Case Study

Surprise! Who said this portfolio site couldn’t be its own featured project? After all, it was built with my own two hands, so why not give it a little spotlight?

Starting in Term 3, we were tasked to build out our own portfolios to feature projects, for potential employers and clients to look over. We weren’t given much direction aside from having an area to display projects, have a biography, a demo reel, and a contact form.

There were quite a lot of challenges for me, with this portfolio, one of the primary ones being design. Unfortunately, the students were advised with a little bit of misguided information where we were told “Your portfolio should focus on 75% functionality and 25% design if you’re a coder.” I took that advice to heart and focused a lot on functionality, but after talking with one of my professors casually, I found out that the students should’ve been advised a bit differently and that it’s a little more than 25% design.

Another challenge was making myself unique. The program had around 60 students and we weren’t going to be the only graduates. There’s other schools with graduates that would be seeking for work, so I had to stop and think “How can I make myself unique and stand out?”. Then, like in the cartoons, an idea came to me. A demos section! Our coding professors was showing us some cool things, like a dynamic slider, scrolling animations, api calls, etc. So I thought having some interactive demos would be a great idea to include. It would help me practice with the code and put the skills I was learning to practical use!

One of the largest challenges with this portfolio, however, was dealing with the back-end. I understand the fundamentals of back-end, especially with what was taught, but for some reason, it decided to be fussy with me. I ran into a few issues that I couldn’t solve myself, so I booked an appointment with my professor to diagnose them and help me out. As it turns out, one of the issues we ran into, he had never seen in his 25 years of teaching and dealing with back-end. My face almost went as pale as a ghost! But together, he and I worked through the code, snippet by snippet, and eventually got my portfolio into a state that you’re seeing right now!