Non-majors, Surviving as Developers

#16. Tips for Creating a Portfolio for New Developers

Typically, those who are preparing for a developer job are either majors who graduate from college and become developers or non-majors who complete a course and prepare for a job. These are the two most common cases.

Recently, I have been reviewing the resumes and portfolios of non-major developer job seekers through In-fr*n mentoring and giving feedback, and I have noticed that many of them are repeating the same mistakes. So today, I will be summarizing tips on creating a portfolio for new developers (based on non-majors).

[Tips for Creating a Portfolio for New Developers]

It is important to include various project experiences in your portfolio. In courses, you usually work on two projects, and these become your project experiences. You can write a detailed description of each project, including the technologies used, the features developed, and the functions you developed.

One common mistake that new developers make is that they focus too much on "technology." I will explain this with an example.

Project Name : Community for Job Seekers
Technologies Used : Spring boot, Oracle, JPA, React.js, CSS, HTML
Responsibilities

• When multiple people post articles simultaneously, TPS increases excessively. Speed improvement of 2.5 times through JPA tuning
• MSA applied to distribute processing for each service to reduce recovery time in case of failure and improve speed
• JWT introduced to strengthen security through permission management

Looking at the above content, I think it is a good description of the project from a technical perspective. However, a person who sees this portfolio for the first time might think, "What features were actually developed?"

What is missing here is the "work" content. It lacks a description of "what services or features" were developed. Basically, the portfolio or work experience that I am aiming for is "work introduction + technical content." Therefore, I gave the following feedback to revise this portfolio.

Project Name : Community for Job Seekers
Technologies Used : Spring boot, Oracle, JPA, React.js, CSS, HTML
Responsibilities

• Development of a user Q&A board where users can ask and answer job-related information.
  • When multiple people post articles simultaneously, TPS increases excessively. Speed improvement of 2.5 times through JPA tuning
  • Referencing Naver's Knowledge i*n, a system for adoption was introduced to increase user engagement.
• Development of a job information crawling bot and a resume and self-introduction writing and saving function
  • MSA was applied to each service to distribute processing for each service to reduce recovery time in case of failure and improve speed.
• Development of social login (Naver/Kakao) function
  • JWT introduced to prevent security incidents such as token theft.
    
    

This is a somewhat simple example, but by adding what work was developed, you can see that this person developed a certain service and what technical concerns they had during the development process.

Personally, I believe that while technical aspects are important, business aspects should also be considered. The financial sector is not just looking for people with experience in financial work. Developers must know the work better than the actual users. Therefore, you need to demonstrate your understanding and analytical skills in the work.

I hope that many job seekers who are creating portfolios will refer to this.