Portfolio Feedback for job search

@moyamanuel @ksjazzguitar

Yeah I realized after the fact that showing off all my react projects actually built inside of the portfolio was not the brightest move making the loading time way too long I plan to move them all out this week and host them elsewhere to speed things up thanks man!

@ksjazzguitar
Thanks for the tips on ON captions each project on my portfolio page definitely going to add that in!

Sweet. Here’s what I see:

[Edit: this went way long and I apologize in advance for nit-picking. Once I turn that mode on, it’s hard for me to turn off. Also, it seems like the indentation on the bullets turned off at some point, so I apologize for that too.]

Portfolio

  • Landing page
    • “A small sample of some of my Professional & Pro-Bono work”
      • “Professional” and “pro-bono” should be lowercase: “professional and pro-bono.”
  • Route 247
    • “Route247 was one of my first real world projects and I was very excited to be involved in their cause.”
      • If you can, it’s best to avoid “very ______” as a construction.
    • “Route247 provides students with an online community, resources and real-world opportunities”
      • you probably want a comma after “resources” here. You can actually get away with either in this case, but putting in the second comma makes it clear that you’re talking about three things ((community) (resources) (real-world opportunities)), not two ((community) (resources and real-world opportunities)).
  • East Coast Driving School
    • “A good friend, wanted to update”
      • This is a comma splice. Correct is “A good friend wanted to update”
    • “She hadn’t known”
      • Consider “She didn’t know”.
  • PSD to HTML Conversion
    • “Contract Web Developer”
      • Don’t capitalize this. The general rule is that if it comes before a name, like “Colonel Mustard” or “Principal Skinner,” you capitalize the job title. Otherwise, lowercase.
    • I was given a fun code challenge. Take a psd from Daniel Snell and"
      • In this case, the second sentence explains the first, so a colon is appropriate. “I was given a fun code challenge: take a psd from Daniel Snell and”
      • Also, “psd” should be capitalized, or maybe written as “.psd”. And is it normal usage to use it as a noun, or should you say “PSD file”?
      • You should explain who Daniel Snell is or just leave his name out: “take a PSD file and convert it into HTML.”
    • “Built used, HTML”
      • Should be “Built using HTML”
    • When I went to the page itself, the “Testimonials” section said, "Snell ask for a webiste to be cloned and it was done. A simple task really. One in which I also learned how to reverse a CSS3 animiation which is pretty dope if I do say so myself I’m running out of stuff to say so I believe some Cat themed Lorem Ipsum is going to be coming up next. " This has a few grammatical errors and a spelling error; you might just stick to the ipsum. I thought putting the food names in the ipsum in other sections was awesome.
  • Simon Game
    • “Fully functional and very addictive Simon Game”
      • I feel like you could take out “fully functional”: why would you feature a game on a hire-me page that wasn’t fully functional?
      • Take out “very,” for the same reasons stated above, plus “very addictive” feels redundant :slight_smile:
    • “Built using, HTML”
      • Comma splice. Correct is “Built using HTML”
    • I’m on a normal-size laptop, and the screen that loads is too big and requires scrolling down. If there’s an easy fix for this with Bootstrap or something, that would be great: this is the only
  • Markdown Previewer
    • “A real-time github Github Flavored Markdown Previewer.”
      • Github is repeated
      • You don’t want to capitalize “flavored,” “markdown,” or “previewer.”
      • You need a single connected dash between “Github” and “flavored”: “Github-flavored.” Whenever you are using multiple words as a single adjective before a noun, connect them with dashes: “Most-improved-camper award.” (But if they go after the noun, no dashes: “the award for most improved camper.”)
  • Tic Tac Toe
    • “A simple Player vs Compouter”
      • “Computer” is misspelled.
      • Consider another description: as is, on first glance it looks like “simple” modifies “Player.” Maybe “A simple tic-tac-toe game for a single player against the computer,” or something like that?
    • “Built using: HTML, CSS, JQuery.”
      • This line is a little different on each project page. Choose a standard (especially whether or not to end the line with a period) and stick with it.
    • “using Mini Max algorithm.”
      *using the minimax algorithm." (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax)
    • I ran into a couple problems playing the game: When I choose O, the computer doesn’t make the first move, and when I try to reset while in the middle of the game, I have to hit the button twice.
  • Bottom four apps
    • You might consider pulling these off until they’re more polished. if not:
      • Having the language names without app descriptions in the buttons was confusing, and I would definitely hit your girlfriend up for icons to match the others.
      • The weather app seems to work pretty well, but the UI is a little sparse; if you’re looking for a frontend job you might try to spruce it up a little.
      • The blog app says, “Check out the post below titled “My React Blog” for the description!” but I couldn’t see any such post, or a button to connect to that post.
      • Lyric writing app: it was hard to see exactly what this did, and the UI was just two links, both of which said, “Fun”.
        About
    • “I am a front-end developer”
    • “I love to develop in JavaScript”
    • “I build websites and applications.”
      • In addition to the capitalization, you want to either append a period at the end of each sentence or do no periods: right now the first and fourth have periods and the second and third don’t.
    • “Massive deep dive” is redundant.
    • “Therefore I explored the option of development”
      • Consider “so I explored web development”
    • “Upon completion, I was hooked.”
      • This would mean that after you finished, you were hooked, which seems unlikely. Were you hooked immediately? Or maybe just hooked? Those seem more likely.
    • “I started picking up every course about every language I stumbled upon.”
      • This also seems unlikely, and makes it seem like you lack focus.
    • “Over the next couple of months, I was building”
      • “Over the next couple of months, I began building” or “Over the next couple of months, I built… and learned…”
    • “Once I built up my confidence, I defined my skillset”
      • Should be “refined my skillset”.
    • “dedicating my education and practice to JavaScript, primarly focused on ReactJS.”
      • “Primarily” is misspelled, and “focusing” is better in this case–it agrees with “dedicating.”
    • “self taught developer”
      • “self-taught developer”
    • “I have made learning into my passion and developed a logical mind geared towards problem solving, as well as a penchant for being the very best at anything placed in front of me.”
      • You called yourself “passionate” in the previous sentence, so saying that learning is your “passion” feels a little redundant. Also, consider using active voice: “Learning is my passion, I have a logical mind geared towards problem solving, and …” And “penchant” tends to have connotations of “fondness” or “liking,” which feels a little out of place when paired with “being the very best”: maybe “drive to be” or something similar there.
        Education
    • I love the Yoda quote.
    • “As the 900 year old Jedi Master said himself, your education never stops.”
      • A couple things here. First, consider “As the 900-year-old Jedi Master said, …”
      • Second, the construction of the sentence makes it sound like you’re quoting him in the second half of the sentence, which I don’t believe was your intent: Yoda didn’t say, “Your education never stops.”
    • “And this simple concept is what has driven me, a Culinary Arts Student, to take on the mantle of Web Developer. It hasn’t always been an easy road, not that I expected it would be, but it has been far more fulfilling than I could’ve imagined. Below are a few of my certifications and areas where I have studied.”
      • Consider “And this simple concept has driven me, a chef, to take on the mantle of web developer. It hasn’t always been an easy road, but it has been more fulfilling than I could have imagined. Below are my certifications and areas of study.”
      • Consider adding areas of study; right now, it seems like you just have certifications (the Treehouse badges feel more like certifications than areas of study to me, but I am new to this world and could be dead wrong).
    • The browser back button on this section is live, but won’t take me back to the main page.
      Contact
    • “When I’m not spending every waking hour coding I love to be outside in nature but I always keep my phone handy so you can always reach me by:”
    • I like how you’ve personalized this, but maybe find another way to talk about your interests and hobbies. Also, this statement is logically contradictory, unless you code outside in nature or sleep outside in nature.
  • “If you made it this far and want to offer me the Opportunity to work with you or your Company
    Here are more offical means of communication”
    • “If you made it this far” makes it sound like they had to trudge through an ordeal to get to this page.
    • “Opportunity” and “company” should not be capitalized.
    • “Official” is misspelled, and I don’t think you need to offset them with a special statement; just list them the same way you listed your other means of contact. And think twice before putting your phone number and email out on the internet. Also, you might want to make the phone and email icons hrefs that you can click on.
1 Like

if you want a subjective opinion, which may be wrong:

  • portfolio app should be lighter and more informative at a glance, i.e. the landing page should not require a potential recruiter/employer to take any actions at all to get the whole picture of you as a specialist;
  • example projects should not be included in the app, each should be hosted on its own (for example, https://www.push2.io/ can be used for codepen projects, https://www.openshift.com/ for github projects) and should be lazy loaded only on user demand if you want to showcase any within portfolio app UI;
  • it may not be reasonable to showcase all (or a lot of) your projects in your portfolio app UI, because of short attention span, which is quite popular according to personal subjective observations, and unwillingness of lots of recruiters/employers to invest time in deep portfolio exploration (just like with paper CVs); if recruiter/employer gets interested in you as a specialist, one will follow your profile links (codepen, github etc) from your portfolio app to see more (and both codepen and github have a showcase section).

an example worth 899+ characters: http://rfprod.tk/