Building your portfolio
Start here
Regardless of whether you’re positioning yourself as front-end, back-end, full-stack, QA, or what-have-you…you need projects that showcase those skills.
As a front-end developer, for example, you would make sure your Github repositories contain the following:
- At least a couple of from-scratch pages/sites/projects with your own HTML&CSS
- Something using a CSS pre-processor like SASS
- A project using plain JavaScript and something using jQuery and Ajax
- Something built with a JavaScript framework like React, Angular, or Ember
- Several somethings that make use of non-JS frameworks like Bootstrap, Materialize, Jekyll, etc.
A back-end developer would probably spend less time building front-end projects like those that fit above’s list. Here’s a great Quora question/answers on this. For them, a good list could include:
- A couple projects built on web frameworks, like Rails (Ruby’s main web framework), or Node (JavaScript for the back-end), or .NET (C#’s web framework)…the list goes on.
- At least one of those should be built to deliver info via something like JSON, rather than views: in short, built to be an API
- A repository containing algorithm problems with your solutions, with plenty of comments to showcase your thinking process
So put together at least 10 projects you can talk about to other developers and during interviews, and iterate on them as you learn.
Get ideas on stuff to build
Below are some places to get ideas on stuff to build yourself–but also remember that contributing to open source projects are one of the best ideas you can have if you want to build up your credibility as a programmer.