Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Personal Website for Programmers

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 111 posts

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#101

Post by tracer4201 »

userbinator wrote: post #3

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…

I probably wouldn’t take the time to build a personal website at all, but if I did, the website is just a means to facilitate communication of whatever core message I want to convey. Personally I think a strong engineer is resourceful. I’m not saying this Git repo should be cloned by everyone or anyone, but in solving real world problems, I don’t expect my team to reinvent logging, dependency injection, or basically any other undifferentiated piece of work unless we have a strong business or technical reason to justify why it wouldn’t be undifferentiated. To me, the website is similar maybe unless I’m trying to show my web and visual design skills.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#102

Post by Skunkleton »

varjag wrote: post #61
Skunkleton wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

motherfuckingwebsite has google analytics. kind of surprising imo.

Makes it noncompliant with GDPR too. Tho maybe one could argue the exemption for personal use here.

I am happy to ignore the word of the law here, and focus on intent. The whole ethos of the website implies that it is just an HTML page. Pulling in google is misleading. I don't like it.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#103

Post by dgellow »

natrik wrote: post #97
dgellow wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO the content matters way more than the form. And your website is empty, so I would focus on this instead of the rainbow text (which is just a bit too fast to be distracting).

I am going for a minimal look however and still working on projects to put on the site.

Then I don’t understand your definition of minimal look. To me that mean no effect such as your rainbow colors, no fluff, only the content and minimum amount of styles to do the layout. But then you need some content for this. It can even just be a short description of you and what you’re good at, what you enjoy, or what you’re looking for in the future, or anything else that you want to share.

Minimalism is about limiting yourself to the minimum necessary to communicate a message or make something usable, in the case of a website the minimum is the raw content. That means that visually you would only have the actual content, without distractions. What you did is instead to remove it, which results in an almost empty page that isn’t interesting to visit.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#104

Post by just_myles »

userbinator wrote: post #3

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…

I see where you are coming from if this person is a designer.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#105

Post by davvolun »

Ragib_Zaman wrote: post #19
rgoulter wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judgements like "I'd expect dev to write it themselves" come across as arbitrary. I think there's no shared context wherein interviewers / job-applicants have the same set of assumptions. Especially since "I'd expect a dev to not rewrite everything themselves, and leverage what's already available" is just as reasonable. There's not exactly a specific "right answer" about whether you need a personal website, what it…

> 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?

If it accomplishes the minimum functional requirements without additional time/money, isn't that the point?

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#106

Post by groundCode »

userbinator wrote: post #3

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…

There’s also something to be said, from a recruitment point of view, to having everyone’s site look the same. It eliminates one bit of unconscious bias. In a way, it can help anonymise each person, which can make for a different (perhaps fairer?) hiring process.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#107

Post by davvolun »

userbinator wrote: post #3

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 saying you wouldn't want to hire someone who put in the absolute minimum effort to meet the desired functional requirements without wasting time/money?

I think the functional requirements in this case are to impress someone who doesn't code, an HR person, etc. Because a qualified programmer manager shouldn't be particularly impressed with any personal homepage put together in a reasonable amount of time for the sole purpose of impressing a hiring manager.

There's places where it's worth it to "think outside the box" and then there are places that -- well, there's a reason we have boxes, because they work well for what they're designed to do.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#108

Post by JDiculous »

onion2k wrote: post #77
JDiculous wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I place more weight on their professional experience / portfolio and don't feel that having a pretty or flashy site is a good predictor of a developer's ability, especially when most devs are using templates anyways. But yea, all else equal a nicer site is an advantage even if a minimal one at that, not going to disagree with you there.

While it's nice for someone to have a public portfolio of URLs they've worked on you can't really rely on that so much now. 15 years ago sure, everyone made websites so you just asked to see what site's the candidate had built. Over the past 10 years I've found it increasingly common that developers working with front end tech are building things they can't show off - SaaS, internal apps, etc. That's one of the reaso…

Ok sure, if you have nothing to show off and no publicly visible code, then sure a nice site might help. My last two companies I worked at have publicly visible websites that I worked on that I can point to, so I don't see why that would matter in my case.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#109

Post by martin_a »

onion2k wrote: post #99
martin_a wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find it aggressive. It's honest, without any digressions or trying to be more than a list of mistakes and bad decisions that were made.

It's very opinionated, it offers no help or pointers about how to fix any of the problems, and it wasn't asked for.

> it wasn't asked for.

Well, it was kind of "public" to begin with, so you have to expect that people will tell you what they think about it. I don't see anything wrong in that.

Post reply on HN