What to put in a developer portfolio that recruiters actually read

A developer portfolio is not a design exercise. The people who open it are recruiters and hiring managers with a link from your application, and most of them give it a minute or two. In that time they want to answer three questions: what do you do, what have you built, and how do they reach you. Everything on the page should help with one of those.

The top of the page: who you are, in one screen

• Your name and the role you want (“Backend engineer, Go and Postgres”), not a slogan.
• Where and how you want to work: city, remote or hybrid, whether you would relocate.
• Availability: open to offers, notice period, or a start date.
• A way to reach you and a link to download your resume, above the fold.

Projects: fewer, with more detail

Three or four projects you can talk about for twenty minutes beat twelve tutorial clones. For each one, include:

• The problem, in one sentence. “A queue for food banks to schedule pickups” tells the reader why it exists.
• Your part. On a team project, say what you built. “I wrote the scheduling service and the SMS reminders” is what an interviewer will ask about.
• The stack, as short tags.
• A result. Users, requests per day, time saved, a hard bug solved. Real numbers, even small ones, are more convincing than adjectives.
• A live link and the repository. If the demo is down, say so rather than leaving a broken link.
• Two or three screenshots. Many reviewers will not click through to the demo; a screenshot shows the product in a second.

Experience, skills and education

Your work history belongs here as well, briefly: company, title, dates and the two or three results from each job you most want a reader to see. Group skills (languages, frameworks, databases, cloud, tools) instead of one long list, and skip the progress bars: “React 80%” tells a reader nothing. Education and certifications go last unless you are a recent graduate, in which case they move up.

Nice to have: a short intro video

A one- or two-minute video of you explaining a project, or walking through your work, gives a reader something a resume cannot: how you explain things. Keep it short and record it in one take; polish matters less than clarity.

What to leave out

• Projects you cannot explain in an interview.
• Every certificate from every online course.
• Your phone number and salary expectations on a public page.
• A blog that was last updated three years ago. Link it only if it is current.

Your own site or a hosted profile?

A custom-built site shows frontend skill, which matters if you are applying for frontend roles, and it is a project in its own right. It also needs maintaining: an outdated portfolio, with a job you left a year ago on top, does more harm than none. A hosted profile is quicker to keep current, especially if it updates from the data you already keep for applications.

A free portfolio on Lazee

Every Lazee account can claim a public profile at lazee.dev/u/yourname, built from the same profile the extension uses to autofill applications, so it stays current without extra work. It shows:

• Your headline, bio, target role, availability and notice period.
• Contact details and links (LinkedIn, GitHub, X, Telegram, your own site).
• Skills by category, work experience and education.
• Projects with live demo and repository links, stack tags and screenshots (3 per project on the free plan, 10 on Pro).
• A YouTube or Loom intro video, if you add one.
• A one-click download of your primary resume.
• A Job Preferences card (work setup, locations, roles, work authorization), which you can hide.

Your phone number, expected CTC and saved answers are never shown on it. The privacy policy lists exactly what is public.