I make beautifully crafted websites for discerning users and so I need to express how I perfectly intersect design and development“

You don’t.

What you actually do is solve problems by building things online, mainly by writing code for people who can’t.

Your focus should be on the things you make and the problems you solve for other people.

The problem of “need a portfolio website” has been solved six ways from Sunday and, unless you have a really unique take, it’s not worth your time focussing on. You should be building a portfolio of projects that solve real-world problems that have some level of complexity that solves a user's needs, like a weather app, to-do list app, or parcel tracker. Not a vanity project to trick yourself into thinking you are being productive.

“Making my portfolio site” is the ultimate developer procrastination trick going. You feel like you’re making great strides toward landing your dream client or employer when in reality you could make a better site in 1% of the time with Wix, Squarespace, or carrd.co and take the other 99% and build a project, write a blog post, post on Twitter or even pick up the phone and ring a recruiter.

Artists don’t make their own frames, developers shouldn’t make their own portfolio sites.

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Simon Barker

On a mission to help every self taught coder and career switch get their first tech job and dream career


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