One of the strongest things that we can do to position ourselves – for the next career move, and also for creating a new tier of powerful professional relations – is to build our online Portfolio.
This post provides links to good Portfolio examples for three different cases:
- GitHub-based Portfolio – where you store EVERYTHING in your GitHub, including your resume/CV & a professional-quality photo,
- LinkedIn-based Portfolio – where you store the most important information about yourself on your LinkedIn profile, and embed various projects into your LinkedIn “Projects,” and also make maximal use of other LI capabilities, and
- Personal domain-based Portfolio – where your personal domain is your primary Portfolio site, and it contains a more detailed “About” section and other pages (e.g., Projects, Media, Blog, etc.). One key useful thing about setting up your own website is that you can embed an “Opt-In” form into your site, so you can invite visitors to give their email address, and then communicate regularly with your “tribe” of followers.
This post provides a collection of useful links to articles and other resources that make very good points about how to craft your LinkedIn profile & portfolio, as well a good article on resume-crafting.
We also offer examples of each of the three Porfolio cases; GitHub, LinkedIn, and personal domain-based.
A GitHub-Based Portfolio Site
Using your existing GitHub is the easiest starting place, and your GitHub should be where you create a specific repository for each of the project in your Portfolio.
Here are two excellent GitHub-based Portfolios:
- Mathias Bal on GitHub – Dr. Bal treats his GitHub more as a blogging platform (with a bit of an “About”) than as a repository for code, etc., but it serves very well … some excellent posts about the statistical mechanics underlying transformer models.
- Jake (Jaesung) Tae – Jake Tae’s GitHub blogpost series, many topics related to AI & machine learning – Tae has done an OUTSTANDING job of addressing not only the entropy topic, but a whole lot more – I’ve pointed to his posts in the past, and students were pretty wowed by his GitHub blog collection!
A LinkedIn-Based Portfolio
Dennis Olympios is a professional LinkedIn and social media coach – so we’d expect his LinkedIn site to be great – and it is!
A Personal Domain-Based Portfolio
Dr. Jim Fan is a senior researcher at NVIDIA, and has some impressive claims-to-fame! He presents his work on his personal website.
Using a Video to Talk about Your Project
Dr. Jim Fan was lead author of “MineDojo: Building Open-Ended Embodied Agents with Internet-Scale Knowledge,” a paper that won a NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) “Outstanding Paper” award. He features his paper on his personal website.
He also has a video presenting his work as a virtual poster session. His video presentation has two parts – him doing the voice-over (which you can watch as well as listen to), and the acccompanying slidedeck.
The length is right – just under five minutes. This is an excellent example of what I invite my Capstone students to do for their final Oral Presentation. (You don’t have to have two separate vids running side-by-side; a voice overlay will work fine, or inserting a small-scale vid of yourself as you talk through your deck is fine also.)
Useful Resources – Cultivating Your LinkedIn Presence
- “How to get noticed on LinkedIn.“
- “Do These Three Things on LinkedIn.”
- “Are You Utilizing Your Project Section on LinkedIn.”
Also, a warning note:
A Good Resume Example
A good two-page resume (that got the person hired at Google for $300K/yr).
Useful Resource – Thought-Process for Designing Your Website
I liked Oddo Designs’ strategy for thinking through your website.
Some Thoughts from Those Who Hire (and Fire, and Get Fired …)
From a Google person – on mistakes that people make when interviewing.
From someone who lost her job after getting poached – how to let colleagues know she was ready for a new job again (so soon!).
Summary: The Best Advice
There’s no end of advice. Most of it is good.
The one thought that I LIKED THE MOST was from Dennis Olympios, who brands himself as having “LinkedIn Superpowers.”
His idea was to KEEP TWEAKING your LinkedIn profile and Portfolio collection. A little here, a little there.
I like this because we often tend to treat all of this “marketing” stuff as a “big project,” e.g., we’ll take a weekend or a week or a month or a year … and update all of our online presence info.
Instead, Olympios recommends just a little bit at a time.
I’ve been doing that lately – it GREATLY reduces the stress/angst, and gives a MUCH BETTER opportunity to come back, look at things, and ask myself – “Is that what I really wanted to say?”
I also liked Oddo Designs, because Tommy Oddo lays out the thought-process for reaching out to clients via your website – it puts the client’s thought process central in your head, which is usually a different (and yet so-important) perspective!
OK … enough fun … time to incorporate some of these ideas!