9:30 - College
10:00 - Heard we got to build a fucking portfolio website in WordPress.
10:02 - Said I already had a personal portfolio
10:03 - Heard I still have to build a fucking WordPress portfolio website..
11:20 - Remembered I put on my portfolio that I don't want to fucking use WordPress!!!!!

Now - I live in pain. Building a WP site so I do NOT have to do it later :/

Tl;dr porn is ruining my life.

Today I had a meeting with the project leader and the CTO. They had bad news, which did not come as a surprise.

In short, they said I did not pass the expectations they had, and unfortunately need to find somewhere else to work.

This is my third time being told to find somewhere else to work, and I really can't describe how it feels. I was even told that I maybe I should reconsider my future as a developer, and kids can do programming better than I can do.

It's really difficult when all you've done in the last year is to learn and improve your current skills.

I have good grades, a unique experience, built lots of unique projects, and a GitHub portfolio with high activity. The apps I've built are used by many customers today. I also have a blog with 600 k views where I share dev tips.

The thing with this work if I'm going, to be honest, is that they expected someone with senior experience, and unfortunately, I don't have that thus it takes many years to build it. So I started here with almost scratch experience of the things they needed.

On the other hand, it feels like a relief in that I can finally focus on my personal business. And maybe this wasn't the right place to work, maybe it requires a couple of jobs until I find the right place.

Despite the bumpy ride, and what such people tell you, I'm not going to give up.

10 years ago, my school teacher told me I was going to be a carpenter (nothing against that) but I manage to get an MSc degree in the engineering field.

There's a lot of shit going into your head when you receive such message like "What if they are true, what if I can't handle programming, what if I'll never be anything etc".

I'm not giving up, this is just a great story every successful person has.

What my number one problem is, and I will f*** win is porn addiction. Get rid of that, and the future is bright.

Sorry for mixing so many things here.

I hate some parts of this company.

They literally have a "Designer" which made a mockup for our new UI and honestly when I first saw it I almost threw up.

Having made a lot of designs myself for personal projects and for fun I LITERALLY SAW he barely put any effort into it he just threw some stuff together took a shit on it and called it a UI.

For that interview we were actually expecting wireframes and not mockups since we were not sure what workflow we wanted for the UI.
Of course this would have come with feedback from us and then would have been reiterated and this was clear from our last talk with him.

Maybe he didn't know what wireframes were ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If this wasn't enough, he was also consistently misspelling words all over the place, not aligning parts of the UI, misplacing common UI elements and stupid stuff like having a GIGANTIC + button for adding a object to a list for a NO TOUCH SCREEN UI.

(The plus button was all the way to the bottom left of the screen as far away from the list so users get a good hand workout).

But everyone just loved it because "We have known him for a long time and he has a big portfolio so he must know what he's doing".

I couldn't bring in anything, you truly notice the difference between "I don't agree with your opinion but you are heard" and "Shutup my buddy the designer is amazing".

I was not being an asshole I was giving critique on specific parts of the UI and not just saying "it's shit" hoping we could improve on it. Still having naive hope for the future of this project.

He even looked kinda mad and irritated by my opinion and just looked at the people previously mentioned.

I truly hate people who just keep using the exact same worthless piece of garbage people because they have known them for a long time.

Personally I wanted to grab him off his chair and throw him out through the window, 2 floors down, straight into the garbage bin, making damn sure he doesn't accidentally fall into the recycle bin.

Never ever would I enjoy or like this application's UI if I had to work with it as a user.

This day I have received the most glorious news in e-pistolary form. For some years, I was suffering in support of a client who was, well, insufferable. My presence there paralleled the divine comedy in both essence and fact.

I opened the missive, expecting another plea to bail them out of whatever clusterfuck they found themselves in. Instead, what I found was something truly magical.

"Hey Human,

I hope this finds you well. I'm not sure if you remember a few years back, we were trying to decide between IBM Cloud and AWS. Well, after years of battling FF*, we're finally moving ahead with AWS. He failed one too many times to deliver anything visibly. After you left, there was no one left he could use to steal credit, ideas, and work.

FF is still pushing to have them use IBM cloud as a "warm backup" in the event "AWS fails." We will see where that goes.

I figured you'd like to know; you were the void in the wilderness for a long time. I don't want to think about how much time we could have saved if we had just listened.

PeeEm**"

This event represents a personal victory, albeit belated, over a few peoples' absurd amount of privilege. Towards the end, I was vicious about my contestation to the insanity of adopting a desperate hedge attempt-as-cloud offering from a failing company. Some examples:

// cloud 'strategy meeting'
Moi: What cloud platform are we looking at using?
FF: We're looking at IBM cloud and AWS as a second.
Moi: Why is that? I understand you're obligated to rep your offering first, but that decision doesn't seem to have the customer's best interest at heart.
FF: IBM cloud is a market leader; AWS isn't as good.
Moi: I see. I mean, that's the tech equivalent of the company's fleet management considering monkeys on tricycles as a strong competitor to service trucks, but I get what you mean.

// steering meeting
Director: Who can we look to as an example? Who is currently using the IBM cloud?
Moi: No one; they account for a single-digit portion of the actual cloud market. Their long game to sell you a "Hybrid Cloud," which means put some front end payload in a CDN, and buy n-frame units of IBM z servers for the DC with IBM gateway appliances acting as connective tissue. So it's not the cloud at all, really.
Director: How does it compare in cost?
Moi: It's generally 40% more expensive than other clouds, and it only goes higher as you option their software.
Director: What about Watson? I hear Watson is good?
Moi: It's a brand name. Most of the "Watson" product is just a facade on top of FOSS products like Spark, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, etc.
Director: Those were words. They sounded good. FF say it's good tho so we'll believe him because we're from the same city.
Moi: *deletes Director from LinkedIn*

Moral of the story: Never trust a vendor that only recommends their products.

*FF = FatFuck - an embarrassingly rotund individual whose girth is roughly equivalent to his height. He shit his way into an IBM architect position in his mid-20s purely due to winning the visa lottery. He had fake hair glued to his head for his wedding to hide his male pattern baldness; his arrange-married wife undoubtedly cries herself to sleep after sex.

**PeeEm - the then project manager, now portfolio manager of some satellite projects. An overall decent human being, capable.

Does anyone own any funny-ish domains?
Mine are:

realog.site - used for testing websites for clients

imgoing.global - will be my personal site / portfolio soon

Does anyone else have this problem?

I hate designing a personal website. I'm never content with what I made, and even if I feel satisfied a couple of days later I want to start all over. I've gone through at least five complete rebuilds in one year because I can't make up my mind! How do you deal with it?

Anyone has ideas for creating logos?

I'm looking for prompts so that I'm able to practice making them (and also build my portfolio, but you don't need to know that, right?)

Drop your ideas/prompts and I'll make them for you on my free time and you'll be free to use them on personal projects 😁

This is going to sound like a ridiculous question, but how do you all find both the time and the interest to work on side projects for your portfolio / GitHub? I always seem to start strong, get burned out, and can never find the inspiration to break away from the 9-5 of my day role to work on coding something else... Where do you find ideas? Designs? Concepts? Interesting solutions? I'm in desperate need of building some GitHub repos for my portfolio... 😅😰

How effective is to have my own webpage where I can show my portfolio for the company recruiters?

Do they really take the time to see the page?

If positive, what host do you recommend?

I'm not in the web dev environment btw, so it's not that obvious.

When your wife gives you a deadline to finish a personal project to build your portfolio... 😅

I was having a discussion with my Spv because I am stuck at my project, when suddenly he said :
"Hey, you seem to enjoy this subject!"

And I was just standing there speechless..
🤨
Excuse you...
I spent so much time than required in the contract because I'm getting paid and more importantly because I can put this experience in my portfolio.
Not because I enjoy this job.
I'd rather work on my personal project, preparing for job interview or playing with my cats if I have another choice.

He is a nice guy and has helped me a lot, but in the end it's all about the money.
Or maybe because I have a hard time trusting people these days.
I can't wait to start job hunting next month so that I can say goodbye to this job.

Just had my reasoning for not doing technical projects for interviews proven.

Pass the first 2 stages of interview (including showing some personal portfolio projects) then after a week of hearing nothing get sent a technical project to complete.

Spend every spare moment for a week polishing this thing, decent front end, quick and efficient back end, low traffic between fe, be, persistence etc.

Submit the code at midday ready for the interview the following day, only for the company to phone at 5pm and say all is fine and the code is great for the final interview (walkthrough) the next day, then phone 5:10pm phone and pull the position.

That company has just had free work done which should have cost 1 weeks worth of fees, using the premise of a job at the end of it, only to take the code that they are super happy with and run with no payout.

(Questions below.) At this point I probably just whine about job search in IT w/o much commitment. It's because I don't learn stuff from interviews and have no willingness to prepare for primitive questions from HR's book. You know, stuff like: "What was your experience on previous jobs and why you quited them?" and "What are your advantages and cons?"
Even though I see them a bit discriminatory. I barely find words and make them audible alrite, and so rush to the stack questions. I answer 50% of them in average, 20% ideally. As a result, I get no conclusive offer. Fair... probably not. Doesn't matter.

All of a sudden, idea chimed in to make a personal website with all of the frequent questions answered in advance. At last, I've got some time to make the decent replacement of the CV into a landing page that communicates my professional and emotional ability to headhunters.

TL;DR: I wanna make my personal website portfolio and I need your word about the following.
1) Can I make up for the absence of my own live projects with OSS commitments or other smooth talk?
2) Is there a merit in answering the common interview questions right off the bat in written form?
3) So, I already prepared 4 conclusive theses with thoughtput choice of words, that I wanna place as a grid in first scrolling section. I call it "Principles", but perhaps there is a synonym to this one or it's good as it is?
4) I don't want to represent myself as a blunt set of "features". How do I transite into explaining the usage of my stack in these circumstances? Less text better, right?

What are people's thoughts on having a personal website/portfolio?

I've set one up on GitHub pages with my custom URL, mainly to host SQL tutorials etc that I make, but do employers look at them?

Is it worth having a personal site/portfolio if you aren’t a freelancer?

I asked on LinkedIn and the response was that personal websites are a bit 90s.

I am, slowly, making a github pages site, and I know no one is really going to be interested in my thoughts on certain topics etc, but I felt it would be a bit more attractive than just a link to my github account.

Do employers care about portfolios/github accounts etc? Or are the only interested in CVs and certificates?

If it’s the latter how do you demonstrate your skills, especially if all of your work is proprietary?

First rant!!
I've got into an impasse.
I'm working as a mobile developer for one of the well known multinational corporations. I am working here for 1.5 years, it's my first job and I'm already a team leader. It doesn't mean that this is my programming experience. The problem is that I'm feeling that this job stops me from growing on personal plan. I have no more time to work on my personal projects, i have no real portfolio, projects made for the company cannot be included in my portfolio and so on. And also the payment isn't real good so i can't quit and allocate my full time to my own projects. And without a good portfolio i can't get my own customers.

What do you guys would do in my situation.

I was just curious but don't need it, the domain would be great for a personal blog/portfolio. First come first serve.

Your welcome.

Gawds, creating personal portfolio sites must be the toughest task ever. I've never been great at answering 'what do you do for a living?' questions.

Writing paragraphs of self-praise and mostly fake positive self representations are beyond me. Got to get it done though, have new work to showcase.

Is giving out business cards at a college career fair tacky? I recently got mine in the mail since I finally have my personal website deployed, and want to make a good impression / show I'm serious since I will be graduating soon. Has my website/portfolio, github, linkedin, and contact info on them. Also any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Portfolio websites...are they good, bad, or meh?

As I’m already contemplating making a move from my current (first) dev job due to the fact I’m a glorified data entry clerk, I got thinking about creating a personal/portfolio website.

I already have a domain name, I registered it years ago and just keep renewing it. So I’ve pointed that to my GitHub pages site, and will do some work on this over the weekend.

My question is, are they worth the effort? Would a prospective employer bother to take a look if it was on my cv or linked in?

What pitfalls should I avoid?

I'm thinking of writing a personal website for fun and as a portfolio for my IT projects and hobbies, eg photography.
Currently I'm working with C# and have some Java and Python knowledge, besides meddling here and there with other languages. I've recently started looking into architectures and other stuff.
Do you have any recommendations for into which language and technology I could look into for this project?

I'm creating my personal portfolio website and writing tag line for my header section but I'm not a native English person, I wrote this tag line to all the English I'm currently knew but it is gramitically incorrect and sounds to dumb can a native English speaker help me to write this in better way, Thanks in advance:D

"I'm a self-taught web developer and I've been doing web development past couple of years. I love to make cool stuff for myself and other people and am always open to learning new things, I currently pursuing my bachelor's degree."

Incoming rant.

I have 4 years professional experience at a small shop working on a web application for property and liability insurance. The application is ASP.NET with C# as the code-behind. I have a BCS and will finish my MSIS fall 2017. I have no idea why I have the degrees. I know that when I enrolled, it seemed like they would be a nice addition to an otherwise empty resume. I was lucky enough to land my first and only development job during my sophomore year of my undergraduate program. Is this enough experience to land a new job?

I feel like I'm learning nothing at my current job. The specs that come in seem very vague to me. When asked for clarification, there is often push back, and I don't know whether that's because I don't have enough experience to parse what the client means in the two sentence spec I got or if it's because the client does not actually know what they want.

I hate my current job. My productivity is low because I spend more time trying to figure out what the client wants and analyzing an 8 year old system that has 0 documentation. I know some of you will just say, "Suck it up" at this point, but I really want another job. The only thing I like about this job is that it's 100% remote. It also pays $60k a year, so a replacement should be at least that salary.

Most postings I see require professional experience of 5 years or more, and knowledge of other frameworks. I can work on getting knowledge of the other frameworks, but will have no professional experience with them. I don't live in an area with a lot of software development jobs, and the ones I see are for non-IT organizations that want 1 person to run a distributed system from 10 or more locations. A hospital system out here wants to pay $30k a year for a guy to be both software developer for new tools as well as the helpdesk and IT support guy that's on-call for four locations in the county. I made more than that before I got into the development industry, for less work, and would rather leave than settle for something like that.

I've thought about moving to somewhere near San Francisco or San Jose, but I have my daughter to think about. I have joint custody of her, and would have to give that up in order to move out of the county.

I like programming and using it to solve problems. I like designing architectures and how all the components will interface. I like designing and normalizing databases. I like taking part in coding competitions for employers that are well-known (Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Twitch, etc.), even though I often just place middle of the pack. When that happens, I feel like I'm an imposter in this industry.

I think I have the most fun just working on small projects for personal use. My latest is an assistant calculator for the game Transport Fever to figure out cargo throughputs per annum based on the in-game timing information. Past projects have also been small. Ones I could use in a portfolio are a sudoku solver desktop application, PC/Web game in Unity that is a 3D FPS remake of Duck Hunt that allows open world exploration but locks the camera's viewpoint for shooting events, and a building assistant for Rome II: Total War that maps out all the bonuses/perks of user-specified building combinations in provinces so users can record their long term building plans without using all their turns to see the final results.

I seem to be an unproductive, average developer who dabbles in projects here and there.

This is what I want from other Ranters. Just say something. I don't care if it is, "Suck it up and get better." It could be your tips for finding and securing a new position. It could even be empathy, if such a thing exists on the Internet. Whatever you want, just say something that will help get me thinking of what the next steps in my career should be.

my next challenge is now building a personal portfolio page :)
I'll create a one pager.
I'm just excited cause its a lil bit harder than building an easy tribute page. My heart will go on xD

I'm thinking about publishing a modified clone of my portfolio website here to get helpful feedbacks.

I don't feel ready to give out all of my personal information. I will change some personal data like names and address to something else. Thus the need for the modified clone.

Fellow Devs,

I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I am at a loss. I have applied to several Front-End jobs, both local, and remote. I have personal projects on my portfolio, and I offer to do "homework," that's been assigned while applying for a job. I am currently learning Python, but I don't have a project up with that.

Any suggestions?

Do you guys have a portfolio website? If so can you leave a link :)
And What do recruiters look at when they are browsing the website?

Share your online portfolio/personal website/landing page.
Please suggest some good templates for a portfolio website/landing page.

So I’m setting up my personal site using GitHub pages with a custom url.

Aside from obvious stuff like a portfolio etc what should I be including?

A full cv/resume or something less formal. It’s also going to have a bit of a blog type thing going on

Is it reasonable to use materialize for a personal portfolio? I just like the minimalistic and simple appearance, and it makes making responsive layouts a breeze...

Also, I'm tired of using bootstrap for everything

Looking at @striker28 's rant made me think of my time I did my MSc and I think it needs it's own separate rant so here it goes:

So I did an MSc at one of the big league unis in London. First clue was during week 1 where in one of the class a mature student asked whether there would be actual coding during the course. There was an audible gasp from everyone else! Once the lecturer said the unfortunatly they wouldn't be you could hear the sigh of relief from the students...

Next up was all the lectures being placed in the freakin' basement of the university in crap, smelly rooms with annoying ticking A/Cs whereas all the social siences, business and other subjects had lecture halls and classrooms above ground. The contempt for CS from the university's direction was palpable.

Then there was the relegation to the theory-only (i.e. abstract with pen/paper) "tutorial" to the hand of T/As with bugger-all teaching experience. In short most were terrible and should've found a way to abscond themselved from this obligation which was part of the terms of their phd grants unfortunatly.

Further into the course there was the "group project". Oh boy! Out of the 5 in the group my now mature student friend and I were the only one commiting to the repo. There was either no code and a lot of bullshit from the others or crap code that didn't even compile despite their assurances it was all good.. Someone clearly never actually coded and pressed "run" in their lives which is fucking surprising since they've managed to graduate with a BSc and get into a MSc somehow. None of the code "made" by the other 3 persons made it into the master branch for release.
The attitude was that of "We (hahahah) wrote loads of code. We'll get a great mark!". At that stage the core wasn't even complete and the software didn't work yet.

Some of the courses where teaching things already 10 years out of date and when lecturer where pressed on that the few mature students that happen to be there the answer was always "yes, we are planning to update it for next year". Complete bullshit. Didn't help that some of the code on the lecture slides was not even correct! I mean these guy are touted as "experts" in their field...

None of the teory during the entire year was linked to any coding. Everything was abstract with no ties to applied software engineering. I.e. nothing like the real world.

The worst is that none of the youger students realised they were being screwed over and getting very little value for their money. Perhaps one reason why these evaluation forms have such high scores given on them. If you haven't had a job and haven't lived outside academia yet there is nothing to compare it to. It tends to also fall into confirmation bias (hey it's a top UK university, it must be worth it afterall! Look how much they ask for).

By the end of the year I couldn't wait to get the hell out. One of the other mature student sumed it quite well: "I will never send my children here."
Keep in mind that the guy had just over a decade of software engineering experience in the industry and was doing this for fun.

In the end universities are not teaching institutions. The lecturers's primary job is research and their priorities match that. Lectures tend to be the most time efficient teaching format for the ones giving them but, on their own, are not for the consumer.

To those contemplating university for CS: Do the BSc. Get your algo/datastructure chops and learn the basic theory. It is interesting. Don't get discouraged by the subject just because it is taught badly.
Avoid the MSc unless you want to do a phd and go for an academic carrer. You are better off using that year and the money to learn more on your own and get into colaborative projects (open source) on top of some personal ones. Build up your portfolio. It will be cheaper and more interesting!

Hey, giving you guys a little context about me. Did my engg in cs and in my whole 4 yrs of college Ive been doing competitive programming and focused more on these coding competitions that any personal project or exploring new tech.

Then had a campus placement and started working as a app developer and ever since(4 years) I've been working as app developer.

I started learning about backend development, really loved it way more than app development. Internally in my organisation I started working on both app development and backend now.

But now I think should I try exploring other division of tech. I roughly divide it into 3 parts Devs, embedded system and ML. I really want to explore embedded system and ML. But I'm little confused whether I should do that or not. Will this affect my career in bad way??

So should I consider adding embedded system or ML in my portfolio??? Or it's too late and not a good idea as a developer.