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Your Portfolio Doesn't Matter As Much As You Think
Bruno Simon’s portfolio is pretty sick tho.
The school year is wrapping up for a lot of you and summer is about to start.
I know a good chunk of you are ready to rot or you’re thinking about:
Internship applications
First jobs
Getting your foot in the door somehow.
So throughout summer, I’ll cover some stuff that's actually useful for that.
If you already have experience, don’t worry the information will still be helpful.
The first thing I want to talk about is portfolios.
A portfolio website is not going to get you a job.
I know, I know. Every piece of advice you've ever seen about breaking into tech starts with "build a portfolio."
YouTube tutorials. Reddit threads. Career coaches. Your professor probably said it.
Everyone says to do this, and they're not wrong exactly.
If you want to do freelancing, a portfolio is a MUST.
However for a job… not so much.
Why? It’s simple.
NOBODY IS GOING TO LOOK AT IT
How recruiters look at your portfolio link
Recruiters at companies are getting hundreds, sometimes thousands of applications for a single role. They spend an average of about 7 seconds looking at a resume before deciding whether to move forward.
You really think they're clicking the portfolio link?
Most of the time they're not. And honestly you can't even blame them. They don't have time.
Which means you spent a weekend building a beautiful portfolio site, deploying it, making sure it's mobile responsive, perfecting the animations... and there's a decent chance nobody ever opened it.
The Only Exception
There is one scenario where a portfolio actually works hard for you.
If the design is genuinely jaw-dropping.
What your portfolio should do.
If your portfolio has unusual interactions, a strong visual identity and feels like a personality, that’s when it gets noticed and shared.
If you want examples of websites like that, check this out.
If you're going to spend time on a portfolio, that's the bar worth aiming for. Anything less and it's just another link nobody clicks.
So What Should You Actually Do?
I’m glad you asked friend.
1. Be active in the developer community.
This one sounds obvious and most people skip it entirely.
A lot of you are probably introverted and awkward (I am too), but trust me being “active” isn't as intense as it sounds. We're talking about things like:
Asking and answering questions
Congratulating people on their work
Helping someone with a problem
Sharing your honest thoughts on a tool or technology
Just be a real person who is genuinely into this stuff.
Developer communities are everywhere:
Discord servers
GitHub repos
Subreddits
Forums
Social media
The most interesting platforms that actually works is X/Twitter.
I know. It feels weird, but it’s genuinely one of the best places to network with working engineers right now.
Now I'm not saying slide into someone's DMs and ask for a job. Please don't do that.
But it’s way easier to build a natural connection than anywhere else.
Reply to someone's thread with a genuine thought or add something useful to a conversation. Do that consistently and people start to recognize your name. That's it. That's the whole trick.
You can have a real back-and-forth with an engineer you respect and they will actually see it (unlike your portfolio).
You could also use LinkedIn. I’m personally not the biggest fan.
Too corporate, too formal, too much "I'm excited to announce." Nobody is really honest on there. Doesn't hurt to try though.
I've seen people get job leads, mentors, and genuine friendships from nothing more than consistently showing up and saying interesting things on twitter.
2. Make interesting projects and post them.
Interesting doesn’t always mean technically complex, it could also be something that describes who you are.
An easy way to do that is create a project that:
You actually wanted to build
Has a little personality
You can honestly explain why it exists.
It’ll give you 100x more opportunities than a portfolio.
BUT make sure you post about them or you’ll have the same problem of people not looking at it.
It could be screenshots, short videos showing how it works, or A quick thread about what you built and what was hard about it.
Even just a single post saying "I built this weird thing this weekend” will get you more eyeballs than your portfolio.
It shows up in front of people organically and it showcases your skills way more.
A post that says "I built this dumb little tool that solves a problem I had, here's how it works and here's what I'd do differently" will get more genuine engagement from developers than a polished LinkedIn announcement ever will.
Just be honest and real. It's rarer than you think. And it stands out because of it.
3. Contribute to things people actually use.
Open source contributions to well-known projects carry serious weight.
It’s not because of the GitHub stars (it is a small bonus though), but because it signals you can read unfamiliar code, work within constraints you didn't set, and ship something that meets a specific level of quality.
Which basically sums up what you’ll be doing at your job.
One small contributions won’t be enough, but multiple small contributions or one big contribution will. Those will get your name known and become resume worthy.
If you do want to optimize for internships/jobs.
Now honesty won’t pay the bills, so let’s be a bit more serious.
For people who have no job experience
Instead of a portfolio, work on making higher quality projects.
Go look at the job postings for roles you actually want. Read through them carefully and look at what technologies keep showing up.
Then build a project with those technologies.
A project that’s specifically made for the companies you want to work at will give them direct evidence that you can do the job.
A surprising amount of people never do this because it requires actually reading job descriptions. This is because most people feel they aren’t “ready” to look at jobs or would rather just copy-paste a project from a tutorial.
If you already have experience, the rules change a bit.
A portfolio matters even less for you.
Nobody is hiring a developer with two or three years of experience based on a website. The experienced developer job market runs almost entirely on warm connections, reputation, and referrals.
So that's what you build.
An easy way to do that is:
Write about what you know
Even as an intern you've solved real problems, dealt with real codebases, made decisions under pressure.
So write about it.
What you worked on.
A technical decision you made and why.
Something you learned the hard way.
Your honest experience at a company.
Post it anywhere. Twitter threads, a blog, LinkedIn (if you must.)
The point is to leave a trail of evidence that shows you know what you're talking about.
At this stage it's more about being the person people think of when a specific topic.
When you have experience and answer enough questions about something, you’ll become the go-to person when someone else has that problem, which means more opportunities.
Too much yap, get to the point.
Build something and post about it like a normal person.
Show up in communities.
Use Twitter more than you think you should.
Read job postings and build projects around them
That combination will get you more opportunities than any portfolio.
Summer is a really good time to start 👀
Oh right, I remembered my youtube password.
That’s all from me!
Have a great week, be safe, make good choices, and have fun coding.
If I made a mistake or you have any questions, feel free to comment below or reply to the email!
See you all next week.
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