When looking for a job in the tech industry, it is important to be able to prove your skills in a competitive market. Having a portfolio of educational work and personal projects is a good idea. I, like many others, thought, why not kill two birds with one stone and create a website? I could use the website as my portfolio and demonstrate my skills at the same time.
When looking into how to make a website most of the issue came around hosting. Luckily, I stumbled upon GitHub Pages which does have limits but works out for making a portfolio. I did not have experience with HTML and CSS but took it as a learning opportunity. I do have experience writing markdown documents and a bit of JS which did help with the implementation. I found a template, Beautiful Jekyll, which helped put down the foundation. With a couple of quick edits, I had a website with my name on it! Now to add information. First, I did a little “about me” page and then a page with my resume. I wanted my resume displayed and easily accessible, so I looked into getting a pdf to work. Sure enough, there was an easy way to do it.
After getting the basic information down I wanted to add a little bit of style. So I got to work on the color and theme. While editing colors I noticed that I was spending considerable time waiting for the web page to update with the edits. I remember in my class about running a website locally and how that might be easier to test rather than committing to GitHub for every small edit. Especially when I was just changing the colors of text several times. Going back to the GitHub Pages information page I found a tutorial. Which I followed the steps and easily got it to work. Now I can test faster.