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Ask HN: Employers of Mid Front end Devs, whats the min you'd want in a portfolio?

9 points by rex-mundi ↗ HN
I'm looking for work but I don't have much work based examples which I feel are suitable for a portfolio.

Atm I'm going back and forth, part of me says that I really should have a feature complete app with tests and the full works but I don't think that's realistic atm as I have limited time available and alot of that will be taken up job hunting.

What's the minimum you'd want to see in a portfolio which would prove to you know I enough to be able to do the job?

Also would you prefer multiple tiny examples (thinking maybe codepen-like stuff) or maybe a larger single example on github?

5 comments

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wwalser
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "Mid Front end Devs". Do you mean not Jr and not Sr? I guess I wouldn't be quite sure how to express that either :|

I've interviewed tons of front end devs, all for product companies whose candidates are fairly different to an agency (agencies candidates with personal portfolios are likely more common). Having a portfolio at all is rare. Most anything that shows that you're active in your craft will be a plus. Github profiles are common but honestly they, on average, show near-zero public activity. Obviously there are outliers who are active in open source but my own experience shows that even very good senior devs at well-funded startups don't have much time for open source except in the rare case where a specific OS tool becomes core to their employment.

Seriously, anything that shows that you used time outside of work to create things is a plus.

rex-mundi
Yep, I meant between Jr & Sr, I wanted to use Midlevel but but I had to keep the title short for hn 80 char limit

Thanks for answer, that's a real help, all the postings I've been looking at ask for github url & examples of work so I thought not having anything was abnormal

wwalser
Well, if you can look someone's portfolio up online then, by default, they have a portfolio. What you're not getting from that type of search is the thousands of people who don't have a portfolio online.

Here's my github url: https://github.com/wwalser

That shows very little public activity. However, even that amount would be impressive to me if I saw it from a candidate. The reason is that, when interviewing a someone from a product company, I implicitly understand that they are going to have thousands of lines of code written for a private company (and therefore not publicly available). In my case http://askinline.com is that work.

Hope that perspective is helpful.

axvk
It's nice to know that given a large amount of JS, this person won't create a single file and dump everything in there. I want to see code organization and deployment techniques. My concern is how the code will scale.

Most people have tiny code examples. A company looking to hire someone full time will need someone to create entire platforms where things like caching become critical.

You have to prove that you can work well with the existing huge codebase and won't make it horrible for others to read your code.

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