Calling all web dev professionals and aficionados, I need your help!
As anyone in the tech space who has gone the self-taught route can tell you, there are several times when you hit a mental brick wall on your journey. I have once again unfortunately found myself slamming face-first into this proverbial mental blockade, but this time I'm trying a different approach to getting over it.
Being the only tech-minded one among my family and friends, I spend much of my time learning and processing things on my own. While as an introvert this seclusion can be nice, I've come to realize that it has severely crippled my opportunity to advance to the next stage in my quest for knowledge. For the past few years, I have very much had only myself (with the exception of one semester with a very poor community college professor) to provide any sort of feedback on the work I have done up to this point.
My Ask
What I need from the wonderful DEV community is some constructive, creative criticism and critique of what I have done thus far. Without any outside review, I'm afraid I have no idea where my time is best spent improving.
If you can spare a few moments, I would greatly appreciate anyone who is willing to take a look at my work from both an overall conceptual design standpoint, as well as a more technical "behind the scenes" perspective focusing on things like performance and code cleanliness. Am I doing something consistently right? Wrong? Absolutely unheard of?
You can view the major projects I've done / am currently working on at my website, as well as everything on my GitHub. (Try to keep chronology in mind, as these things span back to the beginning of my journey.)
Please leave any feedback you have (positive or negative, I'm not looking for only sugarcoated praise, although that's always appreciated 😉) in the comments here, at the email listed on my GitHub, or through the contact form on my website.
Top comments (25)
I'm just going to list these things out in order of my thoughts - and how I'd decide to hire you or not (because that's how I'd think about it first)
Let me just start off by saying holy crap, thank you! This response is a treasure trove of feedback and exactly what I'm looking for.
The two glaring things that stood out to me from reading this were honestly things I guess I'm already aware of and have been trying to ignore.
The first of which being I haven't really grasped the conversion between desktop and mobile design... it's tough! Not to mention accounting for multiple screen sizes within the two designs.
The second, and it doesn't just pertain solely to my portfolio, being that I struggle to describe myself. I can go on and on about the intricacies behind a project I'm working on or a topic I care about, but when I need to boil down to a few sentences about who I am and what I do, I draw a complete blank. I definitely need to sit down and figure this out.
I really do appreciate the time you put into this and the honest feedback, I don't take it lightly!
I can help you sort that all out. The responsive stuff is pretty simple - it just requires a little mental shift.
That all being said: it's just as good as everyone else's portfolio for the most part!
A few tune-ups will go a long way. Then you can totally start getting jobs.
I will definitely be taking everything you've shared into consideration and going back over the whole thing.
As a quick aside, you're spot on. It is React, made with a framework I'm working on utilizing inline styling, with some server-side CSS optimization. So that's where the inspector ugliness comes from (and probably the performance hit, although mobile lighthouse reads in the mid-to-upper 70s on my machine).
I'm in a one-off chrome incognito window and I got 50 the first time and 25/100 when I tested again. Strange
Definitely curious. I just ran it myself several times on both Brave and Chrome incognito tabs, both giving no lower than 66 on Mobile, and 95 on Desktop. I'm hosted via Netlify so I wonder if it's an issue with the server you're being connected to
Consider building it with regular HTML so people can see some proof you can write it. There are thousands and thousands of "React" devs that can't.
RE: score: weird! It's not always consistent - but our numbers are really off!
Rewriting is vanilla HTML/CSS has been at the back of my mind for a while (especially now that I've gained a lot more experience with designing for multiple themes). When I started off making this iteration, it was more of a proof-of-concept for the framework I was designing, and it just sort of got to the point of "holy crap this would be a lot of work to do again"
But I agree, in its current form, React is overkill for this and probably doing more harm than good
It'll be great practice. You can even keep both and compare and write an article. As I said, I'd be happy to help you. 🤠
That would be fantastic. If you don't mind, I might PM you here in a little while to pick your brain on some things. I'm elbows-deep in rewriting everything right now, so I'm sure I'll get stuck somewhere along the way.
Again, I appreciate all the insight you've given thus far!
Maybe you should wait until we talk... ; )
You can find me in the CSS Discord later this evening.
I took a look at your portfolio you seem to know what you are doing. It has a light and dark theme which is cool. The design shows that you have some creativity. Your GitHub has a few nice projects. You look like an experienced developer or at least a developer who is improving 😎
Thank you, I appreciate that!
Some things I noticed on your website in no particular order
I also took a look at ThoriumUI which seems like a cool project, it tells lots about you, and seems like a project an experienced developer would build, so KUDOS. You might want to focus a little bit on the styles of it though. Icons are not completely centered in their container can see it immediatelly on the burgerMenu. Some other elements seem to be sloppy or not well designed. Form elements in form component for example look like they don't have enough paddings margins to breathe. Perhaps improve on it as it very well can be a strong point on your first application for a job.
I say start sending application for react developer positions. Don't need to limit yourself to junior positions. Be bold and send to anything that says 1-5 years of experience. Years of experience is probably overrated as things change every year.
I believe you have an eye for frontend and web deveopment and can see that you are willing to improve. Explain to the interviewee that you are a junior but a fast learner and the reasons you would be an asset for them and try to relate to what they are doing (research the company). Showcase your website and the improved thoriumUI and I believe you will be just fine.
Unfortunatelly those are the two things I had the time to check out, perhaps that is all the time a prospective employer will give you, so focus on improving those minor details which actually make or break things.
Good luck
Giorgos, thank you for taking the time to look through my work!
I did not attend school or a boot camp (aside from two semesters of community college), everything I know / have done have been self-study from various resources. That's a problem I've run into with describing myself (especially on a standard resume) as I don't have relevant credentials to fall back on or show off.
Thorium is definitely my most ambitious project to date, and I absolutely misjudged how much work it was going to be to flesh out when I began haha, but I wanted to use it to get experience working with components I wouldn't otherwise think to use/design in other projects. I lost interest in it for a while as it didn't really yield the performance boost I was hoping for over other development methods, but you're right, I should continue at least polishing what I have completed.
Again, I appreciate the feedback and welcome any more you can think of!
Jeff
perhaps you can mention that you are self-taught somewhere
and you might want to mention that these are practice projects until you have real projects to showcase.
Hi Jeff, I won't go into all the specifics as that has already been covered well in this thread.
In general, I believe this website has the potential to be very cool, however it just misses the mark in a few areas.
My main observation is that it is not immediately clear what product and/or service you are offering or why I should want to contact you.
I suspect this site is falling into the common trap of trying to impress other developers rather than succeeding as a business tool for you, which basically is all a website really is - a marketing tool that needs to meet an objective.
Just my 2 cents :) Keep going I am sure you will nail it.
Hey Simon, thanks for the insight.
I totally agree on all counts, what I'm presenting of myself is way too vague. I guess the main reason behind that is that I don't yet have any practical experience in a relevant field, which leads me to fall back to the very generalized "I make cool stuff for the web" tag line.
I don't want to pigeon-hole myself into a niche that I'm not sure really describes who I am and what I can do. I've looked at awesome examples of other dev's portfolios, and noticed they all have a pretty solid "I do X and Y for Z company in such and such role." I'm not really sure how to translate my personal learning experience into something tangible to represent myself in so few words.
I appreciate your taking the time to look it over!
The market shift in USA looking to outsourcing job labor is moving toward to reduce cost.
I'm from Venezuela and start my journey from 2017, i could migrate to Argentina in 2019 (not the best destiny but far more better from Venezuela).
So keep up the pace, make yourself accountable, take care of your health, talk/listen with friends about your projects and their aswell. Involve in a community (Discord), sleep, enjoy the process and patience.
Best of luck and success.
Thank you for the advice and insight!
Well, that is more or less why I am looking for some quick community insight. Being that my entire learning experience has existed within a bubble including only myself, I'm trying to judge my "readiness" to begin applying what I've learned professionally.
Am I at a point where I could get hired? Is there something I should put a bit more time into before taking that next step? These are the questions I'm trying to answer for myself right now.
I appreciate the advice though and certainly agree that real-world experience is the next (and certainly biggest) step to tackle.
As a quick aside, I live in the middle of nowhere in Upstate, New York, not the city, so job opportunities in the tech field aren't necessarily abundant.
I really appreciate the vote of confidence!