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Personal Website for Programmers

github.com

169 pointsnaresh1318109 comments

Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same obviously distinctive style of site showing pretty much a subset of the info I can already see from your GitHub account, except the latter doesn't require JS to view.

If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not "I cloned someone else's I found on GitHub and changed the names and details to mine."

I mean, it depends. I hire SRE/Devops and I really don't care that much if you used someone else's theme, or paid someone to write one for you and credit them. In fact, it'd be kinda neat to find someone who bought a theme. That's just good specialization and collaboration skills.

And my own website is basically the Pelican generator default with a different color selected. Far more damning is the placid update schedule. Try not to put dated content on your front page if you're putting a website in front of manager's faces.

Agree. I paid some for a template i liked(not for my personal site but same lotic applies). Best 50$ ever spent.

> Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire: It doesn't make for a good impression if I see anyone other than the original author with the same obviously distinctive style of site

> If I'm looking at someone's personal site, it should look personal --- not "I cloned someone else's I found on GitHub

To me that seems petty and I feel you'll end up isolating a good portion of the talent pool. Anecdotally, I can only recall a handful of personal sites that appeared to be truly personal (by your definition) and not all may have been.

For whatever reason this reminds me of: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/67e0hl/whenever_i_ge...

Petty though it may be, if it's true, if it's sufficiently widespread, then it's a reality with which we must be able to deal.

Judgements like "I'd expect dev to write it themselves" come across as arbitrary. I think there's no shared context wherein interviewers / job-applicants have the same set of assumptions.

Especially since "I'd expect a dev to not rewrite everything themselves, and leverage what's already available" is just as reasonable.

There's not exactly a specific "right answer" about whether you need a personal website, what it should look like, or how it should be written.

> Judgements like "I'd expect dev to write it themselves" come across as arbitrary.

I feel like this depends on the type of dev. If you write C code for microcontrollers then who cares, but if you do web dev then using a generic template not authored by you seems like a bad sign, no?

Why would you expect a webdev to do a designer's job?

Part of my concern is: judging a resume is fine, since an applicant is explicitly submitting this. But rejecting based on things done for fun and publicly shown seems 'unfair'. (It's 'unfair' since I'll be judged right now for crap I haven't glanced at for 5 years or whatever, and haven't maintained to the best of my professional ability).

But part of why I consider it arbitrary is it's easy to come up with contradictory criteria, each of which might make sense. (-1 for using latest technology on a personal website, since it shows they buy into hype/resume-driven-development. -1 for not using the latest technology, since it shows they don't know the tools of the trade). I think this bleeds from trying to judge someone's professional capabilities as part of a team, from something produced in their spare time.

> But rejecting based on things done for fun and publicly shown seems 'unfair'.

Portfolio sites are used to showcase the developer's work. If the developer's work sucks then it doesn't matter if it was done just for fun or as an extension of his CV.

If it accomplishes the minimum functional requirements without additional time/money, isn't that the point?

It's actually a better thing to have a template to start with and then customise it to reflect what you want it to show.

Expecting a dev to reuse code for a personal website is not reasonable.

A personal website is not a software development project. It is not something to use to evaluate a developers technical skills. When you have a real project on the line, then you will see the real skills come out.

For a personal website, I’d expect a developer to give a fuck enough to develop something on his own.

Depends on the position. If a web dev is running standard out of the box WordPress Blog that should be some sort of a flag.

Please, explain why then? That really doesn’t make sense to me. If someone setup their personal blog/website it’s something they do in their free time. Using the default template is a good way to spend their limited time on what matters, the actual content, instead of creating something that random people will find or not “personal looking enough to be worthy of the job position”.

You get zero signal from the fact that someone decided to use a default template.

If your profession is to create new, compelling, functional front ends and you opt for the easiest default you can imagine for your personal project, why wouldn't you opt for the most easiest thing on your work project?

If I want just someone to write simple stuff I have whole of India to choose from and they are way cheaper than you. If I'm looking for a web dev from western market I'm looking for highly talented people and if you can not showcase that talent then what good are you for?

From my experience thous who have no personal projects of passion that involve programming to any extend usually aren't that good at their job. That obviously doesn't mean that you can not or shouldn't have other hobbies that are not computer related, but again if it comes down to two candidates and one has proof of work in their github profile then the choice isn't that hard to make.

If anything, writing my own website sounds like a waste of time, especially when there are so many good tools out there like Hugo, Jekyll, etc. and templates to use as a basis for any personal blog or portfolio.

Hell, I can’t even find time to pick a template and design the look and feel or choose what content to put on my own website.

I don't think that parent comment means "you need to spend hours slaving over a personal website for me to look at". A unique site could be raw HTML with some links to projects. Or you could just not have a site and let your GitHub/LinkedIn/resume speak for itself. A cookie cutter site like this is arguably worse than no site because of how generic and uninspired it is

Exactly, and it is actually the content, i.e text, that matters, not the design (unless the person is a designer, at which point the homepage should be really good).

It is just one person's opinion. You don't have to try to slam it down as 'petty'.

They didn't say they reject candidates based on this, simply that it doesn't make a 'good impression'. Weather you agree or not, it shouldn't be hard to understand why someone would think that.

>It is just one person's opinion. You don't have to try to slam it down as 'petty'.

Why? if it is petty, why not slam it? it is a single opinion - do we need at least N people to share it before we can slam it?

>They didn't say they reject candidates based on this, simply that it doesn't make a 'good impression'. Weather you agree or not, it shouldn't be hard to understand why someone would think that.

Unless you make 'Good Impression' on recruiter you aren't gonna pass forward in the process, so it is indeed equivalent with rejection.

Would you mind sharing what company you're hiring for so that I can actively avoid it?

Agreed! If I were a founder and learned that someone in HR was using such arbitrary judgement, they'd be the one looking for a new job. By their standard they wouldn't hire someone like Fabrice Bellard: https://bellard.org/

Why not? Seems like he coded his personal website himself without an existing template.

Exactly. His accomplishments aside, that's the type of personal website that says "I don't really do web design, but I still made a page" --- obviously if you're hiring a web developer then plain nonstyled HTML would be a bit surprising, but someone in a non-web position showing such a site would definitely be seen positively: It indicates honesty and modesty.

I'm a salaried software/database guy for the last 10 years. I ceased programming for personal pleasure before github was invented and haven't done anything more complex than a minor tool on my own time in years.

My personal website is a wordpress blog we've I've dumped some photos of the hardware stuff I do as a hobby.

I'm curious to hear how this factors into your views on what to look for when hiring people?

Once you have a certain amount of experience, I don't think a person's website is going to matter anymore.

With the exception of frontend developers. There is an expectation that you have a good personal site regardless of how much experience you have if your job is to push HTML, CSS and JS. Its a showcase for what you can do when you're not constrained by a product or a client.

I am a web dev and I hire web devs. It's never crossed my mind to evaluate them based on personal sites. (My own personal sites are unstyled html!)

If your definition of "frontend developer" is designer, then sure. Otherwise for any dev with experience, this is a dumb expectation. Part of a dev's job is to use the right tool for the job, and there's no sense in wasting time reinventing the wheel.

(I say this as someone who used to overengineer my own personal websites with the hottest tech stack of the week, but am now in the process of throwing it all away for a simple WordPress site.)

Otherwise for any dev with experience, this is a dumb expectation.

A good website that demonstrates some ability to write frontend code well is a shortcut to demonstrating that you're good at what I want to employ you to do. It's a showcase of your skills, just as a graphic designer would have a Dribbble portfolio or a backend dev would have a few repos on Github. I'm not suggesting you can't get hired without a nice site, but if I get your resume you're much more likely to get a call for an interview if you do.

Personally I place more weight on their professional experience / portfolio and don't feel that having a pretty or flashy site is a good predictor of a developer's ability, especially when most devs are using templates anyways. But yea, all else equal a nicer site is an advantage even if a minimal one at that, not going to disagree with you there.

While it's nice for someone to have a public portfolio of URLs they've worked on you can't really rely on that so much now. 15 years ago sure, everyone made websites so you just asked to see what site's the candidate had built. Over the past 10 years I've found it increasingly common that developers working with front end tech are building things they can't show off - SaaS, internal apps, etc. That's one of the reasons I like to see a personal site or a side project - often that's the only publicly visible code they have.

Ok sure, if you have nothing to show off and no publicly visible code, then sure a nice site might help. My last two companies I worked at have publicly visible websites that I worked on that I can point to, so I don't see why that would matter in my case.

> a backend dev would have a few repos on Github

No, the equivalent here would be to expect back-end devs to build their own blog applications. What a waste of time. I did that when I was younger and it was only a distraction from actually writing and building things that mattered.

What a waste of time.

No one is forcing you to do any of this stuff. If you can find a job you like without doing it then that's awesome, but plenty of people can't. I'm suggesting a way that people can avoid being filtered out based on their resume because, whether you like it or not, wanting a candidate to demonstrate that they can code reasonably well before the interview stage is quite common.

I think people get a bit too hung up on the way FAANG-size corporations do hiring, with code tests, full time hiring managers, etc. That's only a fraction of the software industry, and if you're applying to somewhere smaller having a public portfolio is useful.

Sure, but this thread is about being judged by the thing that basically links to your portfolio (Github) or contains your demonstration of knowledge (like blog posts) instead of judging those those things directly. The OP dismisses the latter in favor of the former, and that's what I meant was a waste of time.

That you should build something if you don't have anything to show off at all is a completely different point -- and that doesn't seem to be your point when I reread your previous comment? At which point, I'd recommend building something more interesting than a blog unless you're a beginner, and I'd avoid mixing your writing with your attempt to build your first demo project. But this thread isn't about beginner advice.

I built my own blog in Elixir/Phoenix when I was looking for a job as a junior dev, and at that time it indicated to employers that I can learn a new language on my own, that I understand basic web dev, etc. Now that I'm more on the hiring side of the equation I would still be impressed if a fresh CS or bootcamp grad built a blog (or any other simple project) in a newer stack that doesn't yet have hand-holding tutorials.

However, outside of junior level positions, I don't think there's much you can glean from whether somebody has done trivial side projects or not. Obviously an ambitious side project is worth a lot, but the bar for building one is really high and there are so many great devs who can't reasonably make the time outside of work to do that.

As a frontend developer, I've gotten by with this as my one and only webpage for almost ten years now: https://stefanfisk.com

What I find interesting about your site is that you've updated it at least once to use more modern web standards - that <main> tag was introduced in HTML5 in 2014, and before that you had a PNG image for your name (https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://stefanfisk.com/). Updating a site to give the user a better experience (eg to use semantic tags) is great.

Yeah, it’s gotten some love every now and then.

In the beginning I felt like I would need a portfolio and all that, so this minimal thing was supposed to be super temporary. But it turned out that actually talking to customers about their needs and what I could do for them was a quite reliable way to land projects. If anyone asks to see prior projects I send them a selected list that seems appropriate in that context.

I'm curious to hear how this factors into your views on what to look for when hiring people?

Having a WordPress blog is generic enough that it alone won't really sway any opinion, but the content you have on it can. The same goes for a GitHub account.

It's really the "I copied someone else's work and made it look like it's mine" type of thing that gives a bad impression.

Speaking from the same perspective: I don't really care. I rarely look into github repos, unless they mention something during the interview/screen or sounds interesting in the CV. Even then, I spend a small amount of time there (less than 15 min). The noise-to-signal ratio for github/gitlab links is really high.

source: I've been a hiring manager for large companies (and a few startups) in SF for the last 8 years.

Well, I'd argue that using templates as a base is OK. Especially if it's just gonna be a page containing your portfolio - looks more presentable that just a plain github account.

Using templates can be free, or low cost, compared to writing everything from scratch yourself. There are other things I'd rather be doing in my spare time.

> Speaking from the perspective of someone looking to hire

Doesn't it friend in what you're hiring for? I'm not sure a backend developer should be expected to craft together a great website.

And even if you're hiring for the front end, I've found that being proficient at a11y or building React apps or designing elegant CSS doesn't really predict your ability to execute on a professional profile site, which is essentially a marketing tool.

Disclaimer: I'm working on a tool for developers [1] in this vein.

[1] https://fizbuz.com

All these HN news comments are formatted identically, too...

Would you be impressed by some out-of-place text, an animated SVG and a shade of purple as theme? I could randomize the parameters and make a lull-recruiter-as-a-service.

"Is your website too bland? Did you just git clone someone else's repository? Concerned about job prospects? Do not fret!"

There are more software careers around than those involved with banging out html and CSS for the adtech industry and it's subsidiaries.

So you're basically judging the book by its cover? You don't care about the content at all?

That only makes sense if you're hiring a frontend developer. Many people who are excellent programmers hate frontend development, and will happily use a theme or clone a repo if they can avoid frontend work that way.

Speaking from the perspective of someone also looking to hire: if you think reusing open source work to accomplish a goal is a great way to avoid wasting time on originality points, then get in touch.

Another static site generator. Being an emacs user i based mine off of org-page by forking it. Perhaps other can fork this too or just go ahead and use Jekyll?

Not wise, unless the candidate's site happens to be an explicit showcase of their professional skills and intended to be such.

Hm. I might share my personal site with you (I don't operate one anymore) but certainly not my github account. I agree with the site would need a personal touch, but not every programmer is a web developer. There is quite a bit of specific knowledge required to set one up.

That might be different if you hire web developers of course.

On the flipside, developers are not designers. "I took a decent pre-existing design and didn't try to fiddle with it too much" is a Good Thing, surely.

When going for a haircut, would you rather have your hair cut by a person with an immaculate haircut, or by a person who has noticeably not had their hair cut in a while?

Programmer =/= Web Developer

It's amazing how many people forget that there are gainfully employed programmers who've never touched a line of JavaScript.

We need websites too.

I probably wouldn’t take the time to build a personal website at all, but if I did, the website is just a means to facilitate communication of whatever core message I want to convey. Personally I think a strong engineer is resourceful. I’m not saying this Git repo should be cloned by everyone or anyone, but in solving real world problems, I don’t expect my team to reinvent logging, dependency injection, or basically any other undifferentiated piece of work unless we have a strong business or technical reason to justify why it wouldn’t be undifferentiated. To me, the website is similar maybe unless I’m trying to show my web and visual design skills.

I see where you are coming from if this person is a designer.

There’s also something to be said, from a recruitment point of view, to having everyone’s site look the same. It eliminates one bit of unconscious bias. In a way, it can help anonymise each person, which can make for a different (perhaps fairer?) hiring process.

So you're saying you wouldn't want to hire someone who put in the absolute minimum effort to meet the desired functional requirements without wasting time/money?

I think the functional requirements in this case are to impress someone who doesn't code, an HR person, etc. Because a qualified programmer manager shouldn't be particularly impressed with any personal homepage put together in a reasonable amount of time for the sole purpose of impressing a hiring manager.

There's places where it's worth it to "think outside the box" and then there are places that -- well, there's a reason we have boxes, because they work well for what they're designed to do.

If the point is that it's not necessary to have a static website to achieve reasonable simplicity - point taken!

From a graphical point of view, it looks a little off to me (I'm not a designer, so take with a grain of salt). The whole website is flat while the boxes have these little shadows. Too many things are centered: the menu on the left, the boxes on the right. The headers on the right side are too close to the left-hand menu.

Also I can't see where the links are pointing by hovering on them.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm not a designer either. So, I'm not quite sure about the psychological effects centered content has on people. It looked aesthetically pleasing, so I kept it. In fact, you can modify the entire home page if you just want to keep the grpahQL and database part.

> Thanks for the feedback. I'm not a designer either. So, I'm not quite sure about the psychological effects centered content has on people. It looked aesthetically pleasing, so I kept it.

This thinking can be dangerous. Aesthetically pleasing != good design, too often it can be the opposite. You definitely need to understand the "psychological effects" your page or app has on its users. First, you have to put yourself in their mind, then can you start building, then go back and iterate.

I know this may be a hobby project without much budget, so find a designer friend and bring them on board. It's very difficult to do this in a vacuum.

Centered content has different psychological effects on different people. You find it pleasing. Some designers think centering is a crime ;)

My first reaction was that the margins seem different everywhere.

I use Hugo. It's easy, static and there are large number of themes. Also writing content in Markdown is great.

I switched to Hugo from WordPress. Best decision I made this year so far. :-D But I still need to look into theme development.

The design is broken, on desktop below a certain width the menu disappears, and there is no hamburger menu either so once you're in a section you're stuck. Also the links are not links, you don't know where they are going and the url does not get updated which makes it impossible to have incoming links other than to the root of the site. It also behaves unusually, if you drag a link it just behaves as a click.

Honestly if I came across this site in the wild I'd quickly pass to something else.

The demo site (https://naresh1318.com/) doesn't work without javascript loaded from CDNs, it just renders some empty (moustache?) templates.

Is over complicating simple web pages the impression you want to send?

I am working on removing on all the CDNs and also reducing load times. CDNs over here get vuejs and other libraries that make my work easy. I was planning on getting something working rather than spending time optimizing.

When I hover over some of the "links", my FF 67 doesn't tell me where the link points to. I don't really like clicking on links if I can't tell what they're doing. Too spooky for me.

Lol. Thanks for pointing that out. I have fixed it now.

Thinking about this, I think designers have it easier when it comes to personal website branding

Web Designers can show the full range of skills by designing their website well.

Web Developers can't exactly cram all their elegantly designed components into one website.

You don't need to show everything in order to show you're capable. A handful of great components demonstrates ability.

The hamburger menu opens automatically on mobile, which is a little jarring as it blocks all content.

I'm working on fixing that!

The live example loads 25 megabytes of resources. Why?

Looks like it's mostly from one `ui_gif.gif` file.

"Resume" and "About Me" overlap on my cheap Android phone.

Other than that, I think this is nice, clean and attractive. Devs aren't all designers and shouldn't be expected to be.

I recently made a super simple personal website in Rust (https://github.com/martingallagher/website) it's basically just a markdown renderer. I think markdown input with some CSS provides a nice balance in terms of simplicity and aesthetics (subjective of course).

Thanks for posting this. I think it's good to learn from others work.

Look like spotify desing but colored

Ummm....shouldn't a programmer make their own? Dumb question I know.

Not all programmers are competent web developers or designers. Some may not see it as worth the time investment; others may not have an aesthetic sense that jives with the majority's.

I think people want it to look fancy, rather than just plain: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Most people don't benefit very much from having prettily-designed websites.

motherfuckingwebsite has google analytics. kind of surprising imo.

Makes it noncompliant with GDPR too. Tho maybe one could argue the exemption for personal use here.

I am happy to ignore the word of the law here, and focus on intent. The whole ethos of the website implies that it is just an HTML page. Pulling in google is misleading. I don't like it.

The website isn't representing their work, the portfolio within is. There's the opportunity cost of the construction vs pre-built. I write smart tv applications for Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, etc. I'm not a web dev nor do I pretend to be one. However, I would like videos and descriptions of my work displayed in the nicest way possible, like this. If every dev had to only use the code which only they created, this entire industry would grind to a halt. All of these criticisms about looking down on people using the same theme for a portfolio site just sends up all kinds of flags about their understanding of the software industry in general, and their hiring practices / company culture. I'm guessing many of you "can't find good devs" or keep devs for very long. It's like judging a job applicant on their tie instead of their resume.

Yes! You made my point, but much clearer. You want employees who can and will use every available resource, instead of making everything from scratch.

As a new joiner to the Freelance Web Developer pool, building myself a portfolio website is on my list of things to do - but, honestly, I'm struggling with some very basic questions:

- Do I want the site to demonstrate the areas of coding I most enjoy (eg HTML5 canvas)? Or should I use it as a glossy form of CV which I can use to impress potential clients?

- Do I want it to act as a simplistic (single-page) calling card? Or should I be looking to use it more as an interactive hub aiming to do stuff like gather contacts, generate discussion on blog posts (which I could submit/share on HN, LinkedIn, Twitter) etc, etc.

- What tech should I be choosing to demo to visitors? If I go for a React front end is that going to put off potential clients with Vue projects I could work on? If I want to attract bread-and-butter work should I be looking to demo a Wordpress site with a home-built theme and plugins? Do I want to show off my skills with 3rd Party APIs?

At the moment I'm thinking of doing a minimalistic HTML site hosted in an AWS S3 bucket, with a picture of my cat above a big CTA button saying "Hire my human!" and a couple of links to my GitHub and LinkedIn accounts. At least it'll be easy to maintain and easy to replace once I'm clearer on the areas of work I want to focus on.

Showcasing my personal website here: [link redacted]

I’m going for a very minimalistic look and it’s still a work in progress, but I’m aiming to keep load times fast, minimal JS, etc.

Features I’m thinking of adding - a links page showcasing interesting links on the internet

Also checkout my 404 page :)

I don't see anything but your name and three external links. Your 404 page shows your e-mail as base64, but it's cut off half the way (or rather bugged out) because of the CSS. From the JS my first guess would be some relation to LGBT. All put into 328 kilobytes. The cert is from Symantec ... and soon to be distrusted by all major browsers. It uses Google Analytics (yuck). Mixed script tags in body and head. No CSP present whatsoever. Same for HSTS. And more things. At least the TLS related problems I would get sorted out first before going online, even for a work in progress.

Honestly, I didn't even realise those were links at first!

What do you mean the JS is related to LGBT? The rainbow animation? The rainbow animation is done by CSS.

Yes, of course. A typo. CSS it is. In my mind I was already at the JS part. Specifically the part about disabling "right clicking" ... which I didn't even end up mentioning.

Hah, with noscript enabled I simultaneously didn't notice the right click disable, but did notice that an animation was still occurring.

This is an unnecessarily aggressive response. That's not how you give good feedback.

I don't find it aggressive. It's honest, without any digressions or trying to be more than a list of mistakes and bad decisions that were made.

It's very opinionated, it offers no help or pointers about how to fix any of the problems, and it wasn't asked for.

> it wasn't asked for.

Well, it was kind of "public" to begin with, so you have to expect that people will tell you what they think about it. I don't see anything wrong in that.

Yeah I was aiming to keep things super minimalistic, I’m just getting started with a web portfolio and I’m still in undergrad. The website was by no means a finished product, not sure what CSP or HSTS are but I’ll look into them. I use cloud flare for the SSL cert so they should update?

IMHO the content matters way more than the form. And your website is empty, so I would focus on this instead of the rainbow text (which is just a bit too fast to be distracting).

I am going for a minimal look however and still working on projects to put on the site.

Then I don’t understand your definition of minimal look. To me that mean no effect such as your rainbow colors, no fluff, only the content and minimum amount of styles to do the layout. But then you need some content for this. It can even just be a short description of you and what you’re good at, what you enjoy, or what you’re looking for in the future, or anything else that you want to share.

Minimalism is about limiting yourself to the minimum necessary to communicate a message or make something usable, in the case of a website the minimum is the raw content. That means that visually you would only have the actual content, without distractions. What you did is instead to remove it, which results in an almost empty page that isn’t interesting to visit.

I can even select the rainbow text, which just doesn't seem right.

Overall, no, this is not impressive. This should be an intro page, I kept scrolling as I thought it was one of those fullpage.js kinda deals.

Please don't disable the context menu. It's basic browser functionality.

Also, think about whether your desire for information on visitors really justifies adding yet another data point to Google's dataset.

Please don't interpret my comments as harsh...But...Disabling the context menu is not nice. What is the point of doing that? You added some code in order to disable fundamental browser behavior? And worse yet, this additional code goes against your stated goal of "...aiming to keep load times fast, minimal JS, etc." Again, apologies if this comes off as harsh. Clearly, you can code which is great, good for you! But, with great power comes great responsibility.

Just disabled right clicking, I was playing around and thought it was interesting at the time. CMD-OPTION-I and the browser toolbar still allow access to it, might reenable it though with all the feedback though!

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