does.software

Junior developer portfolio: what to put in and where to publish it

What people hiring a junior look at, which projects to include and which to drop, and how to publish your portfolio under your own name so you get found.

Reviewed

When you are looking for your first developer job with no experience, the portfolio stands in for the experience. Its job is to show in a couple of minutes what you can do and how you work, and two or three projects are enough for that.

What people hiring actually look at

Whoever screens junior applications usually has a lot of them and little time. They open the link, look at one or two projects and decide whether to call you. What they want is a project that works, code that can be read and a clear idea of what you did yourself.

In the interview they will ask about those projects, so one you can explain in depth, with its decisions and its mistakes, is worth more than five you built by following a tutorial.

What to put in and what to drop

For each project, in this order:

Drop the tutorial clones (the to-do list, the Netflix clone) unless you added something of your own, and drop anything that does not work. A broken project takes away more than one more project in the list adds.

  1. A link to the live demo and another to the repository.
  2. What problem it solves, in one or two sentences and without jargon.
  3. What you did. If it was a group project, which part was yours.
  4. What technologies you used and one hard decision you made, with the why.

Where to publish it

If your portfolio is static, GitHub Pages, Vercel or Netlify publish it for free under a name of theirs, like username.github.io. It works, but the name is long and tied to the platform.

With does.software you get yourname.does.software and point it for free at wherever your portfolio lives, or host it right here with the Starter plan or during the trial. If you switch platforms one day, you change the target and the name on your CV keeps working.

Add paths for what you always get asked for, /cv to the PDF, /github to your profile and /linkedin to your LinkedIn. The free plan comes with two paths and Starter with ten.

A name you can say out loud

It is going on your CV, on LinkedIn, in your email signature and in your slides, and now and then you will spell it out over the phone. yourname.does.software is said in one go, which a platform URL full of dashes and numbers never is.

On the same name you can have hello@yourname.does.software forwarded for free to your usual inbox, which reads better on an application than your school address or the one you have used since you were fourteen. The email guide explains how.

Before you send it

Go through this with the portfolio already live.

  1. Open it on your phone, a lot of people will see it there first.
  2. Click every link, demos, repositories, CV and contact.
  3. Look for placeholder text, broken images and errors in the console.
  4. Check that your name and a way to reach you show without scrolling.
  5. Put the portfolio link on your CV and on LinkedIn, the same one on both.
  6. Ask someone who doesn't code to tell you what each project does. If they can't, rewrite the description.

Two or three projects that work, explained without jargon, behind a short name you can put on your CV. The rest you tell them in the interview.

Claim your name Or back to Static sites

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