Building a Github Portfolio With Github Pages

If you write code, you need a Portfolio — Simple as!

A portfolio allows you to showcase samples of work you have done which serves as a digital resume and proof you have the skills that you say you have in your resume.

If your a frontend or backend developer, there’s some merit in building your own website from scratch. But if you’re like me, a Machine Learning Engineer, then you’d ideally want to go for the simplest option possible.

In my opinion, that means using Github Pages. Github Pages is simply a free hosting service provided by Github — it can take HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files directly from a Github repo.

What can go in my Portfolio?

At some point, you’re going to want to beef up your Github Portfolio to ensure that potential clients/employers don’t just breeze over your application. However, knowing what can go in your portfolio is not a very straightforward task. Here are some ideas of things you may want to include in your portfolio;

• Assignments & Coursework: This may not be your highest quality work, but that doesn’t mean it is not worthy to be a part of your portfolio. All of the programming assignments and coursework you received at school or through courses are still valuable projects to have included but remember if 50,000 people took the same course and share the same thing then you’re going to have to do a bit more if you want to stand out.
• **Stand-alone Projects: **Stand-alone projects (or personal projects) are vital to the development of anyone that wants to advance their skills. Including this as part of your portfolio is a must and is most likely what is going to grab the attention of potential clients/employers.
• **Replicating Research: **When we want to learn something on a deeper level, reinventing the wheel is always a good idea. For Data Scientists, this may mean coding a Neural Network from scratch using a research paper.
• Competitions: If you ever decide to participate in competitions then sharing how you faired is a great step. Although many feel as though competitions do not replicate real-world scenarios, I feel as though there is still plenty of value to take from them and they should definitely be included as part of your portfolio (It’s even better if you can rank high in the competition).
• Blogs & Vlogs: If you create content in form of a blog or vlog then it should be included too. I feel this is a great way to also demonstrate soft skills as well as displaying your technical knowledge.

Ideally, anything that is going to give you an edge, highlights your strengths, and show the recruiter/potential client that you are capable of adding value with your ability to program is good enough to go in your portfolio.

Creating the Portfolio

As previously stated, I am a Machine Learning Engineer and do not have much prior knowledge of web development — although, I have worked at a digital marketing agency that specialized in web development so I’ve had some exposure field and do know some small details about it.

Therefore, instead of stressing myself out to learn how to create a website, I am merely going to use a portfolio boilerplate, refactor it to suit my needs, and make it my own; Once I’m satisfied with how it looks, I’ll host it on Github.

Step 1 — Selecting a Portfolio Template

Step 2 — Refactoring the Boilerplate

Step 3 — Hosting on Github

#technology #advice #ideas #github