Hi, guys.
I have been working as a software engineer for three years now, I am trying to create a portfolio site, to increase my online presence and help my current job search, but I am having challenges with content generation for the site because though I can do frontend work quite well, my more complex work has been 'backend stuff' and a lot of it was for my previous company(signed an NDA so don't know how much I can reveal about my work there)
Please help, what do non-frontend people put on their portfolio site?
Top comments (7)
The NDA probably prevents you from describing the code you wrote, but it does not forbids you to talk about how you approach a problem, how you build a solution for it, and the activities that you perform within your role responsibilities.
During those 3y, did you always work for that company? If not, do show off the code or repositories of your "non-frontend" work. This allows recruiters see how your code looks like, how organised you are and you "sell" your products. It might not be as "flashy" as a website or an app, but it still has value.
For instance, at work I developed a Slack bot to notify my team on someone's birthday. This was a purely back-end project, yet I advertise it in my portfolio. Polish your back-end projects and show them to the world ;)
Thanks, Diogo for your input.
Yeah, I didn't work only for the said company for the three years.
Could you expound on the "Polish your back-end projects" part?
Sure, what I meant by "polish" was to make your projects look as good as possible: make sure it has a
README.md, the purpose of the project is clear, it's easy to configure it to run on someone else's machine, there's documentation or examples on how to use it, maybe add a diagram or a screenshot or some execution logs.Try to think as a recruiter and do your best to leave a good first impression :)
P.S: Contributing to open-source is also a good way to show your skills, even on back-end. Because if you are helping an existing OS project, your code will be peer reviewed, and if you have contributions then it's because your code is good enough for that team. That reassures recruiters that you are a good professional.
Okay, thanks!
I was speaking with a colleague at work today and he also has a project purely back-end, but check how his README looks clean and organised.
Really nice, thanks.
I had this problem. I am a much stronger backend engineer and wanted to show that off for future employers.
The end result was CodeTips