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Personal Website for Programmers

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Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#51
post #42

If the point is that it's not necessary to have a static website to achieve reasonable simplicity - point taken! From a graphical point of view, it looks a little off to me (I'm not a designer, so take with a grain of salt). The whole website is flat while the boxes have these little shadows. Too many things are centered: the menu on the left, the boxes on the right. The headers on the right side are too close to the…

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not a designer either. So, I'm not quite sure about the psychological effects centered content has on people. It looked aesthetically pleasing, so I kept it. In fact, you can modify the entire home page if you just want to keep the grpahQL and database part.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#52

Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same obviously distinctive style of site showing pretty much a subset of the info I can already see from your GitHub account, except the latter doesn't require JS to view. If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not "I cloned someone els…

> Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same obviously distinctive style of site > If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not "I cloned someone else's I found on GitHub To me that seems petty and I feel you'll end up isolating a good portion of the talent pool. Anecdotally,…

I don't think that parent comment means "you need to spend hours slaving over a personal website for me to look at". A unique site could be raw HTML with some links to projects. Or you could just not have a site and let your GitHub/LinkedIn/resume speak for itself. A cookie cutter site like this is arguably worse than no site because of how generic and uninspired it is

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#53
post #42

If the point is that it's not necessary to have a static website to achieve reasonable simplicity - point taken! From a graphical point of view, it looks a little off to me (I'm not a designer, so take with a grain of salt). The whole website is flat while the boxes have these little shadows. Too many things are centered: the menu on the left, the boxes on the right. The headers on the right side are too close to the…

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not a designer either. So, I'm not quite sure about the psychological effects centered content has on people. It looked aesthetically pleasing, so I kept it. In fact, you can modify the entire home page if you just want to keep the grpahQL and database part.

> Thanks for the feedback. I'm not a designer either. So, I'm not quite sure about the psychological effects centered content has on people. It looked aesthetically pleasing, so I kept it.

This thinking can be dangerous. Aesthetically pleasing != good design, too often it can be the opposite. You definitely need to understand the "psychological effects" your page or app has on its users. First, you have to put yourself in their mind, then can you start building, then go back and iterate.

I know this may be a hobby project without much budget, so find a designer friend and bring them on board. It's very difficult to do this in a vacuum.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#54

Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same obviously distinctive style of site showing pretty much a subset of the info I can already see from your GitHub account, except the latter doesn't require JS to view. If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not "I cloned someone els…

So you're basically judging the book by its cover? You don't care about the content at all?

That only makes sense if you're hiring a frontend developer. Many people who are excellent programmers hate frontend development, and will happily use a theme or clone a repo if they can avoid frontend work that way.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Judgements like "I'd expect dev to write it themselves" come across as arbitrary. I feel like this depends on the type of dev. If you write C code for microcontrollers then who cares, but if you do web dev then using a generic template not authored by you seems like a bad sign, no?

Part of my concern is: judging a resume is fine, since an applicant is explicitly submitting this. But rejecting based on things done for fun and publicly shown seems 'unfair'. (It's 'unfair' since I'll be judged right now for crap I haven't glanced at for 5 years or whatever, and haven't maintained to the best of my professional ability). But part of why I consider it arbitrary is it's easy to come up with contradic…

> But rejecting based on things done for fun and publicly shown seems 'unfair'.

Portfolio sites are used to showcase the developer's work. If the developer's work sucks then it doesn't matter if it was done just for fun or as an extension of his CV.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#58
post #29

Showcasing my personal website here: [link redacted] I’m going for a very minimalistic look and it’s still a work in progress, but I’m aiming to keep load times fast, minimal JS, etc. Features I’m thinking of adding - a links page showcasing interesting links on the internet Also checkout my 404 page :)

Please don't disable the context menu. It's basic browser functionality.

Also, think about whether your desire for information on visitors really justifies adding yet another data point to Google's dataset.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#59
post #42

If the point is that it's not necessary to have a static website to achieve reasonable simplicity - point taken! From a graphical point of view, it looks a little off to me (I'm not a designer, so take with a grain of salt). The whole website is flat while the boxes have these little shadows. Too many things are centered: the menu on the left, the boxes on the right. The headers on the right side are too close to the…

My first reaction was that the margins seem different everywhere.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#60
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing what company you're hiring for so that I can actively avoid it?

Agreed! If I were a founder and learned that someone in HR was using such arbitrary judgement, they'd be the one looking for a new job. By their standard they wouldn't hire someone like Fabrice Bellard: https://bellard.org/

Why not? Seems like he coded his personal website himself without an existing template.
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