Show your work !

The job market for developers was very tough in 2023.

It was tough pretty much accross the board.

And it was especially tough if for example

• you are fresh out of a bootcamp, that may or may not teach you programming well, but rarely helps you to get that so difficult first job
• you really wanted to work full remote
• you wanted to work as a freelancer but don't know yet how to do prospection by yourself
• you are not the cliché of the stereotypical developer, meaning 25 years old, white, male, with a master in computer science, 3-6 years of experience, english mother tongue, no hobby outside of programming, and also no girlfriend so that you can spend all your nights and week-ends doing taking home challenges.

If things have been hard for you last year, well yes.
At least it's not about you personally.
In the long term, you will be fine.
But also, as Keynes pointed out, in the long term we will all be dead.

So what can you do apart from falling in the abyss of despair ?
I'm an agent for developers, so I talk with hiring managers aka the people who will decide to hire you or not, and they pointed me out a low hanging fruit :

Most developers don't have any kind of developers portfolio and that's bad.

Why developers portfolio matter

Let's put ourselves in the shoes of Alice, a hiring manager.
Alice is the CTO of a small startup, or some kind of engineering manager at a bigger company.
Alice wants to hire a fullstack developers, ideally with 3 years of experience, and knowing well NextJS, Typescript and good at CSS.
That's maybe you, and you are in her pile of CVs, great news !

The issue is that Alice doesn't know you yet.
For now, you are just one CV in a pile of CV, and the CV is a terrible marketing document of who you are.
I hope we can rid of this obsolete practice of CV-based hiring before I die.

But for now, all Alice has is that pile of CV, with you in the middle, and she wants to know more than just a bunch of buzzwords, list of companies, hard to understand experience, etc.
Oh you have a website, that's much better.
Well, it's a list of GitHub repositories.
Alas there is no README that explains what this is and why anyone should care.
And not, npm start # starts the server doesn't cut it as a README.

What do you think happens next ?

What are your best tips to create a developer portfolio ?

I know it's important, I don't really know how to do it well in practice.
Please share your tips right here !