A few years ago, I was learning to become a web developer, as the company I was in was doing just manual testing without much process in places and I (wrongly) thought it was a lousy career!
I soon left that company, and I changed my mind when I realized how vast software testing actually is and I fell in love with it! Anyway, recently I’ve been pondering on the idea of updating my portfolio, so it’s more in touch with reality - it showed a web developer but I’m working as a tester.
Here’s the updated version: https://mirzasisic.com/
I just deployed the changes so a hard refresh might be needed or just use incognito mode.
Now this got me thinking, developers might have a easier time showcasing their work, compared to testers, they just put web apps they’ve been working on - unless prevented by and NDA. For testers this is a bit challenging, luckily for me I had a few articles to place as samples of my work - I plan to add more in the future.
Aside from that, I plan to connect to the Blogger API to display new content from my blog dynamically, maybe work on improving accessibility and performance of my little website as well.
What are your though on this?
All ideas, suggestions and criticisms are welcome!
It totally depends on what kind of tester we are talking about I think, if it’s a technical tester, you could write some automated tests or showcase some technical tests on a blog or a git repo.
For others, for sure, not sure who will look at decision tables or something
Anyways I very much like what you did with your website! Kind of makes me wanna do one myself!
It wasn’t too much of hard work, I just used a free Bootstrap template and sliced it up into React components.
Pretty cheap too - I use the free hosting plan on Firebase, free tier of Cloudflare for CDN, caching, free SSL cert and security, so my only real cost is around $10 yearly for the domain renewal on Namecheap.
Now all that , the free CloudFlare tier and so on is interesting stuff in itself, but I prefer the idea of git repo. I would love to hear more about the setting up of these things and what is possible. I have a blogger page, but it’s a bit limiting. I think there is something for everyone, but I also think the online portfolio thing is a bit overrated and, a distraction for folk who don’t have the specific skills.
I still think everyone should create one, but just not go off-track trying to get too smart publishing it. Oh and please remind folk to be beware a lot of the “free” hosting options, this is not for hurrying.
GitHub pages also would have done the job for this site (it’s only client side code), at the time that I made it I wanted to check Firebase, with all the social media platforms a portfolio site is not as important as it once was I think - I just use it as a practical excuse to try of new stuff.
I do like the creating a project so you can learn new tech stacks or tech areas part of the whole portfolio thing. That’s probably just as useful as actually having the online portfolio to learn about web publishing now that so much of what we have to cover as software testers is touching the web at one or more points.
For me my blog is a story about becoming a better tester. It is a journey and people can view my ups and downs.
Some ways to avoid problems with NDA are
to ask your employer permission to blog, or
to change the name of the product or service in an unrecognizable one. I used the imaginary Cinema VIP app.
I really like your intention to improve the performance and accessibility of your portfolio. This will reflect your values.
This year I tried to improve the performance of my website. I focused on the pictures:
For accessibility I add alternative text to the pictures. This took me some time to get used to it:
A lot of people are connecting accessibility with blind or deaf people. There is also a group of people who can have anxiety attacks. This influenced my way of blogging and speaking:
