What you NEED to include in your developer portfolio

today we're going to talk about the four essential sections that should be on every developer portfolio and then we're gonna show you how do you use that as a sales tool to win that first software job so today let's talk about something real important which is portfolios that coder founder we've spent a great deal of time and building portfolios because we think they are the essential sales tool to getting that first software job now you may be afraid to put your portfolio out there because other people have these kind of rockstar portfolios and so what you do out of fear is you don't make one and you just try to trade on your resume I want to break a myth for you right now I do not believe that a resume especially starting out is strong enough to break you into that job I think you must have a portfolio to do that now if you're thinking I don't have one or I don't know what to do or you're in the right place because we're gonna tell you exactly what to put on that portfolio now before we get started let me tell you a little story about a guy that went to an interview and took his portfolio with him he was interviewing for a job and he showed his profiler during the interview process and this is key you must ask people to do it and we'll talk about a little bit more later but you must ask people hey look at my portfolio well he was brave enough to ask them to look at his portfolio and they looked at it and he demoed a project inside of that and guess what that person looked at him and said hey can we use that project when you are employed here and that shows you the power of a portfolio versus a resume or versus you as answering a bunch of interview questions the portfolio establishes you as that Pro coder that you want to be and so the power your folio is telling that story that guy got hired based on a demo and its ability to talk about it so let's talk a little bit more about exactly what you need to put on that portfolio one of the things that I think is essential to any portfolio is that it must be attractive clean and beautiful and then probably I must present well because if you show a clean attractive portfolio to a hiring manager they're gonna think that the programming behind it is also very clean and very well organized and gray if you show them something that the colors are mismatched or it doesn't work kind of right or the images don't display well they'll think that the code behind it is also equally unorganized so the clean of tractive miss of the portfolio is job number one I cannot stress this enough it does matter how it looks a lot of people think hey it doesn't matter I'm just gonna show them my cool code or my cool thing but though but though folium must be clean and attractive and you probably think well I'm not a designer how do I do this I'm a full stack web dev I think it's okay to use a template now I know there's a lot of people out there think you must do everything by hand and you must start over and that's not true at all please listen to me and we tell this to students every day instead of code offender you use a template use something that's pre-built because they're gonna hire you based on your projects not on the template but they'll definitely not hire you if the template is is broken and ugly so think about for a second the template itself isn't what's going to get you hired it's the fact that it makes it look attractive is what is going to get you hired so use something that's already built pre-built and spend more time on your projects as we go through this so use something like bootstrap or something like that because it'll be well seen on mobile tablet desktop and it be responsive and so all of those things inside a template will be clean professional and beautiful and that is job number one that first step to winning that job is to making sure that you use some other template or something like that to make it look cool okay so let's get into the weeds this get very technical I believe that if you're watching this I'm gonna tell you exactly what to put on the portfolio exactly the sections I think you're probably consists of four sections now you can have more but it needs to have these four section one needs to be at the very top of the page it needs to be about me now you can put your picture on there or not it doesn't really matter but it needs to have your name and how they can get in contact with you and then some kind of mission statement some kind of thing that says I'm passionate about coding I am a software developer and also in this section if you have an education that matters okay let's say that you went to MIT or you went somewhere else or you went to coda foundry you put that up front and say this is my education now if you're self-taught and your education doesn't necessarily go with the job you don't have to highlight that and what you would do instead is highlight the skills or the languages and the types of things that you can do I'm a c-sharp developer I also know jQuery JavaScript or whatever and so this session contains a passion statement or a mission statement and then it talks about your skills and your education that directly relate to suffer development now the next section that we can put in there is we want to have a section called projects and then in the projects we want these very business-oriented projects now project is kind of very what I would call a big kind of software effort that you need to do now if you're looking at me right now you're like I don't have any projects and that's okay what you should do is start building one now and here's the basic things that each of these projects need to have you need to be able to have a login screen authorization and authentication and it must support something like roles it must utilize the database complete with like admin screens and perform a business function now coder founder we build a blog a bug tracker and a finance reporter on those three projects together demonstrate your ability to solve different business domains but also they're in domains that make sense to the hiring manager now if your business project is in an obscure domain or it solves a problem that they're not familiar with then they're trying to figure out what is the app supposed to do versus looking at it and saying oh that's really good todd mcfarlane is a very famous comic artist and they asked him how do you break into the comic industry you know he wrote spawn and those kind of things he said well if you're applying to Marvel you draw spider-man if you're applying to DC you drop Batman because if they look at that Batman that you draw they can judge you see if it's good or not you don't present your custom character and this is the same way with projects show a project that the user would immediately understand pretty much if you're altona a hiring manager every single hiring manager you'll meet with or an interview with does have a bug tracker and that's why we built one here at coda foundry they have seen a blog before they've seen a lots of blogs out there so they know what that's supposed to do and on the financial side everyone has a checking account savings account whatever and they know intuitively how that should work so we build those projects that solve business problems that the the hiring manager can understand what the domains operate in okay your third section which should go under the project section is what I call the coding challenges section now a lot of people just have this and this is the only thing that's on their portfolio so I want you to build those business projects up top but I also want you to build some coding challenges now what is a coding challenge it's something that doesn't necessarily have a database it's more of an algorithm type question or maybe an interview question something like fizzbuzz reverse a string palindrome those types of problems that you can solve with code maybe something with just purely JavaScript and then that way you can show your algorithmic skills now if you're wondering what coding challenges are just google it and you can get a bunch of them and then just create those and solve those online now what I would say on your portfolio when you do solve a coding challenge go ahead and spend some time on the UI of that current challenge as well so if you make a fizz buzz make it look cool if you make a reverse a string make it look cool don't just put it say hey I did this in the console or here's the link to my JavaScript you can download it and try run it make a UI for it and then solve the challenge in code the last section that I think that you need is obviously your contact section at the bottom and so this is how they can reach you through email through LinkedIn through whatever how do they contact you how do they do that and so if you put all those on there and you put it at the top is about me a project section a coding section and at the bottom my contact section so let's talk about one bonus section some kind of extra credit if you want if you want to say as if you could add technical writings to your portfolio is very very powerful so like if you write a LinkedIn article push that also on your portfolio as well or link back to it if you're on medium or if you've built your own blog site like we do a cutter foundry you can link over to the blog where they can read about the things that you're writing that the read about things you're writing about and these articles should not be whether you think Star Wars or Star Trek is good it should talk about the internals of JavaScript or why you like C sharp or this thing you discover databases write about your journey as a suffer developer and the things that that's interest you in the software world it's not your opinion on this or that it's more about the technical things that you can do so they can understand how you think and and and steps yourself as more of an expert than necessarily just a junior dev looking for a job so that's that bonus section that you can add is right about technical things and show them on your portfolio okay now that you've got the portfolio and consists of the four sections possibly the bonus section that we talked about and you've got all your projects your kind of challenges and everything you want to do the next step for you isn't now you pass the construction phase you want to give you one more tip I want you to treat this for follow as an absolute sales tool if you were selling software the poor fellow is the product that you're selling so that you can get a job that means that you must have all your projects must be able to be demoed okay and this is a software demo and that means you have a script about what you want the hiring manager to see you walk them through the login process or whatever it is that your project does and you demo that to them now here's what's cool if you demo things you do what we teach at coda founding is take control of the interview if they were gonna ask you 50 C sharp interview questions say in a done interview but then you show them a piece of software written in c-sharp then guess what they're gonna ask you questions about the software that you've written second if you bring your laptop with you may be able to even walk them through the code so therefore you've moved from answering questions from memory and to showing them as a code walkthrough of your projects on your site and that is very very powerful so build to build all the projects the cut-in challenges and their portfolio make it look clean and attractive and then practice your demo with someone in your sphere of influence maybe it's your husband and your wife your mom dad brother sister or whatever or just talk to your cat or find a rubber duck whatever you want to do talk to them and work through that demo and then win that next job so I hope this helps good luck and keep coding hey if you're trying to win that first supper job or you'd like to break into the tougher industry at Kota friender we will teach you how to build a portfolio we just talked about but if that interest you I would like you to check this out Kota frantic calm slash job roadmap and we'll give you the five essential steps that you need to to break into that first job we would love and be honored to be your coach mentor and your teacher to get you that first sophomore job that's cutter Viacom's slash job [Music]

Channel: Coder Foundry

Views: 49,774

Keywords: coding bootcamp, learn to code, dotnet, .net, c#, programming, software developer, coder foundry, coding bootcamp in north carolina, portfolio website, portfolio, web development, portfolio review, web developer, how to make a portfolio website, how to get hired as a developer, coding projects, how to build a portfolio, portfolio advice, coding bootcamp 2019

Id: BZLLP7Gk3ps

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 07 2019