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Personal Website for Programmers

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Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#81

Post by kreetx »

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #52
whycombagator wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Exactly, and it is actually the content, i.e text, that matters, not the design (unless the person is a designer, at which point the homepage should be really good).

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#82

Post by hombre_fatal »

onion2k wrote: post #67
JDiculous wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your definition of "frontend developer" is designer, then sure. Otherwise for any dev with experience, this is a dumb expectation. Part of a dev's job is to use the right tool for the job, and there's no sense in wasting time reinventing the wheel. (I say this as someone who used to overengineer my own personal websites with the hottest tech stack of the week, but am now in the process of throwing it all away for…

Otherwise for any dev with experience, this is a dumb expectation. A good website that demonstrates some ability to write frontend code well is a shortcut to demonstrating that you're good at what I want to employ you to do. It's a showcase of your skills, just as a graphic designer would have a Dribbble portfolio or a backend dev would have a few repos on Github. I'm not suggesting you can't get hired without a nice…

> a backend dev would have a few repos on Github

No, the equivalent here would be to expect back-end devs to build their own blog applications. What a waste of time. I did that when I was younger and it was only a distraction from actually writing and building things that mattered.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#83

Post by Xelbair »

40four wrote: post #74
whycombagator wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

It is just one person's opinion. You don't have to try to slam it down as 'petty'. They didn't say they reject candidates based on this, simply that it doesn't make a 'good impression'. Weather you agree or not, it shouldn't be hard to understand why someone would think that.

>It is just one person's opinion. You don't have to try to slam it down as 'petty'.

Why? if it is petty, why not slam it? it is a single opinion - do we need at least N people to share it before we can slam it?

>They didn't say they reject candidates based on this, simply that it doesn't make a 'good impression'. Weather you agree or not, it shouldn't be hard to understand why someone would think that.

Unless you make 'Good Impression' on recruiter you aren't gonna pass forward in the process, so it is indeed equivalent with rejection.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#84

Post by onion2k »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #82
onion2k wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Otherwise for any dev with experience, this is a dumb expectation. A good website that demonstrates some ability to write frontend code well is a shortcut to demonstrating that you're good at what I want to employ you to do. It's a showcase of your skills, just as a graphic designer would have a Dribbble portfolio or a backend dev would have a few repos on Github. I'm not suggesting you can't get hired without a nice…

> a backend dev would have a few repos on Github No, the equivalent here would be to expect back-end devs to build their own blog applications. What a waste of time. I did that when I was younger and it was only a distraction from actually writing and building things that mattered.

What a waste of time.

No one is forcing you to do any of this stuff. If you can find a job you like without doing it then that's awesome, but plenty of people can't. I'm suggesting a way that people can avoid being filtered out based on their resume because, whether you like it or not, wanting a candidate to demonstrate that they can code reasonably well before the interview stage is quite common.

I think people get a bit too hung up on the way FAANG-size corporations do hiring, with code tests, full time hiring managers, etc. That's only a fraction of the software industry, and if you're applying to somewhere smaller having a public portfolio is useful.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#86

Post by stefanfisk »

onion2k wrote: post #71
stefanfisk wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a frontend developer, I've gotten by with this as my one and only webpage for almost ten years now: https://stefanfisk.com

What I find interesting about your site is that you've updated it at least once to use more modern web standards - that tag was introduced in HTML5 in 2014, and before that you had a PNG image for your name ( https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://stefanfisk.com/ ). Updating a site to give the user a better experience (eg to use semantic tags) is great.

Yeah, it’s gotten some love every now and then.

In the beginning I felt like I would need a portfolio and all that, so this minimal thing was supposed to be super temporary. But it turned out that actually talking to customers about their needs and what I could do for them was a quite reliable way to land projects. If anyone asks to see prior projects I send them a selected list that seems appropriate in that context.

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#89

Post by tasuki »

naresh1318 wrote: post #51
tasuki wrote: 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.

Centered content has different psychological effects on different people. You find it pleasing. Some designers think centering is a crime ;)

Re: Personal Website for Programmers

#90

Post by ajnin »

The design is broken, on desktop below a certain width the menu disappears, and there is no hamburger menu either so once you're in a section you're stuck. Also the links are not links, you don't know where they are going and the url does not get updated which makes it impossible to have incoming links other than to the root of the site. It also behaves unusually, if you drag a link it just behaves as a click.

Honestly if I came across this site in the wild I'd quickly pass to something else.

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