Ask HN: What are the best personal project websites you've seen?
I just finished graduate school and am trying to design a small personal website that showcases the research I've done to potential employers and explains how and why my skills would be useful in an industry/startup setting. I also want to give a little background about myself.
I've been looking at a variety of people's personal websites; however, I've noticed most of the researchers I follow tend to highlight their papers/publications on their website, which doesn't seem quite so useful for someone who wants to work in industry (in most of my interviews so far, I get the impression that publications are secondary to the technical skills I've acquired).
What are the best personal project websites you've seen? Something that a potential employer would look at and think "I need to hire this person".
Thanks!
313 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 365 ms ] threadNot sure if it fits the context but have a look at Matthias Noback website http://php-and-symfony.matthiasnoback.nl/
Minimalist modern design, sans any kind of framework (like Bootstrap for example) is the name of the game.
People spend their lives studying things like typography and design. There's a lot of value there and its NOT entirely a matter of taste. Tossing out a framework means you're wading out into hit or miss territory and creating a lot more work for yourself.
Knuth/Norvig/Kernigan can easily get away with naked HTML (although I see that Knuth has really gone bonkers and added a short stanza of css).
Normal folks who dare create a website will fare better if they stand on some shoulders for their visual styling.
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/
http://norvig.com/
http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/
Sure, nobody else is Knuth. Redesigning a personal website with scrolling text and the blink attribute won't change that in an important way.
I had some good feedback on mine as well - https://tim.fyi - and I'm pretty happy with it (love to hear what other people think too though). After the intro though, it's more about highlighting recent specific projects and talks and articles, rather than acting as a full CV. Sounds like that might be what you're going for?
If I were you, I'd keep it simple. Go for a short simple intro that highlights what you're about, a two or three sentence summary of what you've done and what you're good at, and then keep the body as something that gives more of a feel of what you're about and up to right now. Links to blog articles, things you're tweeting about etc.
You can provide an actual CV for people who want to dig into the details of your list of achievements and research in more detail, but if this is the first place people hear about you and it's your personal site, then a sense of personality and active things going on is more important imo.
Come on, you can do better than this. You're wasting your own time more than anyone else's with these sorts of comments.
To GP: Your website is just okay (on mobile). I recommend getting rid of the carousel since they're generally useless UX-wise and in this case it also repeats content with the feed below it. Not a big fan of the typefaces, but it is "approachable" if that's what you're going for. I'd get rid of the shadows on text and personally I don't think the boxes behind every feed item is totally necessary. The content without the cards behind it looks fine to me!
Also maybe making the medium/github/etc links stand out a bit more (on mobile they're overlaid on your picture). They look a bit decorative but in fact seem quite important for users to notice.
EDIT: Looked at it on desktop: The cards seem to make more sense, but not a fan of the background photo (just a bit dated). I also see now that the carousel content isn't completely duplicated, but I'd still advocate swapping it out for a single highlighted project – your magnum opus – that you dive into more extensively. Just to offset the deluge of information that's in the feeds below. Cool site! Tasteful blues and shadows goin' on.
Kept it minimal :)
It's a UI library for animating 3D web stuff, so it should look pretty. Suggestions to improve are welcome!
-Don't make us wait so long (so far down on the page) to find out what you're doing. I'd like to see this immediately: "Film it Right is a new and exciting tool created for amateur and independent filmmakers".
-You could move your own pictures and names to the bottom. People tend to first look for a reason to care, then lastly look at who did it.
I will be putting the finished beta version of the website live in the new year. I'd love to hear feedback from you for that as well?
http://www.whitneyland.com/recent-projects.html
http://drewwilson.com/
Perhaps a teaching-focused site that explicates all the tips and tricks you've gleaned about atomic microscopy. Maybe featuring a WebGL microscope simulator. And extensive Youtube tutorials for beginners.
Or a data bank. Resources that would appeal to researchers rather than students. Modelled after something like the Electron Microscopy Data Bank:
http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pdbe/emdb/
Your goal is simply to convey that when it comes to this particular characterization technique, you're the world's #1 expert. Not so different than the inbound-style, content-rich influencer marketing all of us are seeking to master here ;)
Good luck!
https://ponyfoo.com
A jaw-dropping website by Steven Wittens that pushes the boundaries of what your browser can do. Nothing I've seen has ever topped this wizardry.
(You should view it on desktop, with WebGL capability.)
I only read one article but it was really well written and presented.
[re-edit] I was not being dismissive or negative. Since I didn't have JS enabled I didn't know I was missing anything. This site (unlike many) was functional without JS (which is what should happen IMO). Only after a second look did I think to enable JS to see there was more to it.
https://acko.net/blog/zero-to-sixty-in-one-second/
> This site (unlike many) was functional without JS
While I don't echo hfsktr's views on not seeing what's special - Steven Wittens' work is mindblowing - but I think the fact he has a site that is so Javascript-centric in content, while also being so perfectly functional and rich without, is doubly commendable.
In the 3 years since I published it, the heads-on-pikes brigade hasn't slowed down, with Crockford being the latest target of a sanctioned witch hunt on the elusive cis white man, based on purely misquoted, imaginary offense. It failed spectacularly with LambdaConf, where people with actual jobs raised a handy $40+k to allow a programming conference to remain politically neutral in the face of a very loud and entitled minority.
So don't worry, you won't see my resume. Outside of the bubble of west coast web tech, there's a whole industry where people with real skills are never out of a job.
My original comment wasn't addressed to him. This thread was started by somebody asking about how to build a personal website for potential employers to evaluate them by. Even though the author isn't applying to work for me, I'm going to talk about his site from my perspective as an employer, in terms of how I'd evaluate it if he were applying to work for me because that's what's useful in this thread. I'm going to describe this guy in a kind of subjective, hypothetical sense - I know essentially nothing about him, other than that I've seen his website and now he's responded to my comment, so all I can offer is the impression I've formed as a potential employer and let the reader draw their own conclusions. My impression is hardly going to be unique here, or limited to some bubble (contrary to the "west coast tech web" guess, I'm writing from the infamously liberal state of Texas).
I value technical skills, but I also value how well people work in a team and how they contribute to the culture at my company. Red flags in the social skills area can absolutely trump impressive technical skills - I've seen too many situations where a skilled employee whose behavior is toxic in context has destroyed a team's ability to work together and finish projects, ultimately driving other people off. Their individual contributions might have been high, but their effect on the company was net negative.
Certain parts of his essay strongly suggest that he wouldn't be a good fit at my company. The overall vibe I get is that there are going to be cases where if someone has a problem with something he says, he's going to interpret them as being being hyper-sensitive or too PC or something. Everybody I've ever met with that attitude has been bad news. They're the sort of people with a much bigger problem: they really don't think that they should be held responsible for the effects that their words and actions have on the people around them. It shows up in complaints about "safety" and "sensitivity", in always siding with the guy caught on the wrong side of a harassment policy and it shows up in other work habits. The "I should be free to do my thing and if you don't like it, that's your problem" attitude stops working the moment their thing isn't what works best for the team.
Of course, it's not always the case that you're to blame for other people having problems with you. There are always going to be trolls on the internet, and even in workplace situations where we all have common interests and good reasons to get along, you're going to encounter people having a bad day, or interpreting things wrong or whatever. What matters is your reconciliation process. If you're saying or doing something that somebody takes issue with, I need your first response to be to trying to see what you could do to improve the situation, not rolling your eyes and bemoaning the sensitivity of a "pampered minority". One of those is constructive and the other isn't.
Perhaps ironically, in my experience the people who complain about hyper-sensitivity in the workplace are the most likely to instigate problems by reacting badly to something that doesn't need to be a conflict. For example, they will say or do something, and someone else will express that...
> there are much better things I could do with my limited time
> letting it go would be chief among them in my playbook
2+2=5
> If I saw this linked from a resume, I'd throw the resume out …like a giant, blinking "DO NOT HIRE ME" sign. I wouldn't want this guy anywhere near my team.
Have you tried reading your own words back to yourself? It's terribly embarrassing.
Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but its simple and clicking through any project makes me to want to work with and/or hire him immediately.
- When reducing the width of your window, you obtain some layout disaster
- There are those weird pages containing only one sentence
- The articles are often split into many little pages, which I find pretty useless, and only makes it slightly more difficult to navigate.
http://www.jaruzel.com/
Stumbled upon this one yesterday, it's from a paper, but well written: https://mzucker.github.io/2016/09/20/noteshrink.html
A long time favorite writer: http://www.frankchimero.com/writing/the-webs-grain/
These are great examples. Clean and user-friendly. They invite the visitor to spend some time reading, and display the articles using familiar conventions. Nice work!
To contrast with the top 2 comments...just look at all the tacky animations, cheesy special effects, massive headshots. Clearly the people had nothing to say so they decided to bedazzle the fuck out of their sites in the hopes that no one noticed.
Surprised nobody's posted it yet.
Other people are also posting their own, so here's mine: http://www.dougkoellmer.com/
Other job-hunt-specific efforts: http://www.dougkoellmer.com/portfolio/ http://www.dougkoellmer.com/resume/ http://www.dougkoellmer.com/games/
Can't be totally sure but I believe they've gotten me a job or two.
FWIW the engine (https://github.com/dougkoellmer/swarm) that runs the website doesn't care what the layout of the cells are. For example here's a prototype textbook reader: http://eagrereader.appspot.com/
Given how much thought he puts into user experience in his projects, that's really weird. I have to scroll with click and drag and sort of "throw" the page upward as if I'm using a touchscreen.
To hazard a guess, the testing environment was a Mac with trackpad scrolling. Each scrolling step on that would be small enough that "teleport to next scroll position" looks smooth, and breaking the built-in smooth scrolling wouldn't be noticeable.
I do wish people would stop trying to reimplement scrolling and just let the OS/browser do it...
FWIW I'm in Chrome 54 on Windows 7.
It's kind of when fashion designers wears an ill fitting t-shirt and jeans I guess.
I started noticing some sites were hijacking scroll despite having them blocked by NoScript, however the above config change fixed that instantly. Turns out scroll can be hijacked by CSS now, not just JavaScript. Progress!
[1]: http://www.b33hive.net/
PS: If you are patient enough to wait for 45 clicks, you will bump into the second easter egg ;-)
Then I enabled JS, and it completely breaks scrolling and loads a ton of images :|
1. http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming
2. http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction
3. https://vimeo.com/115154289
4. http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange
This is the best one I've read: http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange
The visualisations and interactions are really helpful in aiding understanding. It's nice to see people trying out new ways of presenting information.
WRT Bret's website, it's the type of website I'd pass if I wasn't told that there's sth. interesting in it. A black window w/o JS, and when enabled, it takes 5-10 seconds to just show me some text b/c needs to load custom fonts and loads of JS, and then messes up my scroll. Yours is a creative thing and I like it, but this one just imitates badly the normal scolling. Plain awful.
I had no idea Bret's website would be so polarizing! I appreciate it in a more idealized sense, so "assuming JS is enabled and scrolling works right and you have a fast internet", and of course for the content itself. If he was the kind of person that had to look for jobs then I'd recommend fixing those things as well.
Bret's website is an obstacle to the content therewithin. If all he cares is getting hired, then well... But if it's sharing information, he should fix that website.
If your're hoping to convince employers of your technical skills I would put examples of your work up front. Unless you're applying for jobs where "unique" UIs are valued (designing ad agency sites?) then it will actually detract from your goal.
Also notice that DougK (the commenter) has been kind enough to post his own site (which fucking sucks). Turn down the narcissism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Its absolutely insane someone could be that productive in 2 years. A lot of the ideas in that showreel are incredible. Yeah many of them probably don't work, but I saw dozens of new interactions that don't exist anywhere else. Plus the demo is >4 years old. That's amazing.
His CV has the following quote: “One of the greatest user interface design minds in the world today.” — Alan Kay
People are obsessed with getting immediate gratification and have little to no attention span these days.
I also honestly can't say I've faced the usage issues other people have. It was a pleasure to look through a bunch of his stuff and I actually kept on looking for fun.
That's the point.
If a genius can't make a tricky personal website without breaking things, what chance do normal people have?
Just make a normal website.
Brett Victor is awesome. If you copy his website, you're learning exactly the wrong lessons from him.
I'd certainly never hire that guy based on my first impression, which is that he doesn't value performant code.
http://www.pascalvangemert.nl/
http://johanbrook.com/
http://dustandmold.net/
http://www.rsudhakar.in/assets/professional-me.jpg
It was even helpful to kickstart conversations in meetups / other technical gatherings
You need to think of yourself as the product and work out what's the best way to describe and package the skills and experiences that you have already acquired and how they can be applied to whatever your target companies are looking for.
Also think about whether you are using your portfolio site for lead generation or lead qualification. Lead generation means that you'll have recruiters finding your portfolio off the back of your SEO and they contact you. Whereas lead qualification means you are selling your self to a hiring manager/expert after they've read your resume and decided that they want to check your credibility before interviewing.
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/