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The dying portfolio of the web dev

zooboole

Published By zooboole

How do clients know if you are the right developers for their job? how do they find you? How do they learn to trust you? The answer to all these questions is, as you might guess, your reference or commonly known as your portfolio. It's generally a list of websites/applications you worked on. Over time your references are supposed to grow giving bigger chances to convince future employers or customers on what you can do and the type of projects you have already worked on.

Some of the most frequent questions employers ask when they interview you are to tell them a bit about yourself, and the second is to require your portfolio. It's an important piece of information which serves as your back up. Most employers and customers would even try to find and go through your portfolio before you even get to interact with them.

I quite remember some years back a friend said something touching to me. He said this to: zooboole, you always present the same portfolio every year.

From 2002 to now, if I had even 10% of the projects I worked on alive, I would look insane in the eye of the average person.

That friend and I as well had no idea that portfolios must be maintained over time. I write this post today to educate anyone who might not be aware of this subtle information.

Like any other thing in this life, time is a big threat to your reference. It sucks away everything. A few problems start to rise to cause your references to dying over time:

- Most of the websites start to die.

Either the owner does not want to maintain it anymore or the hosting expires and they don't bother/can't afford to renew.

- The technologies you used "are dead" or are no more relevant in the professional field

Technologies evolve and new ones pop up every single day. When you become too good at one, and suddenly another one comes to dominate the market share, you find yourself in the lifted side of the scale.

- You lose the control

Sometimes clients can decide to change their developer. Although you were the one who built and maybe was maintaining their website, they may decide to go away with you and handle the work over to a different person or to a new team. From there you have no control over how the project will become. As time goes, you start to realize that your work is disappearing, and you can't refer to it as your work anymore.

- Privacy policies and private projects

Some deals prohibit you from showing or even talking about them. You will usually sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement before starting such projects. Or, due to competition, you can't mention your them as your previous projects. I remember being at Jumia for an interview, and at the moment I mentioned that I worked at SuperPrice, I became suspicious. It feels like you are there to spy, or just to harm the organization...

I remember building some applications that one cannot be really proud of. What it means is that such applications are not necessarily healthy for everyone... I also built some that are private and proper to just one person.

- Your magic wand skills

There are other few skills you can't talk about with the majority of people. although you might be good at it and you have been building with them, you just can't say it out loud. Some good examples are your dark hacking skills, dark SEO tricks, cracking adobe cs6 (wink), etc.

Commentary

I know some of you might tell me to show the works in the localhost. Yes, we do that. But it's not always enough. That option means you must physically meet the client or the employer, and that's not always possible. Also, such people would not believe or value a project you show from your personal computer.

I also hope people in charge of employing developer consider some of these points to investigate candidates in a fair way.

Your take away

If you have not quit the job yet, or you are starting, it's important that you consider all those aspects I just spoke about. In addition, you can go on your own adventure and add a few experiences to your belt. To accompany you, here are a few suggestions I would like to give you:

-- Work on durable ideas

Try as much as possible to find projects that can live long enough. This implies making sure that the client is serious about their business and that the business heavily depends on the project you are building for them.

-- Build some personal projects and maintain them

You might not always have someone to work for, thus build something for yourself.

-- Help clients to remain committed

For some of your clients that are not well motivated about their projects, help them understand the projects' value and the importance to have the application you build for them. For example, you could help them renew their domain names when they go through tough times.

-- Work for conscious clients or conscientize them before the job

I call conscious clients those who know exactly WHY they need their project. Sometimes, they already have the application and just need you to improve it. Some have experience with the idea of using software and its advantages.

-- Build something every year, at least a personal project.

This is my personal new resolution. It's one of the solutions I have found to fix this issue of our dying portfolios. Get to insert a new raw of projects in your resume every year. Find an idea of the project as a personal project and build it.