DEV Community

Cover image for But do you have a portfolio?
Amanda Koster
Amanda Koster

Posted on

1

But do you have a portfolio?

Hello! My name is Amanda Koster. I'm a former photojournalist and visual content creator who transitioned to Software Engineering six years ago.


After three years at T-Mobile, I was laid off in December 2023 along with thousands of others. From there, I worked at my friend's AI startup for a bit and am now looking for another role. I was happy to learn more about how AI works and code in tandem with our LLMs. I recently started looking for a new role and have been asked a few times for a portfolio. Unfortunately, everything I did in the last six years is behind a firewall and cannot be seen.

However, my friend and I want to brew beer for fun. We were chatting about automation and I decided to build a temperature controller using Raspberry Pi and BrewPi. BrewPi is an open-source codebase written in Python specifically for home brewing. We are starting with a Raspberry Pi 4 to get that running. From there I will install the thermometer.

Eventually, this will live on a React Native app so we can monitor the temperature anywhere. Normally I would write this app as a PWA as to view it on any screen. Instead, I chose React Native vs. writing a Progressive Web App (PWA) to learn the latest version of React Native. I wrote a React Native app in coding school, but the framework has changed quite a bit.

A software engineering friend of mine mentioned blogging about various software projects over the last year while looking for a job, a blog that would serve as a portfolio. This seemed like a good idea, welcome to my blogfolio.

Heroku

This site is built on Heroku

Join the ranks of developers at Salesforce, Airbase, DEV, and more who deploy their mission critical applications on Heroku. Sign up today and launch your first app!

Get Started

Top comments (0)

👋 Kindness is contagious

Please leave a ❤️ or a friendly comment on this post if you found it helpful!

Okay