Marvellous ✦

If I were building my developer portfolio from scratch today, I'd approach it very differently. When I started, I thought having more projects meant having a stronger portfolio. I'd build something, add it to my portfolio, move to the next thing and repeat. But I've come to realise that a portfolio is more than a collection of projects. Here's what I'd do differently: → I'd focus on fewer projects and take the time to make them genuinely useful. → I'd stop adding projects just because I followed a tutorial or wanted to try a new technology. → I'd explain the problem I was solving, the decisions I made and the challenges I encountered. → I'd give my strongest project the attention it deserves, with a working demo, screenshots and a proper breakdown. → I'd show more of my engineering thinking: how I handled errors, structured the application, made trade-offs and approached edge cases. → I'd document my process instead of expecting people to figure out what I contributed from a GitHub repository. Looking back, I wish I'd understood this earlier: Your portfolio isn't just supposed to show what you've built. It should help people understand how you think, how you solve problems and what it's like to have you on their engineering team. That's what I'd want my portfolio to communicate today.