4 Developer Portfolio Projects to Get Hired

Okay, so today we're talking about four projects that you can build in a week that will get you hired. Projects may be the single best way to help you get a job because number one, they can catch the eye of an interviewer or a recruiter and help you stand out. And they prove that you have the skills to do the job that you're applying for. If you do it right, it's a great way to stand out. But the question I hear so often from either junior developers or even mid-career developers or people just looking to get into the industry is what do I build? So for that reason, I'm going to take you through four of my best ideas for building portfolio projects that will get you hired. A quick note before we jump in, I'm assuming these are full stack projects, but depending on whether you're more front-end or back-end oriented, you can adapt these kind of to fit your needs and fill in whatever gaps you might have. So let's go ahead and get into it. Okay, the first project is building a landing page for a company. And I know I just said that the projects can be front-end or back-end oriented depending on your preference. This doesn't really fit the bill. And the reason is I think that HTML and CSS are core skills that everybody should be at least competent in regardless of whether you're more front-end or back-end oriented. So this'll be good for everybody to do, I think. There are a few reasons that this is a good project. Number one, companies need landing pages. So assuming you have these skills, you could go get freelance work or slot in at a company and immediately provide value. So that's pretty cool. And building a landing page will also help you practice a real life workflow. So as a front end developer or as a full stack developer, a lot of times you're given a design either in Photoshop or Sketch or Figma and you have to implement that in a pixel perfect way. Pixel perfect is just it matches the designs exactly. So if you do this project, then you will have mastered that real life workflow and it'll be helpful when you actually start doing it on the job. And so assuming you've bought what I've said so far you may be asking yourself well where do I go to get designs and practice this real life workflow. And I'm going to tell you about a website that I mentioned before on the channel and that is frontendmentor.io. And the purpose of frontendmentor is basically to do what I'm talking about. You get designs and then you implement them. And so it teaches you that real life workflow. It's a great opportunity to master your html and css and maybe even a bit of javascript and like i said you can make this more front-end or back-end oriented so let's say you're a more back-end oriented person you can build an api to receive form submissions and anything you could think of really you can build in automations you can build in scraping you can kind of do whatever you want and so i think this is a great project to get started like i said you can build it within the week and you can have a really nice looking portfolio piece for you with that said let's go on to the next project. Okay the idea for the second project is a game and I think maybe a few months ago people would have dismissed this but since the popularity of Wordle I think people are way more into games than thinking about how can I build a game that people are really into especially since Wordle sold for several million dollars to the New York Times. It's on people's minds right now but even disregarding Wordle I think a game is a great portfolio piece. There's a few reasons for that. Number one, games are fun. And so I think it's a good way to get whoever is reviewing your portfolio engaged in the project. Number two, that can be as simple or as complicated as you want. So you could do a simple text-based game, kind of like the game in the movie big, where you're simply entering commands, or you can make it complicated by something like Wordle, even though Wordle is not that complicated or like a pong or something that has a lot of interaction, something that has web sockets you can really go crazy on this and you can make it as complicated as you want from a back-end perspective. So I mentioned you can kind of spice these up you could do user authentication and leaderboard which is something that Wordle didn't have because the creator was focused on not having a back-end. But the good thing is when you're making your own game you can do whatever you want and depending on which direction you take your game it could teach you some really interesting skills. So there's no need to learn C++ or Unity or anything crazy for this, you can make a game using HTML5 canvas and have a lot of fun. And depending on what direction you go, there's a lot you're going to learn. And that brings us to our third project, which is a database. And I put database in quotes because it is data, but there's also a front end around it. So let me explain what I mean. I think looking at a good example of this is probably easier than me explaining. So I'm thinking about this project from Steph Smith you know which is basically a database that she has around words that are really hard to translate into other languages. They kind of only have a meaning within their language and so this is basically just a list a table with columns where you can look at things you can sort search filter and that is pretty cool. It makes a great project idea number one because people like data and number two because there's a lot of directions you can take this. So for example you could collect the data on your own and you can simply have it on a front end in JSON or you could have a real API where there are actually requests being made to a back end you can make it a full stack node app which i'm pretty sure Steph Smith did in this particular one where the front end is just a template and it's mostly back end kind of business logic and you can do a ton of other things to actually get the data so let's say there are data sources that you're interested in you can write a scraper that goes out on a cron job every night at midnight or something and collects and updates your database. So you can really take this in some pretty interesting directions. Another reason this is interesting is that people are willing to pay for data. So I'm particularly thinking about this guy Jacob right now who has a bunch of database products that he collected by scraping basically. So he has this thing called GumSpy which is basically data on what's selling on Gumroad. He also has a database product that categorizes product launches that did really well where the owners aren't working on the product anymore that you could potentially buy. And the point is that number one, data is valuable. People are willing to pay for it. And number two, that there's a lot of ways you can go out and get this data. And for those reasons, I think this would make a great portfolio piece. And that brings us to our last project idea, and that is building a Web3 project. Now, there's a lot of different reasons to build a Web3 project. And it's not just that there's a lot of hype around it. I think number one, this is kind of the next big area. And number two, if you can build a web three project, it's a strong signal to employers that you know how to teach yourself things and you know how to learn even when there's not a lot of documentation or tutorials out there. Another reason I think it's very compelling right now to learn web three is that it opens up consulting opportunities. So these skills are in demand, but there's not that many people out there that know how to build in web three. And so if you have a portfolio piece showing that you know how to do so, you can command some pretty high rates for contracting or consulting work. And so you may be asking yourself, what do I build? I think anything that is web two based, you could build in web three, especially things that have to do with exchanging money. So you could do a web three version of Airbnb or gum road, or really anything where you're paying for something. You could also do non-financial things on the blockchain. So I've seen a tutorial example where you have a blog that's built on the a blockchain where that data is stored on chain with its own hash. And that's kind of where the blog posts live. So basically anywhere you have a database, you could sub that out for being stored on chain instead of in some Mongo database that's hosted somewhere, just as an example. And that is actually something I'm working on right now. So I'm trying to take my own advice a little bit. But regardless, I think Web3 is super compelling. It would make an interesting portfolio piece, especially if you're already in the JavaScript world. I think the transition from JavaScript to web three is simpler because there's a lot of packages on NPM and stuff like that. And so I think it's a great opportunity and something worth considering. Okay. So those are my four best project ideas to get you hired that you could build this week. So go ahead and get started. If you're still here, you'd probably like the rest of my channel, which focuses on software engineering and self-employment. So consider subscribing regardless. Thanks so much for watching to the end. Remember, stay hungry, stay curious, and I'll see you in the next one.