What Makes a Good Developer Portfolio

A portfolio has roughly ninety seconds of a reader's attention, and it is competing with a tab full of other candidates. Everything else follows from that constraint.

Show the decision, not the feature list

A list of technologies tells a reader what you have touched. A paragraph explaining why you split a model into a feature extractor and a separate classifier tells them how you think. Only one of those is hard to fake.

Proof beats assertion

• ›A link to running code is worth more than any adjective.
• ›A number is worth more than a claim, provided you say what it measures.
• ›Published or reviewed work is worth more than either, because someone else checked it.

Be findable

Whatever else your site does, a reader must be able to reach your résumé, your code, and your contact details in one click each. Any design that makes those harder to find has made the site worse, however it looks.