Ask HN: What are the best personal project websites you've seen?

Also posting own website: https://harishnarayanan.org/

As the original poster, I too have been through many years of grad school. I have not needed to interview for jobs, and believe my website has sold me well.

Blogging is a great way to show off what you know and how you apply it, if you're open to that sort of thing.

I'll humbly say that I'm by no means an academic, but I try to showcase what I know front and center and and let the rest be unraveled by those that are interested on my personal site - https://lacke.mn

Here's the deal: I disagree with this guy about a lot of things. I'm not going to address them one-by-one in a comment on a three year old piece. It's not my responsibility to write an essay about what precisely I think is wrong with a piece that I think demonstrates sexist attitudes every time I see one. There are a lot of them out there and they often repeat the same things. I used to spend a lot of time hunting down and refuting bad arguments, only to see them come up over and over again - I've realized there are much better things I could do with my fairly limited time and spare mental energy than that.

My original comment wasn't addressed to him. This thread was started by somebody asking about how to build a personal website for potential employers to evaluate them by. Even though the author isn't applying to work for me, I'm going to talk about his site from my perspective as an employer, in terms of how I'd evaluate it if he were applying to work for me because that's what's useful in this thread. I'm going to describe this guy in a kind of subjective, hypothetical sense - I know essentially nothing about him, other than that I've seen his website and now he's responded to my comment, so all I can offer is the impression I've formed as a potential employer and let the reader draw their own conclusions. My impression is hardly going to be unique here, or limited to some bubble (contrary to the "west coast tech web" guess, I'm writing from the infamously liberal state of Texas).

I value technical skills, but I also value how well people work in a team and how they contribute to the culture at my company. Red flags in the social skills area can absolutely trump impressive technical skills - I've seen too many situations where a skilled employee whose behavior is toxic in context has destroyed a team's ability to work together and finish projects, ultimately driving other people off. Their individual contributions might have been high, but their effect on the company was net negative.

Certain parts of his essay strongly suggest that he wouldn't be a good fit at my company. The overall vibe I get is that there are going to be cases where if someone has a problem with something he says, he's going to interpret them as being being hyper-sensitive or too PC or something. Everybody I've ever met with that attitude has been bad news. They're the sort of people with a much bigger problem: they really don't think that they should be held responsible for the effects that their words and actions have on the people around them. It shows up in complaints about "safety" and "sensitivity", in always siding with the guy caught on the wrong side of a harassment policy and it shows up in other work habits. The "I should be free to do my thing and if you don't like it, that's your problem" attitude stops working the moment their thing isn't what works best for the team.

Of course, it's not always the case that you're to blame for other people having problems with you. There are always going to be trolls on the internet, and even in workplace situations where we all have common interests and good reasons to get along, you're going to encounter people having a bad day, or interpreting things wrong or whatever. What matters is your reconciliation process. If you're saying or doing something that somebody takes issue with, I need your first response to be to trying to see what you could do to improve the situation, not rolling your eyes and bemoaning the sensitivity of a "pampered minority". One of those is constructive and the other isn't.

Perhaps ironically, in my experience the people who complain about hyper-sensitivity in the workplace are the most likely to instigate problems by reacting badly to something that doesn't need to be a conflict. For example, they will say or do something, and someone else will express that they disagree with it, or they were hurt by it, and the first person will cry "witch hunt" and interpret this as a kind of persecution. Often it doesn't take anything beyond even insinuating a negative sentiment. That's the kind of thing going on when Trump claims that the media is slandering him when they've merely quoted him disapprovingly (sometimes without comment).

My first reaction was that this guy's interpretation of the "shametweet" demonstrated this kind of thinking, because honestly being quoted with implied disagreement is not being persecuted - but upon further thought, he's right that people can use that kind of thing to aggressively sic their troll-ish followers on someone. At the same time, his response to my comment threw up some red flags. What I did was point out that he'd posted an essay and that its contents were a bad sign to potential employers like me. In a comment addressed toward someone asking about how employers view personal websites, I mentioned that his website gave me a bad impression, and I implied that I disagreed with him. Having seen this implied disagreement, he had many options for how to respond - letting it go would be chief among them in my playbook. How he chose to respond was to imply that I'm part of the "heads-on-pikes brigade", trying to discredit him and misrepresent him.

It's hard to find where I had space to misrepresent him, other than my subjective judgment of the tone of his essay as a "rant" - he'd done a fine job of representing himself without my help. So far he's represented himself as the kind of guy who interprets an implied disagreement and personal judgment as persecution. When I see that, I imagine someone who's going to interpret being disagreed with as being attacked in other situations. That kind of adversarial attitude is tolerated or even seen as healthy at some companies, but it's a big red flag for me. I could definitely be wrong, but I'll pass without finding out the hard way.

If you're reading this and thinking that the take-away message is "don't post potentially controversial stuff on your personal website" - that's absolutely not what I'm saying. I actually encourage people to post things that they care about that not everyone is going to see positively - insofar as you're trying to find a good fit, you're doing yourself and your potential employers a favor. As an employer, I don't want to hire people that would be a bad fit and unless you're just desperate to pay the bills next month, as someone seeking employment, you don't want to work at a company that's a bad fit for you either. Seeing an essay like that meant that I could determine that quickly and we don't have to go through the painful process of figuring it out later.

Shameless plug for my own: http://www.johnloeber.com. I designed it for maximal clarity and readability.

@@@@ Self Promotion Disclaimer @@@@

I think my personal site is a very nice minimal site: https://cmp.is/

I strive to have as little js/css as possible. Currently only has Google Analytics and whatever Cloudflare wants to stick in there. I have to simplify the CSS to the bare basics eventually. I use Hugo to build the site and I get to post many different kinds of posts like links, notes, and real full posts.