Portfolio Feedback for job search

Recently started applying for Jr dev positions and yet to hear anything back figured i should ask around and get some feedback on my portfolio. If anyone has a few minutes to spare. http://milesaylward.me

Also to people who have successfully found jobs is love some insight as I am slowly feeling as if what I’ve done is not enough and I may have to fall back and do more projects before beginning my jib search

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It’s a very, very heavy website, i would try to do something more lightweight, maybe remove what you need from your libraries and dump the rest. You can also compress your images, they’re pretty huge and they do load first, your “front.png” is 600kbs, which is basically the size of a complete website.

You page for contact has a broken “check out my repos” part.

Other than that, your portfolio is pretty excellent. But it’s really, really, really heavy. At the very minimum compress the images, you can use https://tinypng.com/

Also you have some insanely large files, “weatherapp.js”, “markdown.js”, why are these loading in the portfolio website? Shouldn’t they just link somewhere else? I believe bootstrap is modularized now, you probably don’t need to use the whole library. You have the size of 10 (or more, if you consider static websites) websites loading right up front, someone using cellphone internet will likely give up before loading it.

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Thanks for the info @Selhar1,
Quick question because someone else told me the linked in part was broken but I can’t seem to see it broken as it shows for me. There’s no box like this under check out my repos

Dunno, maybe clear your cache. You might be loading local files.
The linkedin iframe is working though.

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And the large files are react applications I had decided to put them directly in the portfolio but with the slow loading time I’m thinking might be better to move them to a free heroku deployment and link to them or iframe them. And cleared my cache but I couldn’t be loading local files as I’m on my phone and not my computer hmm must look into the problem more.

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I loved the design. I wish I had that kind of aesthetic talent.

But lets say I’m some random web surfer. I go to your site. I see four colored rectangles. It’s all very artistic but…what is it? Seeing as this site exists to sell you and your skills, shouldn’t there be some “branding” up front? Like maybe your name or photo inset in the center. On a heraldic shield supported by a nymph and a dragon. (I told you I had no aesthetic talent. I’m sure you can think of something better.)

I echo what Gregory said about the weight and his suggestions for reducing it.

And I certainly think your projects are good enough to showcase for junior positions. Don’t doubt yourself.

Oh one more thing, there were a couple of typos here and there. E.g. you misspelled neanderthal in one place and in your pages title tag there should be a space between Aylward and |. Just little things like that but have someone proofread everything before you show it to employers.

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Thanks @Jaldhar the design work is all done by my gf she’s a graphic design student haha but definitely hearing you on more branding on the landing page and definitely going to move all my react applications to a separate site tonight and just link to them rather than place them in the site.

Very impressive site. Your portfolio won’t be the only piece necessary to land you a job, but it’s definitely doing it’s part here.

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You can use the processed version on surge.sh, or even host the minified bundle on codepen.
It’s what i’ve been doing for the react projects, setting it up is really a pain. You can also try glitch.io but i’m not sure if they allow webpack/babel configs.

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Agree with the others!! It does look awesome… do need some branding so that its clear what site one is on…

It did take a really long time to load though. Im on my desktop, I opened a new tab to check out another post right quick, came back and it was still loading.

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Great portfolio. I was wondering how did you make this square opening effect when you click on one of the sections in the landing page

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Yeah that’s due in part to the fact that I have multiple react applications built straight into the site which now in hindsight was a bad idea going to move them to heroku tonight and just place links to them

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@marinm all the page transitions are done using css3 animations. Used a section to split off all of the pages and defined there width and height to split screen 4 ways evenly. When one is clicked it calls to a jquery function that adds a class to the section to now have a height and width of 100% and the key frames specifies all section elements to ease all transformations by 0.5s. I’ll be adding the code for my portfolio to my github tonight once I clean it up some if you want to take a look at it.

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A great thing about development is its almost like a living thing…with the ability to change and modify things as time goes on. Yeah def, once you have those applications moved over, that will make a huge difference to future employers first impression.

Thanks for explaining how you did the page transition effect!!! That really is amazing. And kudos to your gf for the design too :smiley:

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Hey Miles - the portfolio does look good, but BOY is it heavy. 10.2MB on the loading page alone?

I’m on a slow connection in a coffee shop, and I managed to load and read three FCC tabs, and also visit tools.pingdom.com to get a speed test on your site while it was loading in another tab… :wink:

See this link for detail: https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/s5qIc/http://milesaylward.me/

Your site also breaks the back button functionality for each page that I visit - instead I have to hunt around for the page close X (which vanishes if I scroll up).
I love your design skills, and I’m just an amateur by comparison, so please feel free to ignore me!

Cheers
John.

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Yeah it’s a single page application, one for which I need to use hashhistory or something similar to enable the use of the back buttons rather than searching for the x buttons and, the heaviness is because I have multiple react apps in the site. Plan on hosting them elsewhere asap Thanks for the feedback!

Hi Miles! Congrats on your work to get out of the industry–I waited tables for 12 years myself.

I’m not sure if it’s important, but I saw a few grammatical errors. If you care, let me know. Awesome site and good luck getting out of the industry!

Chris

This is an awesome and unique design, Miles. You should try making it a bit more optimized due to the long loading times. Nevertheless, the aesthetics of the portfolio is elegant and simple. Good job.

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No time to read all the previous posts, but I’ll pipe in…

I like the design and I like the colors.

A few comments:

  1. It took a long time to load. I know you’re trying to show off with “Here’s what I can do!” but I wonder if some people are going to ask themselves: Do we want our pages to load this slowly? It’s always a balancing act and compromises must be made between performance and pizzazz. Just something to think about. Maybe there are ways to speed things up a bit - I don’t know enough to give you advice here.

  2. Your title is “Miles Aylward| Web Developer” - I would add a space before the pipe to even it out: “Miles Aylward | Web Developer”.

  3. I would add captions to your portfolio, and maybe include what technologies you are using on each project, talk about what you learned. Don’t assume that everyone is going to go exploring through every project - you want the information out front where they can see it and make a quick assessment if that’s all they want to do. The old adage is that “Most people don’t read web pages, they scan them”. The quicker and easier you make it for them to find the information, the better their experience and the more likely they are to get the information you want them to. (On that note, I’d recommend reading Don’t Make Me Think by Krug - excellent introduction on how to think about UX.)

But I like it. I’m going to have to do something similar in the next few months, so this has been on my mind too.

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Definitely Chris! Any and all feedback is appreciated