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Discussion on: How do you make your portfolio/GitHub profile standout?

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whoisryosuke profile image
Ryosuke

The most distilled way to improve a Github profile:

  • Contributions to big or relevant projects
  • Frequent/regular contributions that reflect on the contribution graph
  • Great personal projects
  • Flex your git skills in your projects (recruiters can and will check your commit history to see how you handle projects)
  • Make sure to take advantage of Github's features like "pinned repositories" to curate the repos your profile shows initially.

General tips:

You can make yourself stand out in any situation by doing something divergent. If you're marching in the same direction as everyone else, people aren't going to care about where you're going. It doesn't mean make your workflow so different and weird no one wants to work with you, but feel free to experiment and push the boundaries of inherent limitations.

Identify problems, create solutions. If you create something that solves an existing problem that developers or designers have, you'll get plenty of great promotion in the community. Creators are always looking for the latest and greatest tools, if you can contribute to that pool, you'll get way more attention that "yet another XYZ library".

Be clear about who you are and what you do. This one seems a given, but it's probably the #1 reason you get passed over by recruiters. What do you do, and does your portfolio/resume speak to that? If someone without any experience with your work looked at your site, could they quickly and easily discern your skillset? Imagine you're a recruiter going through 50 portfolios in a sitting and look at your portfolio or resume critically. Could they tell you do ReactJS in 10 seconds or less? What first impression will they be left with?

Document your work. Pretty design or elegant code is fantastic, but a final product doesn't paint the picture of your process. How did you arrive to your destination, and what mountains did you have to climb? Case studies, documentation, etc -- all help 3rd parties view your work and understand the actual scope of it all. Did you design the entire SPA app yourself or just a component?

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donita profile image
Donita

Thank you so much for such a detailed explanation! I am going to keep all of this in mind!