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Show HN: Pocketsquare – portfolios for developers

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Re: Show HN: Pocketsquare – portfolios for developers

#41

Post by alanfriedman »

RickS wrote: post #40

It's a fine line between "minimal and designery" and "understyled". I think this falls slightly to the wrong side. Also, the icon thing encourages people to check the most number of boxes, even if they're not skilled there. This is reasonable and something lots of devs do, but it will hurt your appearance to people who hire. Everyone I've ever talked to about hiring developers has an opinion somewhere in the realm of…

Fair points. As for the design, it can always be tweaked, but I have gotten positive feedback around the simplicity and minimalist look so would have to think it through.

As for the icons, my theory is that devs are free to add whatever skills they want to their own portfolio or resumé anyway, but they're going to ultimately be responsible for demonstrating that knowledge to employers, clients, etc, so it probably wouldn't be beneficial to them to exaggerate their skills. I do see your point though.

Re: Show HN: Pocketsquare – portfolios for developers

#44

Post by fweespeech »

alanfriedman wrote: post #33
zatkin wrote: post #23

Good work so far. Just a few things: - I graduate from university in 2016, but I can only choose up to 2015 for the end date - This is in Chrome 45, Windows 8.1: http://i.imgur.com/u5xMXob.png

Thanks - I'll think about how to incorporate future dates. And wow those scrollbars look terrible. Sorry about that! I think I can fix it pretty easily with CSS overflow.

I'd suggest to do this year +10 and set the input to the current year. That should cover pretty much anyone.

Re: Show HN: Pocketsquare – portfolios for developers

#46

Post by fweespeech »

Just a suggestion...

If you are going to have a big list of icons the first thing that comes to mind is "Click on one". Analysis of programming language(s) used isn't hard given its built into the GitHub api:

https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/#list-languages

So if you allowed an "import Github Repo option" then linked those icons to the "examples/repositories/snippets" in those languages that would help.

You already seem to be able to designate icons-per-project/snippet so you shouldn't need to add much beyond a hyperlink on the icon that scrolls to the first appropriate projects and/or allows the user to designate the project to scroll to.

I'd say have a page listing the relevant projects as well by technology [e.g. A "Would you like to know more...?"] but I'm not sure that should be the default behavior.

Similarly, I'd encourage/enforce linking to test suite(s) and/or documentation as a requirement to list anything larger than a snippet. That might be a bit too opinionated but I think it encourages "new" developers to get into the right practice of having some sort of documentation [even if it is just a test suite].

Re: Show HN: Pocketsquare – portfolios for developers

#47

Post by nicolewhite »

alanfriedman wrote: post #35
cableshaft wrote: post #31

Yeah, you need to add more languages and frameworks, and not just the things that are out and popular now. I'd want to include projects from awhile back, personally, and that includes projects made from Flash. I know its unfashionable now (and I no longer use it), but it's how a lot of devs got started. If you want game developers to find this useful, you might want to consider adding: C++, C, Unity, Unreal SDK, Coco…

Thanks for the tip on gaming languages. And I agree on Flash - I actually started as an AS3 dev so should've known. More languages/skills are coming soon.

You should also think about catering to data scientists. It's not an option in the "specialty" dropdown and you don't have languages like Scala, R, Julia, or MATLAB.

Re: Show HN: Pocketsquare – portfolios for developers

#48

Post by alanfriedman »

nicolewhite wrote: post #47
alanfriedman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the tip on gaming languages. And I agree on Flash - I actually started as an AS3 dev so should've known. More languages/skills are coming soon.

You should also think about catering to data scientists. It's not an option in the "specialty" dropdown and you don't have languages like Scala, R, Julia, or MATLAB.

Yeah I had that same thought actually. Data scientists are becoming more common lately.

Re: Show HN: Pocketsquare – portfolios for developers

#49

Post by WorldMaker »

alanfriedman wrote: post #37
Kudos wrote: post #30

You're making use of the deferred anti-pattern [0] on your own profile page [1]. [0] https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/wiki/Promise-anti-p... [1] https://pocketsquare.io/alanfriedman

Because "request" returns a promise? I created the deferred object because I'm waiting on multiple async operations (get gravatar url, download gravatar locally and upload to s3). Or am I missing something?

The trick is learning how to compose promises out of one another. For instance, then() on a promise doesn't just support a callback, but another promise or a function that returns another promise. Often you can build multiple async operations as chains and flows of promises. Additionally there are "higher level" compositions of promises such as Q.whenAll(promise1, promise2, ...).then(), making it easier to deal with things like parallel promises.

Also, it's often cleaner to use something like Q.nfcall to turn a callback accepting function (like request in your example) itself into a promise that can be chained. (I just noticed that this is contrary to Q's own documentation which surprisingly is pro-deferred.)

Re: Show HN: Pocketsquare – portfolios for developers

#50

Post by shostack »

alanfriedman wrote: post #29
a3n wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool idea. > Oh, also: it’s free. Your target users, developers, have the "I'm a product" meme at the front of brain. It certainly immediately came to mind when I read that. I'm not saying you are selling me, but some treatment of that concern might make the paranoid wing (proud member) more comfortable. And if you are selling me, well, nothing wrong with that, but be up front about it.

Good point - I should probably spend more time working out the text on the landing page, as I could see how that could come off wrong. To be honest right now I'm just focused on making users happy with a product that's useful for them so I haven't given too much thought as to what's next. Thanks for pointing that out though - I'll definitely think about it.

And that's perfectly fine, but then you end up on the other side of the coin which is:

"How do I know you don't plan to sell me out down the line or that you'll disappear in a few months once I've invested time and energy into setting things up?"

So really you need to make sure both are addressed ;)

Congrats on shipping!

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