On GitHub, there is a tab on the pull request which will take you to the code: What actual code did you write? This is where people will spend most of their time looking. Are you the type of person who says, “it’s my way or the highway” or do you work well with feedback?Īnd finally – the part of the pull request that matters the most. How you react to feedback on a pull request will show an employer how you take criticism of your code – something that will happen on a regular basis. ![]() ![]() To promote this, GitHub allows people to have conversations about the code right on the platform. Most software teams and projects care a lot about code quality and want to make sure everything that gets added to their project is a good idea – a process called code reviewing. That gives invaluable context and provides an idea of what to expect. Having a smart title and description that succinctly describe what your code is doing and why it’s important will give the person reviewing it (the one considering hiring you) an idea of how you’ll propose code changes on their product. You’ll notice it includes a title and a description. In general, a pull request is used to propose an added feature or bug fix to a project that’s being developed by a team. Sharing a link to that pull request in a cover letter is a better idea than sending whoever is reading your cover letter to a wishy-washy portfolio page. You will want to find a pull request you’ve made that you feel most proud of, and showcase that one. A pull request (or what developers sometimes abbreviate as a PR) is a proposal to make a certain code change. When you work on a team of people – and are using git in a more advanced mode than you generally would when working on projects by yourself – you’ll find yourself using something called a pull request quite often. Your code on GitHub is what dev teams will care about. In most cases, your code will exist on GitHub – a web application that allows people to collaborate on the same project. So instead of talking about portfolios, let’s drop down, flip it and reverse it, and talk about the best way to showcase your code. Your code samples will be the answer to the questions: “What does the code that this candidate writes look like?” and “What type of code can this candidate potentially write for me?” This is what the team hiring a new developer really cares about. Given the limited amount of time you’ll have to impress a potential dev team – you should spend 100% of your time showing off your code. It will convey exactly what your process and skill level are. The code you write will speak for itself – use this to your advantage. If a portfolio isn’t a good tool for that job… what is? Showcase your code Instead, focus 100% of your effort on showing that you’re an adaptable programmer who is capable of writing complex programs. So stop worrying about stuff nobody cares about. Regardless of how well-designed a portfolio page is, or how many apps a candidate has built, nothing changes the fact that the only thing employers care about is how skilled candidates are at the craft of programming. Instead, hiring teams spend their time complaining about how 199 out of 200 applicants for a programming position can’t even do basic programming. Or your website could look like Richard Stallman’s- an architect of compilers, debuggers and text editors, representing the leader of an open-source movement and one of the world’s most prolific programmers of our time. You could have the flashiest portfolio on the planet. But please trust me when I tell you that the people who are reviewing you as a candidate don’t care about what your portfolio looks like. ![]() As an aspiring developer who doesn’t have a history of previous web development jobs, proving your skill and aptitude can be hard. Developer portfolios are taken about as seriously as most people took Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. In fact, while aspiring developers are spending countless hours making their portfolio sites pixel perfect, experienced developers are busy ridiculing how utterly pointless portfolios are. People believe that a professional portfolio site will help them land a job as a web developer – and this belief couldn’t be farther from the truth. There is a massive confusion that up-and-coming developers have about what it takes to get a job as a developer.
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