I want to create a personal portfolio website for my personal projects, and to show off my programming skills for employers. I was wondering if using ReactJS with SASS instead of plain HTML, CSS, and JS would be okay for something like this, or would it be overkill using React for a small project like this.
Ask HN: Should I use React for a personal portfolio?
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Re: Ask HN: Should I use React for a personal portfolio?
#2Personally, something I think would stand out is an explanation of decisions made for the project, such as in a README. I'd love to know why you picked React for the project and it may not sound great in recruiting context to say, "I thought it would make me more likely to be hired." Of course, that's a very understandable motivation but it's not going to fly in a real-world job setting (though, I've heard stories; don't count on it happening to you).
That said, I think, e.g., "I wanted to learn what I could do with React" sounds like it would be a pretty good reason to choose React. The important thing is being honest with why you chose something even if the reason seems boring or same-y. (Hiring managers love boring and same-y.)
Re: Ask HN: Should I use React for a personal portfolio?
#3I'd argue that it's overkill. Simplicity of solutions is a virtue and a good employer recognizes that.
On the other hand, there's always fun in doing something stupid and impractical, like porting DOOM to a smart appliance. So instead of making a portfolio with React and SASS, try doing something else that more clearly projects "I know this is overkill, but it's weird fun so I did it anyways."
Re: Ask HN: Should I use React for a personal portfolio?
#4If you are looking for a front end role, a great idea, otherwise it's not a bad idea. But, I would suggest going with Next over React for static content, this a great starter https://vercel.com/templates/next.js/nextjs-boilerplate and your build process will be all set from the set and tied to the created GitHub main branch, best of luck!
Re: Ask HN: Should I use React for a personal portfolio?
#5I don't know if I've ever thought to see which technologies went into a candidate's portfolio site. For me, you want it to be clearly presented, with the content being the most important thing. I would not give an engineer more or less attention if I knew they were using React vs. vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. I want to see good case studies of previous work, which show you've got a good head on your shoulders. Everything else comes out in the interview.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use React for a personal portfolio?
#6You should use “resume” to show off your skills.
Nobody is looking at a portfolio site.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use React for a personal portfolio?
#7React or not, I think you should maximize for your fun and enjoyment. I've seen many a personal portfolio and the ones that shine the most are the ones where you can tell the author really enjoyed working on it, either on the site itself, or when asked about it in an interview.
Do what excites you, and interviewers will pick up on that!
Re: Ask HN: Should I use React for a personal portfolio?
#8I'd argue that it's overkill. Simplicity of solutions is a virtue and a good employer recognizes that. On the other hand, there's always fun in doing something stupid and impractical, like porting DOOM to a smart appliance. So instead of making a portfolio with React and SASS, try doing something else that more clearly projects "I know this is overkill, but it's weird fun so I did it anyways."
One might say, OP is overREACTing.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use React for a personal portfolio?
#9If you want to use or show off React, use it. If you want to make it simple, keep it simple.
If your portfolio's content is simple enough for one page, or just a unique pages, go for just HTML! You will like it. Static HTML files (with a bit of JS) will be easy to deploy and better for SEO and performance.
That said, you might quickly find you want something with more capabilities.
Through my experience, you're eventually going to want some sort of template engine. Want to reuse the same "article" layout or you want a for-loop over a list of articles? Templates. Your template engine could be as simple as Pug or Handlebars templates, no client-side rendering needed yet. Compile your templates and deploy your HTML files.
Pug (or other template engines) will probably carry you a long ways. The next step would be some sort of static site generator. This is basically the same as Pug, with with extra options and more structure. Hugo and Jekyll are popular, but there are a lot of options. Deploys are the same: build locally, deploy, or set it up with some hoster like Netlify or Vercel to build and deploy automatically (and for free!).
The next level is something like Nuxt, Vuepress, or Next, which can generate static websites, but also give you fancy things like client-side rendering for fancy page transitions (although there is now a native way to accomplish this with just HTML and CSS!). My blog articles are written in Markdown so they are easy to port to other frameworks or themes. This is the approach that I use because I like to stay up to date with Vue...but you'll spend a lot more time "upgrading" things instead of building or writing. Just my experience.
Re: Ask HN: Should I use React for a personal portfolio?
#10Why? Why not?
Arguments can be made either way.
You could build a portfolio site with just HTML depending on your priorities
Or you could extend to using CSS
If you need basic interaction and event listening, JavaScript is fine enough
Maybe you want a really interactive single page portfolio or web app, then you could reach for React/Svelte/Vue/Angular
Maybe you want a blog style portfolio with many pages and some interactions, in which case you can use any server side templating framework or a “full-stack” framework like NextJS