Day 21

Today

• Taking your projects public
• Individual portfolios

For Next time

• Reading Journal 21 (including portfolio exercise from today)
• Please share your raw Architectural Review form responses with us if you did not do so already. We use these to help improve the AR feedback process in general. To do this:
  1. In the Responses tab of your form, click “View responses in Sheets” (the green cross)
  2. Click “Share” in the upper right corner of the resulting spreadsheet, and then “Get shareable link”
  3. Add the link to the spreadsheet as a comment in your Canvas Architectural Review Reflection assignment (if it wasn’t already part of your reflection document)
• Continue project work

Individual Portfolios

One of the great things about Olin classes is that you are continually building projects that demonstrate your creativity and talent as an engineer. In SoftDes alone, your work on MP3, MP4, and the Final Project (at least) fall into this category.

I’m sure you’d love to have a curated collection of that work by the time you graduate, but sometimes we don’t take the time to actually make that happen. Today and in the current Reading Journal, we’ll work on capturing and presenting your work by writing up a short summary that could be published as part of an online portfolio. We’ll also give you some tools to actually implement the portfolio once you’re ready.

Exercise:

Olin’s Office of Post-Graduate Planning recently hosted an alumni session on portfolio creation.

Individually: Look through the PGP portfolio workshop slides (PDF) up through the “Storytelling” section. Then choose 2-3 examples from the PGP list of sample portfolios (PDF) and study the examples they have for class projects.

In small groups: Discuss the portfolio entries that told a compelling story. What made them interesting to you? What features did they share? How would they connect with various audiences? At the boards, create a list of guidelines to emulate when creating your own portfolio entries.

Note: The visual appearance and formatting of your personal website/portfolio is an important condsideration, but NOT something we’re thinking about today. Focus on content for now - there will be plenty of time later to play with themes to your heart’s content.

Making SoftDes projects part of your GitHub portfolio

One part of making your work discoverable is to have it as part of your GitHub profile. Your mini-project work is currently under the SoftDes organization and private. Once it’s ready, you may want it to be under your personal GitHub account and public.

We have some suggested prerequisites for making your work public:

• “Good code” - you’ve addressed feedback from course staff, reviewed and revised your work, and possibly completed a code review with peers or course staff to put your best foot forward
• No secrets or other inappropriate content in the repo
• Solid title, description, and README (see the current Reading Journal)

Once you feel like you’re ready, we can help you flip the switch and share your work with the world!

Creating a personal website using GitHub

One platform you can use to create a personal website (including a portfolio) is GitHub. You will be doing exactly this to create a SoftDes final project website with your team, so this is good practice

Pros of GitHub Page:

• Quick and easy to create
• Free
• Markdown - don’t need to write HTML if you don’t want to, but it’s there if you do
• Discoverable by being connected to your GitHub account, plus you can use a custom domain if/when you’re ready
• Easy to link to existing project work on GitHub

Cons:

• Not WYSIWYG - must use or develop your own themes/styles
• Static pages only, will not do server-side stuff (like Flask)
• You may have feelings about GitHub as a company, but site itself is fairly portable (just a git repository with Markdown/HTML that you could host elsewhere)

If you’re ready to try it out, check out Getting Started with GitHub Pages. Course staff are available to help you out with the process.