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Show HN: Pocketsquare – portfolios for developers

pocketsquare.io

76 pointsalanfriedman51 comments

Hey guys, thanks for checking out Pocketsquare. I built this to give devs a better way to showcase their work. For me, my public Github page isn't always the best representation of the stuff I like to work on, and LinkedIn isn't optimized to show dev work.

So, Pocketsquare focuses on just showing your skills, projects (may or may not correspond to a git repo) and code snippets. You can also show work experience or education. I tried to make it simple and straightforward for non-technical visitors yet also visually appealing so it's something you want to show people.

Thanks again and I appreciate any feedback you guys have.

Edit: I didn't have time to put social links on the landing page, so for anyone who wants to stay up to date as I make pocketsquare more awesome, you can follow the Twitter account here: https://twitter.com/getpocketsquare or add your email to this list and I'll let you know when new features roll out: http://bit.ly/1RvGHIn

Thanks!

Cool idea.

> Oh, also: it’s free.

Your target users, developers, have the "I'm a product" meme at the front of brain. It certainly immediately came to mind when I read that.

I'm not saying you are selling me, but some treatment of that concern might make the paranoid wing (proud member) more comfortable.

And if you are selling me, well, nothing wrong with that, but be up front about it.

Good point - I should probably spend more time working out the text on the landing page, as I could see how that could come off wrong. To be honest right now I'm just focused on making users happy with a product that's useful for them so I haven't given too much thought as to what's next. Thanks for pointing that out though - I'll definitely think about it.

And that's perfectly fine, but then you end up on the other side of the coin which is:

"How do I know you don't plan to sell me out down the line or that you'll disappear in a few months once I've invested time and energy into setting things up?"

So really you need to make sure both are addressed ;)

Congrats on shipping!

Code repos are also hard to digest for non-technical folks

And that's exactly what the gh-pages branch in a repo that generates a Github Pages/Jekyll site addresses - https://pages.github.com/

This is an admirable effort but I feel it's going about the problem the wrong way. The presentation is very rarely the problem with developer websites. It's the content that's the problem. No amount of fancy bootstrap veneer is going to fix someone failing to write documentation for their project or themselves, especially when Github makes it very easy.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm a fan of Github pages and Jekyll and have used them for several projects. Github pages are great for explaining individual repositories but I think they serve a different purpose than Pocketsquare.

Pocketsquare is more of an overview of what you do, letting you showcase multiple projects in one place and talk about different skills, language and frameworks you know, as well as highlight your experience and education background if you'd like.

15-20 language/framework icons don't tell me much, despite telling me too much. what's the estimated level of expertise? I don't believe someone who shows that many different things is a master at any of them (whether they are or not, I don't believe it). grouping those icons - data, web, language, etc - might help as well.

I don't see how the snippets bring value to the portfolio, can't imagine a use case.

Anyway good initiative!

Snippets provide a way to showcase concise bits of code or programs. I think of it as a place to centralize jsfiddles that emphasize specific interactions or examples of some particular software concept or architecture.

Yep, and that's very nice/useful for a blog post, but it feels weird in a portfolio. It's like "hey, I'm XX, those are my strong skills, and check this neat piece of code".

I do see your point, and I'll just have to see if it's something users want and are using, or not.

Needs a sign-up/sign-in with Github button

I would also add portfolio integration with github. Having to manually replicate code over to a new site will turn some people away.

Thanks for the feedback - great idea.

Yeah, you need to add more languages and frameworks, and not just the things that are out and popular now. I'd want to include projects from awhile back, personally, and that includes projects made from Flash. I know its unfashionable now (and I no longer use it), but it's how a lot of devs got started.

If you want game developers to find this useful, you might want to consider adding:

C++, C, Unity, Unreal SDK, Cocos2D, Lua, Flash, Havok, Direct X, OpenGL, VR. Maybe show a list of consoles to show specific console dev experience.

Thanks for the tip on gaming languages. And I agree on Flash - I actually started as an AS3 dev so should've known. More languages/skills are coming soon.

You should also think about catering to data scientists. It's not an option in the "specialty" dropdown and you don't have languages like Scala, R, Julia, or MATLAB.

Yeah I had that same thought actually. Data scientists are becoming more common lately.

Just a suggestion...

If you are going to have a big list of icons the first thing that comes to mind is "Click on one". Analysis of programming language(s) used isn't hard given its built into the GitHub api:

https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/#list-languages

So if you allowed an "import Github Repo option" then linked those icons to the "examples/repositories/snippets" in those languages that would help.

You already seem to be able to designate icons-per-project/snippet so you shouldn't need to add much beyond a hyperlink on the icon that scrolls to the first appropriate projects and/or allows the user to designate the project to scroll to.

I'd say have a page listing the relevant projects as well by technology [e.g. A "Would you like to know more...?"] but I'm not sure that should be the default behavior.

Similarly, I'd encourage/enforce linking to test suite(s) and/or documentation as a requirement to list anything larger than a snippet. That might be a bit too opinionated but I think it encourages "new" developers to get into the right practice of having some sort of documentation [even if it is just a test suite].

You're making use of the deferred anti-pattern [0] on your own profile page [1].

[0] https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/wiki/Promise-anti-p... [1] https://pocketsquare.io/alanfriedman

Totally irrelevant to the topic at hand, but that first link really is grim reading - a complicated topic treated in a dismissive tone, chock-full of jargon, and probably leaving the average reader feeling slightly abused.

Not really, it demonstrates that displaying random snippets of code as some kind of portfolio is maybe not a great idea. I didn't think I needed to spell it out.

I wasn't criticising you for sharing that link - just that the content of the link itself was, really, not the best (no doubt written with good intentions, though, I'm sure). I also think snippets of code are somewhat worthless, unless perhaps they're clever solutions to specific problems that really can be expressed in a dozen LoC. My GitHub gists, for example, are for the most part useless to anyone other than myself, and I wouldn't ever really think to share them as any kind of insight into my work.

Because "request" returns a promise? I created the deferred object because I'm waiting on multiple async operations (get gravatar url, download gravatar locally and upload to s3). Or am I missing something?

The trick is learning how to compose promises out of one another. For instance, then() on a promise doesn't just support a callback, but another promise or a function that returns another promise. Often you can build multiple async operations as chains and flows of promises. Additionally there are "higher level" compositions of promises such as Q.whenAll(promise1, promise2, ...).then(), making it easier to deal with things like parallel promises.

Also, it's often cleaner to use something like Q.nfcall to turn a callback accepting function (like request in your example) itself into a promise that can be chained. (I just noticed that this is contrary to Q's own documentation which surprisingly is pro-deferred.)

You need a better differentiation between skills - this is very web orientated at the moment. If I'm a native mobile developer is that full stack? Backend?

There also needs to be a bigger range of languages. Alternative contact details would be nice, or, links to other profiles and the option not to show the email address.

Yeah, one of the most common requests I've gotten is adding more languages/frameworks, and I'm working on getting that out as soon as possible. It is very front-end dev focused at the moment, so I'll be broadening the options to give all developers what they're looking for. Thanks for checking it out!

I think the request was to add other options besides Front/Back/Full.

I see a few great suggestions from people here, but I want to add — I see the grand vision here. This is a great "First-step" in this direction. I feel it's great because it does away with the shitty "sign-in-with-github-and-youre-done" thing. Comprehensive, yet minimal. I like it.

Thanks!

Good work so far. Just a few things:

- I graduate from university in 2016, but I can only choose up to 2015 for the end date

- This is in Chrome 45, Windows 8.1: http://i.imgur.com/u5xMXob.png

Thanks - I'll think about how to incorporate future dates. And wow those scrollbars look terrible. Sorry about that! I think I can fix it pretty easily with CSS overflow.

I'd suggest to do this year +10 and set the input to the current year. That should cover pretty much anyone.

It's a fine line between "minimal and designery" and "understyled". I think this falls slightly to the wrong side.

Also, the icon thing encourages people to check the most number of boxes, even if they're not skilled there. This is reasonable and something lots of devs do, but it will hurt your appearance to people who hire. Everyone I've ever talked to about hiring developers has an opinion somewhere in the realm of "I'd rather see resumes with one or two languages that they're strong with, than have to spend time fishing out which of 20 languages they actually write every day"

Fair points. As for the design, it can always be tweaked, but I have gotten positive feedback around the simplicity and minimalist look so would have to think it through.

As for the icons, my theory is that devs are free to add whatever skills they want to their own portfolio or resumé anyway, but they're going to ultimately be responsible for demonstrating that knowledge to employers, clients, etc, so it probably wouldn't be beneficial to them to exaggerate their skills. I do see your point though.

Looks great! I recently revamped my freelancing homepage and something like this would have made the process much quicker.

By the way, I noticed your site returns a server error for pages that aren't found instead of a 404 e.g. https://pocketsquare.io/notfound

If you're interested NeedProgrammer also offers simple dev profiles for freelancers: https://needprogrammer.com/#/profiles/developer/zach-van-nes...

Yeah there's definitely some work to be done and I have better server responses on the list. Thanks for checking it out! Also, it can't hurt to host your freelance page here too!

I'm sorry but I feel like you have to do more than whack some icons on a bootstrap page for something like this. That level of simplicity requires exceptional presentation for it to be valuable.

Thanks for the feedback. What kinds of features would make it more appealing for you?

What/where is your privacy policy?

I plan on adding it today and will send it to any users who signed up before it was posted. I know how important it is so it's my top priority to finish by end of day.

Nice work man, I am working on something similar - would be cool to chat? PM me on twitter @desicochrane

I... can't change my password. Nice and clean look though!

Sorry about that - it's at the top of my list!

As I said on reddit yesterday, I like it, keep up the good work

Thanks!

issue: Can't reorder experience items and they are not sorted by date.

Yeah, this is on my list for sure. Projects, experience and education will all be sorted by date until there's an option to manually sort. I'm working on it!

Any custom domain love?

Absolutely - it's on the roadmap.

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