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Ask HN: What are the best personal project websites you've seen?
516 points by Xcelerate on Oct 27, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 291 comments
I just finished graduate school and am trying to design a small personal website that showcases the research I've done to potential employers and explains how and why my skills would be useful in an industry/startup setting. I also want to give a little background about myself.

I've been looking at a variety of people's personal websites; however, I've noticed most of the researchers I follow tend to highlight their papers/publications on their website, which doesn't seem quite so useful for someone who wants to work in industry (in most of my interviews so far, I get the impression that publications are secondary to the technical skills I've acquired).

What are the best personal project websites you've seen? Something that a potential employer would look at and think "I need to hire this person".

Thanks!




First the master: http://worrydream.com/

Surprised nobody's posted it yet.

Other people are also posting their own, so here's mine: http://www.dougkoellmer.com/

Other job-hunt-specific efforts: http://www.dougkoellmer.com/portfolio/ http://www.dougkoellmer.com/resume/ http://www.dougkoellmer.com/games/

Can't be totally sure but I believe they've gotten me a job or two.


http://worrydream.com was a horrible experience for me. Between the extremely slow scroll-hijacking and disabling of my vim-based scroll events it was a nightmare to try to navigate and I gave up without actually viewing any of the projects. Even using my colleagues hyper scroll wheel gave us a brief chuckle before quitting the page entirely.


Funny enough my first experience with worrydream was without JS, as with most new websites. And it's much better then.


:) I loved it when I first looked at it, but it vandalized itself when I turned JavaScript on.


me three. I went there and saw a basic resume. thought, ok. whatever. then i saw the comments about turning javascript on. the horror


haha same here ;)


Holy smokes, that was atrocious. I have no idea what was causing me to flip to different slides, if I'm even getting that terminology correct. But it was just magically happening. I didn't get very far. I think I had to re-navigate to the "bio" page about six times before I gave up.


Perhaps you should start a startup that lists sites friendly for vim-based scroll events.


He didn't argue his point well by bringing up vim, but he does have a point. It loaded very slowly and isn't designed that well.


In general, WWW content should be designed browser/user/agent agnostic way. Better not to assume that everyone is using touch or a mouse to scroll around. Hence, it's not the greatest design.


Am I missing some sort of joke here? These are exactly the types of pages that I would recommend avoiding.

If your're hoping to convince employers of your technical skills I would put examples of your work up front. Unless you're applying for jobs where "unique" UIs are valued (designing ad agency sites?) then it will actually detract from your goal.


This. In addition, the readability is straight-up bad on many of these.


Everyone is going nuts about the presentation/scrolling/UI of worrydream, but they are missing out on the goldmine of what he's actually been working on: http://worrydream.com/#!/Showreel2012

Its absolutely insane someone could be that productive in 2 years. A lot of the ideas in that showreel are incredible. Yeah many of them probably don't work, but I saw dozens of new interactions that don't exist anywhere else. Plus the demo is >4 years old. That's amazing.

His CV has the following quote: “One of the greatest user interface design minds in the world today.” — Alan Kay

People are obsessed with getting immediate gratification and have little to no attention span these days.


It's not a demand for instant gratification so much as a demand for functional websites. The page was so weighed down by javascript bloat that it lagged on my phone when trying to scroll. I gave up in disgust and never made it to the allegedly-awesome showreel.

I'd certainly never hire that guy based on my first impression, which is that he doesn't value performant code.


Honestly, this guy is a genius. And people can't get over that their scroll wheel doesn't work on a website that hasn't been updated in half a decade.


AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

That's the point.

If a genius can't make a tricky personal website without breaking things, what chance do normal people have?

Just make a normal website.

Brett Victor is awesome. If you copy his website, you're learning exactly the wrong lessons from him.


In the context of a showcase website, first impressions matter. You want the work to be front and center. Not the fact that you can't design a usable website.


To a degree. Sometimes it's OK for the user to have to put a modicum of effort in, especially for something which is not a product or service.


Where "a modicum of effort" is have a specific type of machine?


The thing that got to me about how amazing his website was is how many of his sites I've actually seen, used and been impressed with that were all built by him.

I also honestly can't say I've faced the usage issues other people have. It was a pleasure to look through a bunch of his stuff and I actually kept on looking for fun.


The first one you linked messes up with my scrolling and makes is incredibly slow, I have to use the thin scrollbar on the rights side due to that...


It was terrible under Firefox on my Surface Book, so out of curiosity I then tried it on Edge: scrolling doesn’t work at all on the touchpad or touchscreen (the arrow keys, Space, Shift+Space, Home and End don’t work in any browser). The scrollbar is the only thing that allows you to navigate down the page.


Disabling JavaScript (or if you are a NoScript user) usually 'fixes' the scroll override annoyances but try going to about:config and toggling layout.css.scroll-behavior.enabled to 'false' as well.

I started noticing some sites were hijacking scroll despite having them blocked by NoScript, however the above config change fixed that instantly. Turns out scroll can be hijacked by CSS now, not just JavaScript. Progress!


Nice. Unfortunately, that configuration option doesn't exist in Pale Moon.


Did you mean worrydream or my personal website? If you mean mine, sorry for the scroll-jacking! It's been a few years since I've touched the input handling code and that kind of stuff tends to rust really fast. Might have to go back in there.


Talking about worrydream.com


Yeah, I'm in Chrome on Windows and a full spin of the scroll wheel moves it down about 5 pixels.

Given how much thought he puts into user experience in his projects, that's really weird. I have to scroll with click and drag and sort of "throw" the page upward as if I'm using a touchscreen.


In Swedish there is an expression "The smith's horse and the shoemakers children are worst shod" that comes to mind.

It's kind of when fashion designers wears an ill fitting t-shirt and jeans I guess.


That is really weird. I'm using Chrome on Windows too, and my scroll wheel works normally on the site. I wonder what is causing the different behaviors we're seeing.


It works sorta-fine in Firefox. I say "sorta" because it overrides the browser's smooth scrolling to move in jerky steps on every click of the wheel, but at least it moves useably fast.

To hazard a guess, the testing environment was a Mac with trackpad scrolling. Each scrolling step on that would be small enough that "teleport to next scroll position" looks smooth, and breaking the built-in smooth scrolling wouldn't be noticeable.

I do wish people would stop trying to reimplement scrolling and just let the OS/browser do it...

FWIW I'm in Chrome 54 on Windows 7.


On my iPhone it works perfectly.


Same, I think it's on purpose.


Why would someone purposefully make navigation of their site significantly worse than the default?


I've seen slower scrolling done to improve the "mouth feel" of the website. It's usually a designer wanting to do it without considering the full ramifications of their whimsy.


Did anyone bumped into the easter egg on his site? If not, try to click on the "purveyor of impossible dreams" text below his name/logo thingie (and keep clicking!)

PS: If you are patient enough to wait for 45 clicks, you will bump into the second easter egg ;-)


WRT your website, it's quite nice of you that you've added the message "you need js for this website". Maybe better if you add a little personal information to that message too, like "Hey I'm Doug, I'm a software dev, and this is my website. You need JS enabled for it to function. Otherwise reach me at <mail <at> domain>." This'd be more intriguing to enable JS. And when I enabled it I liked what I got, a nice idea.

WRT Bret's website, it's the type of website I'd pass if I wasn't told that there's sth. interesting in it. A black window w/o JS, and when enabled, it takes 5-10 seconds to just show me some text b/c needs to load custom fonts and loads of JS, and then messes up my scroll. Yours is a creative thing and I like it, but this one just imitates badly the normal scolling. Plain awful.


Hey thanks, really nice focused feedback there that I will take action on. A pipe dream I have is to actually make the engine powering my website work without JS as well. So a zoom/swipe navigation would actually go up to the server to get a fresh static html page that would render all the cells at their appropriate location/size. Kind of like how the very first map apps worked online. It would be a little clunky obviously but I think still usable.

I had no idea Bret's website would be so polarizing! I appreciate it in a more idealized sense, so "assuming JS is enabled and scrolling works right and you have a fast internet", and of course for the content itself. If he was the kind of person that had to look for jobs then I'd recommend fixing those things as well.


I guess who don't have JS in these days are mostly the ones who disabled it in purpose. So a message inviting them to enable would be enough. Also, it's harder for some handicapped people to use interactive websites, so they'd rather have a nice plain alternative than an imitation of the interactive site that's equally harder to use. And, you're welcome :)

Bret's website is an obstacle to the content therewithin. If all he cares is getting hired, then well... But if it's sharing information, he should fix that website.


I like your concept, but zoomed out the layout kinda reminds me of a swastika with more arms.


Ha! I was going for spiral galaxy, but now you've got me wondering about all those job applications that I never heard back from!

FWIW the engine (https://github.com/dougkoellmer/swarm) that runs the website doesn't care what the layout of the cells are. For example here's a prototype textbook reader: http://eagrereader.appspot.com/


Yeah the accidental swastika needs to go. Even though everyone knows it's not a swastika, the emotional reference is formed before logic takes over.


The emotional reference needs to go. Swastikas were around long before nazis and they'll be around long after. It's a pretty fundamental shape.


I totally thought it was going to be a swastika before I got zoomed out all the way


+1 for worrydream.com. I don't mind the scrolling, once you're in a post it's fine. It's an experiment in UX after all.

This is the best one I've read: http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange

The visualisations and interactions are really helpful in aiding understanding. It's nice to see people trying out new ways of presenting information.


My corporate firewall has your domain name on a shitlist, for the stated reason of distributing viruses and malware. Have you been told this before?


Could you give me any more information? My original site (years and years ago) was a PHP monster that got hacked briefly through a security vulnerability in my hosting provider (wasn't my fault, I swear!), so maybe the corporate firewall just has a long memory?


I'll try to get more info when I get time. I'm not really sure what software my place uses for blocking sites. Here's one message I get: "This page has been blocked by the PaloAlto URL filtering device." -- and then it tells me the site is contained in a "malware" category.


I thought worrydream was very nice and I could see why it was being upvoted.

Then I enabled JS, and it completely breaks scrolling and loads a ton of images :|


Highlighting worrydream (I think) was less about the site, and more about the site content. Bret Victor has dedicated an incredible amount of time to writing about design [1], visualization[2], reality[3], climate change[4], among other things.

1. http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming

2. http://worrydream.com/#!2/LadderOfAbstraction

3. https://vimeo.com/115154289

4. http://worrydream.com/#!/ClimateChange


How could you possibly list worrydream.com when it completely breaks the scroll wheel?


Because one issue does not negate an enormous treasure trove of content


Wow, your site has the most original interface I've ever seen. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it certainly leaves an impression.


Your first demo link [1] to Swarm on your resume is broken for me.

[1]: http://www.b33hive.net/


Bah yea need to update that, thanks for the heads up.


After looking at worrydream.com, everything seems little bit tilted now.


Whoa that spiral layout/zoom one is really sweet. Neat idea!


Man, downloading all the images on worrydream.com takes me 5 full seconds, and I have a 50 megabit line.


trying to scroll is horrible


I don't find worry dream to be aesthetically pleasing.


The scrolling is sooooooooooo choppy.


[flagged]


This is not a civil comment. Please stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


http://kellysutton.com

Stumbled upon this one yesterday, it's from a paper, but well written: https://mzucker.github.io/2016/09/20/noteshrink.html

A long time favorite writer: http://www.frankchimero.com/writing/the-webs-grain/


Finally, someone with taste!

These are great examples. Clean and user-friendly. They invite the visitor to spend some time reading, and display the articles using familiar conventions. Nice work!

To contrast with the top 2 comments...just look at all the tacky animations, cheesy special effects, massive headshots. Clearly the people had nothing to say so they decided to bedazzle the fuck out of their sites in the hopes that no one noticed.


Thanks! Yes, great writers and you can learn something from them, not just empty content.


Content, content, content and then presentation.

You need to think of yourself as the product and work out what's the best way to describe and package the skills and experiences that you have already acquired and how they can be applied to whatever your target companies are looking for.

Also think about whether you are using your portfolio site for lead generation or lead qualification. Lead generation means that you'll have recruiters finding your portfolio off the back of your SEO and they contact you. Whereas lead qualification means you are selling your self to a hiring manager/expert after they've read your resume and decided that they want to check your credibility before interviewing.


http://www.gwern.net/

Does gwern fall into this category? While I'd need to know more about what he's like in person, the author certainly seems like a technically competent individual.


While likely not specifically what the submitter was looking for (that is, will help you get hired), the fact that I immediately searched for "gwern" in the comments so I could upvote or submit myself points towards it definitely being am example of a personal site/project that is memorable.


I've never heard of gwern, but would definitely be more likely to hire than other sites I've seen here. The others are very much: overengineered, presentation-over-content, presentation-over-function, inaccessible. Effectively, they represent an overt focus on the "shiny" while neglecting the usually less exciting, but significantly more important, aspects of development. Not traits I would value in an employee.

Gwern's is up-front about one thing: communicating content clearly.

That said, a prospective employer may very well be more swayed by "the shiny": while I would deem that in poor judgement, I may be in a minority, so these other sites could be more likely to get you hired in practice.


I must say http://acko.net is easily the most impressive personal site I've visited.

This is mine: https://ruph.in It's something I threw together recently, but it's still missing some content. I like the style though :)


Your website throw an error in ff: Polymer is not a function ;)


I'm not even sure if it's cross browser compatible. I literally threw it together in an hour using the assets I made for one of my side projects: https://overwebs.ruph.in

I'm pretty sure that one works in Firefox and Chrome at least. It's also considerably more developed :)


Throws a lot of js errors in FF 49 on Fedora 24 as well.

Kinda interesting contrast when you link the website you admire along with your own website. The admired website worked great with or without noscript while yours didn't work at all.


It's also broken on mobile


FYI, it neither site works in Firefox 49, which is the latest stable version as of writing this.


The size of the headshot on personal websites exhibits a strong correlation (P=0.01) with narcissism.


Designing a personal website can be an interesting learning experience and an engaging creative act expressing a strong sense of aesthetic judgment and philosophy. On the other hand, there's something to be said for not overcooking the pudding and just giving the user what they're likely to be looking for.

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/

http://norvig.com/

http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/


I feel like "wall of text and no modern styling" works better if you're already a world famous researcher (or if you're Y Combinator).


A wall of text is often the simplest thing that might work: e.g. Twitter, StackOverflow, Reddit, Whatsapp, blogs, email, SMS.

Sure, nobody else is Knuth. Redesigning a personal website with scrolling text and the blink attribute won't change that in an important way.


Daniel Johnson's blog is hard to beat

http://www.hexahedria.com/

Stephen Wittens' site is another that comes to mind

https://acko.net/


+1 for https://acko.net/ It excels at presenting the subject matter.


Is the play button below the header on acko.net meant to do something? The WebGL header works fine for me, but that play button doesn't seem to do anything.


Hexhedria just reminds me of BlogSpot


It seems like a lot of these are very promotional - using a lot of superlatives to describe the person, and all of their work/accomplishments. Is this necessary? I feel very uncomfortable doing that sort of thing, it feels cringey I guess.


Sadly, shameless self-promotion works. It gets you hired, it advances your career, and it opens up doors to great opportunities. The talented hacker with just a standard resume that lists their projects and results will always get passed over for the self-promoter with mediocre output who glosses it up with superlatives and bullshit, blogs about himself every week and has 10K twitter followers.


Saying this is "sad" is the same thing as saying it's sad that marketing or sales have to exist. Not everything knows about everything that's out there. You have to tell them. That doesn't make the act of telling them bad or dirty.

As someone progresses in their career, their job is as much about selling the business or their boss on the direction they want to go as it is writing good code or architecting good systems. If your idea of a great website showcasing your work is a 12pt. Times New Roman list of GitHub links, what does that say about your ability to progress beyond stubbing out interfaces all day?


I'm afraid Xcelerate has shown us that hacker news readers' ego allows this sort of thread to get to the #1 page...


Totally agree with you. I struggle to write a bio for companies I work for, can't imagine dedicating an entire website just to memorialize myself.


It does seem to me that if one of the great virtues of a programmer is laziness then too much self-promotion is a resume smell. But then again, it seems to be the nature of the game for the foreseeable future.


These two, by Jack Qiao: http://jack.works/ http://jack.ventures/

These sites have set the standard of beautiful personal website for me. Despite their modern appearances, they're both just static sites, generated with bash: https://github.com/Jack000/Expose


https://acko.net

A jaw-dropping website by Steven Wittens that pushes the boundaries of what your browser can do. Nothing I've seen has ever topped this wizardry.

(You should view it on desktop, with WebGL capability.)


I didn't see what was so special. You will need to enable javascript if you have that disabled. [Edit: with javascript it's cool the first time but if I want to read an article I don't need the animation every time...]

I only read one article but it was really well written and presented.

[re-edit] I was not being dismissive or negative. Since I didn't have JS enabled I didn't know I was missing anything. This site (unlike many) was functional without JS (which is what should happen IMO). Only after a second look did I think to enable JS to see there was more to it.


I'm not sure why this comment is receiving downvotes, unless those downvoters have not read past the first 7 words - it's fair, complimentary, and points out one very important thing:

> This site (unlike many) was functional without JS

While I don't echo hfsktr's views on not seeing what's special - Steven Wittens' work is mindblowing - but I think the fact he has a site that is so Javascript-centric in content, while also being so perfectly functional and rich without, is doubly commendable.


Honestly, what did you expect from browsing this thread with JavaScript disabled?


I browse all sites with javascript disabled by default. I didn't know what to expect in this thread as I'm not a designer and hold none of those skills. I thought maybe the sites would be more about the content of the project than the design.


Then look at the article about how acko.net was built. You'll want JS active, since like all of his work, it's usefully interactive.

https://acko.net/blog/zero-to-sixty-in-one-second/


I plan on visiting many articles on the site. The one I did read was pretty long (even this one is long to me) so if they are all that long it will be a slow process but I liked what I saw.


No need for JavaScript to make a good website.


Normally I would agree but in this case JavaScript serves its purpose.


If I saw this linked from a resume, I'd throw the resume out. The projects are impressive and I haven't spent enough time with the essays to evaluate their technical merits, but the anti-harassment-policy rant is like a giant, blinking "DO NOT HIRE ME" sign. I wouldn't want this guy anywhere near my team.


Yes, yes, yes, it's always the same. Misrepresent well-cited arguments as rants, shoo people away with vague insinuations, and discredit the author from afar. All in the name of the "safety" and "diversity" of a narrow and pampered demographic. It's a tired old playbook.

In the 3 years since I published it, the heads-on-pikes brigade hasn't slowed down, with Crockford being the latest target of a sanctioned witch hunt on the elusive cis white man, based on purely misquoted, imaginary offense. It failed spectacularly with LambdaConf, where people with actual jobs raised a handy $40+k to allow a programming conference to remain politically neutral in the face of a very loud and entitled minority.

So don't worry, you won't see my resume. Outside of the bubble of west coast web tech, there's a whole industry where people with real skills are never out of a job.


Here's the deal: I disagree with this guy about a lot of things. I'm not going to address them one-by-one in a comment on a three year old piece. It's not my responsibility to write an essay about what precisely I think is wrong with a piece that I think demonstrates sexist attitudes every time I see one. There are a lot of them out there and they often repeat the same things. I used to spend a lot of time hunting down and refuting bad arguments, only to see them come up over and over again - I've realized there are much better things I could do with my fairly limited time and spare mental energy than that.

My original comment wasn't addressed to him. This thread was started by somebody asking about how to build a personal website for potential employers to evaluate them by. Even though the author isn't applying to work for me, I'm going to talk about his site from my perspective as an employer, in terms of how I'd evaluate it if he were applying to work for me because that's what's useful in this thread. I'm going to describe this guy in a kind of subjective, hypothetical sense - I know essentially nothing about him, other than that I've seen his website and now he's responded to my comment, so all I can offer is the impression I've formed as a potential employer and let the reader draw their own conclusions. My impression is hardly going to be unique here, or limited to some bubble (contrary to the "west coast tech web" guess, I'm writing from the infamously liberal state of Texas).

I value technical skills, but I also value how well people work in a team and how they contribute to the culture at my company. Red flags in the social skills area can absolutely trump impressive technical skills - I've seen too many situations where a skilled employee whose behavior is toxic in context has destroyed a team's ability to work together and finish projects, ultimately driving other people off. Their individual contributions might have been high, but their effect on the company was net negative.

Certain parts of his essay strongly suggest that he wouldn't be a good fit at my company. The overall vibe I get is that there are going to be cases where if someone has a problem with something he says, he's going to interpret them as being being hyper-sensitive or too PC or something. Everybody I've ever met with that attitude has been bad news. They're the sort of people with a much bigger problem: they really don't think that they should be held responsible for the effects that their words and actions have on the people around them. It shows up in complaints about "safety" and "sensitivity", in always siding with the guy caught on the wrong side of a harassment policy and it shows up in other work habits. The "I should be free to do my thing and if you don't like it, that's your problem" attitude stops working the moment their thing isn't what works best for the team.

Of course, it's not always the case that you're to blame for other people having problems with you. There are always going to be trolls on the internet, and even in workplace situations where we all have common interests and good reasons to get along, you're going to encounter people having a bad day, or interpreting things wrong or whatever. What matters is your reconciliation process. If you're saying or doing something that somebody takes issue with, I need your first response to be to trying to see what you could do to improve the situation, not rolling your eyes and bemoaning the sensitivity of a "pampered minority". One of those is constructive and the other isn't.

Perhaps ironically, in my experience the people who complain about hyper-sensitivity in the workplace are the most likely to instigate problems by reacting badly to something that doesn't need to be a conflict. For example, they will say or do something, and someone else will express that they disagree with it, or they were hurt by it, and the first person will cry "witch hunt" and interpret this as a kind of persecution. Often it doesn't take anything beyond even insinuating a negative sentiment. That's the kind of thing going on when Trump claims that the media is slandering him when they've merely quoted him disapprovingly (sometimes without comment).

My first reaction was that this guy's interpretation of the "shametweet" demonstrated this kind of thinking, because honestly being quoted with implied disagreement is not being persecuted - but upon further thought, he's right that people can use that kind of thing to aggressively sic their troll-ish followers on someone. At the same time, his response to my comment threw up some red flags. What I did was point out that he'd posted an essay and that its contents were a bad sign to potential employers like me. In a comment addressed toward someone asking about how employers view personal websites, I mentioned that his website gave me a bad impression, and I implied that I disagreed with him. Having seen this implied disagreement, he had many options for how to respond - letting it go would be chief among them in my playbook. How he chose to respond was to imply that I'm part of the "heads-on-pikes brigade", trying to discredit him and misrepresent him.

It's hard to find where I had space to misrepresent him, other than my subjective judgment of the tone of his essay as a "rant" - he'd done a fine job of representing himself without my help. So far he's represented himself as the kind of guy who interprets an implied disagreement and personal judgment as persecution. When I see that, I imagine someone who's going to interpret being disagreed with as being attacked in other situations. That kind of adversarial attitude is tolerated or even seen as healthy at some companies, but it's a big red flag for me. I could definitely be wrong, but I'll pass without finding out the hard way.

If you're reading this and thinking that the take-away message is "don't post potentially controversial stuff on your personal website" - that's absolutely not what I'm saying. I actually encourage people to post things that they care about that not everyone is going to see positively - insofar as you're trying to find a good fit, you're doing yourself and your potential employers a favor. As an employer, I don't want to hire people that would be a bad fit and unless you're just desperate to pay the bills next month, as someone seeking employment, you don't want to work at a company that's a bad fit for you either. Seeing an essay like that meant that I could determine that quickly and we don't have to go through the painful process of figuring it out later.


> So far he's represented himself as the kind of guy who interprets an implied disagreement and personal judgment as persecution. When I see that, I imagine someone who's going to interpret being disagreed with as being attacked in other situations.

> If I saw this linked from a resume, I'd throw the resume out …like a giant, blinking "DO NOT HIRE ME" sign. I wouldn't want this guy anywhere near my team.

Have you tried reading your own words back to yourself? It's terribly embarrassing.


> it's not my responsibility to write an essay

> there are much better things I could do with my limited time

> letting it go would be chief among them in my playbook

2+2=5


The very red flags you're raising against Wittens I would raise against you for your essay rant here. I can imagine your keyboard received quite the bashing as you pounded that out.


Why is that? I only skimmed the post, but it seems to me he's making a rational argument (and even complains about people wanting to shut down discussion in the first paragraph). Isn't our current "I'm not going to touch gender issues with a ten foot pole for fear of being retaliated against" stance regrettable?


When you make a statement like this, you should also mention which company you are managing the hiring process for so people who disagree with these anti-meritocratic and anti-freedom measures know where not to apply. Saves everybody's time.


http://jon.gold/


http://www.jon.gold/txt/ - his text site is also fantastic.


This looks horrible on my mobile device :(


It simulates a desktop OS UI so I don't see how it could really be useful on mobile.


It would probably work OK if it rearranged to be a bit more like an old PDA interface.


http://davidmiranda.info/

  from scratch, no css framework
  responsive
  portrait by alisabishop.com
i'd love feedback!

edit: feel free to use it as a template for your own site! https://github.com/panphora/davidmirandainfo


This is the first one in this thread I find visually appealing :)

edit: I guess I should put my money where my mouth is, but I took down my portfolio site and redirect to a project specific one: https://doomtroopergame.com so that's all I have at the moment.


Very snappy and looks great on mobile and desktop. I'm no designer but I also like the typography, the text is very readable and there's just the right amount of negative space. And content-wise, it's an impressive list of skills and projects.

Nice work!


Definitely my favorite one. Most of the others I clicked on were very gimmicky.


Design is entirely personal preference. Therefore information-first is a good bet if you want to absorb as large of a demographic as possible. Keep the layout and page design simple. Load times should be fast or nearly instant for that sleek professional feel.

Minimalist modern design, sans any kind of framework (like Bootstrap for example) is the name of the game.


Fast, "simple" and minimalist are hard things to do right.

People spend their lives studying things like typography and design. There's a lot of value there and its NOT entirely a matter of taste. Tossing out a framework means you're wading out into hit or miss territory and creating a lot more work for yourself.

Knuth/Norvig/Kernigan can easily get away with naked HTML (although I see that Knuth has really gone bonkers and added a short stanza of css).

Normal folks who dare create a website will fare better if they stand on some shoulders for their visual styling.


http://natwelch.com is mine, I use it more as a cover letter to try and get people to contact me. It works somewhat well.

I love looking at people's personal sites though. I've got a small index of them from over the years at http://pinboard.in/u:icco/t:personal.


For your age timer, you should use a mono-spaced font so it doesn't jump around like that.


http://quartermaester.info/

It's an interactive Game of Thrones map. It shows you where everyone is at a given time. You select who you want to track, drag through time and the character path trails show up on the map. The interface is genius, best I've seen for messing around with (thing, place, time) triples.


Man page formatting for the win, no bull shit:

http://hergert.me


I've been running my personal projects website ( http://www.michalpaszkiewicz.co.uk ) for just over 2 years and I get a job offer almost every week (not just the typical spamming recruiters, but startup owners who said they liked my work). I'm also pretty certain I got my current job due to the fact I could impress my interviewers with my open source code. My design isn't great but what counts is the amount of material that is out there and how good it is. I'm not looking for design jobs, so my lack of design skills doesn't matter.


Your website doesn't open without a www.


Nice one! Should be fixed now. Thanks :)


791 on gnomes and salamanders ;)


Hey, I want some feedback too!


Simple and Functional: http://andrew.hedges.name/

A horrible website for horrible people (in the style of CAH): http://jefflombard.com/

(full disclaimer last one is my own site, anyone is welcome to clone it, it's based off of cards against humanity and available under creative commons: https://github.com/jefflombard/jefflombard.com)


I'm surprised no one has posted about Andrej Karpathy.

http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/


http://bellard.org :) Content wins.


I take this over worrydream.com any day.


fabrice: casually cites ffmpeg, qemu and tcc

most people: THIS NEW AWESOME JS ROUTING FRAMEWORK BY ME (last commit: 3 hours ago)


Mine, for UI/UX design: https://evanwknight.com


This is awesome. I love the wireframe animations at the top. And your projects are presented is a simple but appealing way. Hard to pull off!


This looks great! I love the cleanliness of it, as well as the consistent design language and the buttons.


Great work. Simple and fast, lets the work shine.


http://www.bellard.org/


http://louis.merlin.family

Kept it minimal :)


I think you should remove (future) from your subheader. You've demonstrated that you are a software engineer already from your 'What I coded' section so you're selling yourself short.


This.


"Pomo Space" reads like something else, especially in the font you use :-|


When I did put myself in potential recruiters shoes, I came up with this one page drawing to quickly showcase what I am and what I know

http://www.rsudhakar.in/assets/professional-me.jpg

It was even helpful to kickstart conversations in meetups / other technical gatherings


Great idea!


I feel like a lot of people in this thread show very flashy websites. But honestly, if your work is decent, some people will notice regardless of how you present it. Since you ask this question, I doubt you'd make your website total crap.

Most of the time more people e.g.: watch my github page: http://github.com/wkoszek page than my real website http://www.koszek.com since its harder to find you on a separate website. This is unless you market it.

To summarise: enter the http://cr.yp.to/ and see how good the content is and how you're ok with no form too, if content is outstanding.


Agreed, http://cr.yp.to/ is a triumph of minimalism, and the best trailing argument to `wget --mirror` you'll probably ever find.


I saw one on here that I've bookmarked and have been using pretty frequently. Great for getting a file over to a group of people I think. I used it once for myself as well, pretty neat!

https://destructible.io


I love this one: http://mrdoob.com/

I've just updated my blog and would appreciate any feedback https://trengrj.net/


https://myhikes.org

This is a site I built for myself, friends, and the public; however, I haven't promoted it much... Trying to get more users, but it's been under construction for a while. Nothing fancy, but I wanted to build something that was free for users.

Also to the poster: side projects are great, showing off your pet project is awesome, but I can say that a lot of employers don't even care to look at them... I cannot speak for ALL employers, but a lot of the time interviewers and employers don't have the time to poke around in your side projects - they're very busy too. It's kind of a shame


http://blog.soulshake.net/2016/04/command-line-resume/

    curl cv.soulshake.net


Wow, love this!


I am a graduate student with similar goals (though already have a job)

Here is my site:

http://www.akshaybhat.com

I optimized it for following:

0. Responsive

1. Easy to understand layout

2. Images to highlight projects

3. A professional picture.

4. Contact & email information.

Don't bother fighting email collecting bots, they already have billions of them due to breaches and most likely yours if it appears on Have I Been Pwned. Rather I recommend optimizing on usability and making it easier for human reader to send you an email.

Note: The design looks slightly different on desktop and mobile. E.g. on desktop it loads institution logos and uses a two columns or efficient use of the space.


If I could offer some advice, there are a few minor grammatical errors in your bio. Maybe have someone cast their eyes over it to show you some things you could change.


thanks, can you point out any specific ones. I tried finding but didn't find any obvious ones.


I happen to like my own. Go figure. http://samsarajs.org

It's a UI library for animating 3D web stuff, so it should look pretty. Suggestions to improve are welcome!


Top 3rd looks good, below that could be more interesting.


Like many of before me, I'll share my own website (currently in redesign, so I'll provide links via internet archive) - built in Nanoc3, hosted on github pages:

Main page: https://web.archive.org/web/20150801213611/http://lukaszkups...

Experience page: https://web.archive.org/web/20150826004819/http://lukaszkups...

About page: https://web.archive.org/web/20150826004912/http://lukaszkups...

Contact page: https://web.archive.org/web/20150826004918/http://lukaszkups...

Blog page: https://web.archive.org/web/20150826004935/http://lukaszkups...

I will release new design next week, based on brand-new static site generator ;)


Lektor?


no, I've written own one (while learning some stuff around Node.js) - INKU (still in progress / early beta - even official website is not ready yet) - repo: https://github.com/lukaszkups/inku


Sarah Federman - http://sarah.codes/

Sarah Drasner - http://sarahdrasnerdesign.com/

Assume whoever looks at your portfolio is going to scroll from top to bottom first, get a first impression, then _maybe_ click through things later.

So build for the question "What do I want people to see if they scroll through my site without clicking on anything?"


> So build for the question "What do I want people to see if they scroll through my site without clicking on anything?"

The home page of the first site could literally fit all of its quickly parseable informational content with no scrolling required and without being too dense (on a desktop - minimal scrolling would be needed on mobile).

Does anyone really enjoy looking at seemingly-random large background images while trying to pick out the isolated islands of text as they scroll - complete with shifting brightness/contrast? I used to think not, but it's becoming so prevalent I begin to think I'm in the minority.

Pictures convey a lot of information, but (IMO) people don't want a lot of information when first visiting a place - they want an overview that they can digest quickly, and they want to be able to drill deeper for more details. Images.

Pictures also take a lot more time to process - it was three passes through the site you linked before I realized that the pictures were actually showing (through pictures of devices...) examples of her work - I was there for information, but didn't realize some of that information was png-encoded.

Some of her work looks quite good - but if I weren't paying extra attention for purposes of writing this, I would have never seen it.


Hey, you guys found my old website! It's in sore need of some upkeep, I haven't touched it since the week I built it when I was in school :(

I understand what you're getting at re:scan-nability and info denseness, but I believe that is what a resume for. I'm not trying to use my website as a resume, I'm trying to establish a digital presence and show off my work. If I weren't a designer and front end person, having an online resume might be the goal, but this is a portfolio.

It has many problems that I hope to fix, but using visual aides are not one of them :) Anyways, thanks for taking the time to look at it. I adore Sarah Drasner's work too, she's one of my favorite people!


Thanks for the reply and the additional context. I hadn't considered that from the perspective of why you're showing what you're showing. Naturally design is visual, and difficult to show effectively using small chunks of text.

(But my feelings on scroll allthethings remain unchanged :D )


Sara Soueidan's is pretty great - https://sarasoueidan.com/ - especially the speaking section. She's amazing generally though, so it's quite a high bar!

I had some good feedback on mine as well - https://tim.fyi - and I'm pretty happy with it (love to hear what other people think too though). After the intro though, it's more about highlighting recent specific projects and talks and articles, rather than acting as a full CV. Sounds like that might be what you're going for?

If I were you, I'd keep it simple. Go for a short simple intro that highlights what you're about, a two or three sentence summary of what you've done and what you're good at, and then keep the body as something that gives more of a feel of what you're about and up to right now. Links to blog articles, things you're tweeting about etc.

You can provide an actual CV for people who want to dig into the details of your list of achievements and research in more detail, but if this is the first place people hear about you and it's your personal site, then a sense of personality and active things going on is more important imo.


Website did nothing for me.


Comment did nothing for me.

Come on, you can do better than this. You're wasting your own time more than anyone else's with these sorts of comments.

To GP: Your website is just okay (on mobile). I recommend getting rid of the carousel since they're generally useless UX-wise and in this case it also repeats content with the feed below it. Not a big fan of the typefaces, but it is "approachable" if that's what you're going for. I'd get rid of the shadows on text and personally I don't think the boxes behind every feed item is totally necessary. The content without the cards behind it looks fine to me!

Also maybe making the medium/github/etc links stand out a bit more (on mobile they're overlaid on your picture). They look a bit decorative but in fact seem quite important for users to notice.

EDIT: Looked at it on desktop: The cards seem to make more sense, but not a fan of the background photo (just a bit dated). I also see now that the carousel content isn't completely duplicated, but I'd still advocate swapping it out for a single highlighted project – your magnum opus – that you dive into more extensively. Just to offset the deluge of information that's in the feeds below. Cool site! Tasteful blues and shadows goin' on.


Going by what I do, the answer to your question is a bit problematic. I don't work on projects for others, I work on them for myself, and merely like showing them to others, so I'm bad at keeping a list of everything in one place and up-to-date.

That said, I did try to create a single page of some of my projects so people can look at them more easily: https://www.stavros.io/projects/

The other day I also decided to give my resume some love, so I created a single page with side-projects I believe to be worthy of mention: http://resume.stavros.io/

Maybe those two will give you some idea. I've scrolled through some of the other responses in this thread, but I'm not sure I like the project sites that are tech demos themselves. They seem to conflate "optimizing the listing of projects" with "optimizing showing a project". Most of the linked sites are great tech demos, but very bad at getting me to click on the actual posts themselves. Then again, maybe mine is worse.


I suppose opinions differ, but I like things where content is king, and these are excellent:

http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/

http://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/

https://ludens.cl/Index.html


A few that I've bookmarked for such purposes:

http://www.pascalvangemert.nl/

http://johanbrook.com/

http://dustandmold.net/


A personal project website that's a personal project in itself.


I personally built a small blog engine, with a subset of features from Jekyll, which can generate blog posts and home page out of markdown. It was definitely a project on its own.


I'm doing something very similar to this currently!


A blog about stuff you worked on and challenged you tackled will be more than enough for potential employer.

Not sure if it fits the context but have a look at Matthias Noback website http://php-and-symfony.matthiasnoback.nl/


http://elm-chan.org

A one man hardware & software powerhouse. He is an old-school EE in Japan and his personal projects are astounding in breadth and depth.

His SD Card and FFT libraries are classics. His hand wired SMT circuits are works of art.


Also posting own website: https://harishnarayanan.org/

As the original poster, I too have been through many years of grad school. I have not needed to interview for jobs, and believe my website has sold me well.


Something useful, indeed.

Perhaps a teaching-focused site that explicates all the tips and tricks you've gleaned about atomic microscopy. Maybe featuring a WebGL microscope simulator. And extensive Youtube tutorials for beginners.

Or a data bank. Resources that would appeal to researchers rather than students. Modelled after something like the Electron Microscopy Data Bank:

http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pdbe/emdb/

Your goal is simply to convey that when it comes to this particular characterization technique, you're the world's #1 expert. Not so different than the inbound-style, content-rich influencer marketing all of us are seeking to master here ;)

Good luck!


http://spritesmods.com/

Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but its simple and clicking through any project makes me to want to work with and/or hire him immediately.


The content is great (and probably famous on HN), but I find the website itself is really not optimal:

- When reducing the width of your window, you obtain some layout disaster

- There are those weird pages containing only one sentence

- The articles are often split into many little pages, which I find pretty useless, and only makes it slightly more difficult to navigate.


I guess I can post my own, although there's not that many projects on there: http://iheanyi.com

Also feel free to peep my old one: http://iheanyi.github.io. I didn't like this one because it was too image heavy, but I did like the layout of case studies better in this iteration than in my new one.

And I guess another old iteration I was using when I was looking in college: http://old.iheanyi.com. Yeah, I know. I re-design my website a lot.


Creating an account just to post this (it's not mine): http://www.rleonardi.com/interactive-resume/


You beat me to it. When I saw the this Ask HN, the first thing that came to my mind was this website. It was widely covered in blogs a while back. Very impressive!

It always reminds me of super Mario.


Here is the ideal of what every site should look like:

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

edit: Seriously, why does a site need to be like a fucking pop-up book?!


Couldn't agree more.


I've always liked Bret Victor's site, due in no small part to the amazing content: http://worrydream.com/


Here's a cool little corner of the web from the cyberpunk crowd, reminiscent of geocities.

http://fauux.neocities.org/


Interesting how this question is becoming a source of examples for personal website!

Mine: http://www.goncalves.me

Some nice ones on top of my head:

* http://victorfern91.github.io/

* http://www.rleonardi.com/interactive-resume/

* http://jon.gold/


I'm posting my own too:

http://javier.xyz/

It's an auto updated portfolio with my github, dribbble, and some other social networks.


Though not a 'personal website' per se, I've been in contact with the creator / host and it was most definitely a 'Personal Project' mating technology skills with a purpose, and I believe it's one of the finest executions of the sort that I've used in recent memory. I genuinely think it's a great reflection of the talent of the creator:

http://www.scriptrevolution.com

Disclaimer: I use the site


One of the ones I really like is http://www.find70.com It's a great way to find your first customers, business partners and affiliates. It's an advanced form of twitter search that let's you target accounts based on their bios and many other filters, including contact info: email/phone number, follower count, location, etc. Disclaimer: I created it. Let me know what you think.


@@@@ Self Promotion Disclaimer @@@@

I think my personal site is a very nice minimal site: https://cmp.is/

I strive to have as little js/css as possible. Currently only has Google Analytics and whatever Cloudflare wants to stick in there. I have to simplify the CSS to the bare basics eventually. I use Hugo to build the site and I get to post many different kinds of posts like links, notes, and real full posts.


Inline your CSS to make it leaner.

Probably drop that custom font too, they are all render blocking.

About the CF's js in the head: probably you have some apps enabled (smart errors?).

You can disable it.


Yea I tried to disable the CF stuff, but I'm not sure which setting I'm forgetting.

Yea, I'm thinking about dropping the font so it loads even faster. I do like it, but I can always just specify it as a font to use if it's there.

I'm gonna see how much I can inline to speed it up, but I'm not sure how manageable that'll be with Hugo. I guess I'll just try that in a branch for now.


http://kbhat.rocks is my landing page. Rather than dump all my info on this page, it links to my blog and other things I'd like to share.

I got this up after getting my job offer in place, but for now I'm happy with it. One thing that's missing is my resume, but for me that's application-specific and I'd rather have people ask for it than display a fixed version.

Feel free to critique, HN!


I like it, simple, (obviously) quick to load, and easy to visually follow as well.

One piece of browser feedback: on my Firefox, when I zoom in above 100% (to even just 120%), part of the text (say, your email ID) vanishes beneath the page, and scrolling only scrolls your image on the right, not the text.

And talking about email, it might be better to move the email address up a bit, perhaps after the blog link. A lot of folks coming to your personal page are probably going to want to contact you as the next step.

(As a subjective comment, I'm not a fan of the background colour, makes the page feel a bit dull. )

By the way, are you standing on top of an electric transformer in the photo? If so, why???


> I like it, simple, (obviously) quick to load, and easy to visually follow as well.

Thanks!

> One piece of browser feedback: on my Firefox, when I zoom in above 100% (to even just 120%), part of the text (say, your email ID) vanishes beneath the page, and scrolling only scrolls your image on the right, not the text.

I'll try to fix that.

> And talking about email, it might be better to move the email address up a bit, perhaps after the blog link. A lot of folks coming to your personal page are probably going to want to contact you as the next step.

Duly noted, and fixed.

> (As a subjective comment, I'm not a fan of the background colour, makes the page feel a bit dull. )

Agreed; but I didn't want the harsher white, and I'm not sure if I really like any other solid color. Suggestions?

> By the way, are you standing on top of an electric transformer in the photo? If so, why???

Haha, no. This is a pole on top of Mission Peak in California; it's something of a tradition to have a picture taken with/on it. Those holes are meant for looking through, but no one does that. :)


I'll throw two of mine into the mix as well.

Blog: https://axiomatic.neophilus.net Photoblog: https://odyssey.neophilus.net

Particularly happy about the way the photoblog turned out. I think the interactivity of the globe, showing you where photos come from give it an immersive touch that isn't in your face.


Here are a couple of my favorites:

http://okaysamurai.com/portfolio/okaydave2006.html - It was built in Flash over 10 years ago, but the skill and creativity behind it is a force that is absolutely still relevant today.

http://shauninman.com/pendium/


This one isn't about the website (which is basic in the extreme) but the work that is documented on the website - which is a collection of absolutely stunning precision engineering projects:

http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/projects.html

[NB Along with things like the restoration of Navigation and Bombing Computers from UK strategic bombers!].


On the more technical side, some that blow my mind:

Windytan: http://www.windytan.com/ DJ Bernstein: https://cr.yp.to/djb.html Fabrice Bellard: http://bellard.org/


Since people are posting theirs, here's mine: http://chuckdries.rocks

My issue is that I don't have a very impressive resume yet (though I should probably link a PDF of my current resume anyway), so I decided to keep it simple and lightweight but also stylish because I bill myself as the intersection of tech and design.


I have a printable PDF with my resume on it on my own site. It makes it a lot easier to deal with recruiters or smaller agencies when they ask for a resume. You can just send them the link.

It's a good time saver.


simple, hand coded, kind-of responsive, http://www.alvarofeito.com


Blogging is a great way to show off what you know and how you apply it, if you're open to that sort of thing.

I'll humbly say that I'm by no means an academic, but I try to showcase what I know front and center and and let the rest be unraveled by those that are interested on my personal site - https://lacke.mn


I recently designed a template (based on GitHub Pages, Jekyll, and Semantic UI) to support professional portfolio development by my students:

http://techfolios.github.io/

You can see a bunch of examples here:

https://ics-portfolios.github.io/


http://sub.blue/ is an amazing gallery of unique fractal art.


http://traviswingo.com is my personal site.

I built an interactive unix-based terminal to navigate my projects and resume. I'm planning on adding a better layout though since it's been pointed out to me that the people actually looking at my site to hire me won't know what to do with a terminal :p.


I've always enjoyed this one: http://www.jcchhim.com/route/

It is for a visual designer, so obviously the presentation of that work is different than academic/technical research, but it is very clean and simple.

Apparently he is re-doing his portfolio as the main site is just a giant tweet.


This one is pretty awesome. http://jakealbaugh.com/


How about http://www.tittietime.com/

Yes its a tad salicious, but its an interesting technical project.

I have a rather large email list that would be quite expensive to send to with MailChimp, Sendgrid or the like. I've been able to use Amazon SES to send large blasts, daily for next to nothing.

Edit: This is NSFW


This thread has gone from "best project sites you've seen" to "click here for titties".


Blocked by company firewall, probably because of the word "tittie" in the URL.


Probably for good reason :p


I'll throw mine into the mix. Not sure about employers thinking "I need to hire this person", but for me, my personalized dashboard is a nice way to monitor things I'm working on and reflecting on things I've learned.

http://cole-maclean.github.io/


Graph of world history: http://histography.io/


not supporting FF. Now I know what all those folks browsing with javascript disabled feel like.


I like mine :) Simple and speedy (hopefully)

http://www.retu.be/


Yes sir.

5 requests

6.91kb

0.75S

I've always been a big fan of having an absolute minimal number of http requests. This is right up my alley.


5! damn. need to base64 encode those icons


There was a personal site by a guy named Rademacher (sp?) that had apartments on craigslist in San Francisco overlayed on google maps. IIRC, it was a solution to a pet peeve that became really popular. He later formed a company with some other GIS-in-the-browser people that quickly got acquhired by some big tech corp.


https://amdouglas.com

Recently redesigned. It used to be like this:

http://brutalistwebsites.com/amdouglas.uk

(Yes, I know, the new version is not as user friendly, it's not finished yet).


I have a simple website for my Donald Trump text to speech server (written in Rust):

http://jungle.horse

And a simple webpage for my work on laser projector video games:

http://lasers.io

My laser projector work has gotten me hired at a few places. :)


I like Drew Wilson's:

http://drewwilson.com/


I get severe scroll stutter in Chrome on my MBP.


This is truly beautiful! I am definitely using this as inspiration for my next website update!


Catchy & Informative


Very nice.


I ported Caffe models to JavaScript in my free time http://chaosmail.github.io/projects/. however, since I know about Keras.js and it's GPU support, it doesn't seem that fancy anymore.


More self-promotion: https://sinusoid.es/

Built using ClojureScript. Ethernal WIP. https://github.com/arximboldi/sinusoides


https://dbatools.io - started as a solo project, which the lead developer has gotten others involved in. The site is simple, the descriptions of each of the cmdlets (functions) are excellent.

Every open source project needs a site like this.


http://aprilzero.com/

When I first saw this site I was blown away. Sure, the level of detail may be off putting to some people, but even from a purely engineering standpoint it's impressive.

Shoutout to Anand for the incredible work.


huh? it's app dashboard.


https://juokaz.com/

Mine has switchable backgrounds ("Don't like the speaker look? Go with serious, punk, scottish or racing driver."). Many people have commented about this when meeting in person.


Does https://standardresume.co/ meet your needs? It might be a little bit closer to a resume than a website, but it could easily be combined with a more personal single page website.


Bruce Simpson "The low cost cruise missile" http://aardvark.co.nz/pjet/cruise.shtml

Alas, the project was not finished... (the NZ government intervened)


A bit embarrassed about mine but I'd welcome feedback:

http://www.pablodamasceno.com

More a researcher type of site but it also showcases the work I've done, so perhaps it's useful.


Mine is here: http://isaacforman.com.au/

I used a card approach so I can easily add new projects and other items while keeping things responsive without much effort.


You can create a short video with highlights of your work, people seem to digest that easily:

http://www.whitneyland.com/recent-projects.html


Anything that isn't bootstrap, full-screen image or scroll-jack paging is great.


Check out http://bhuvaneshshan.me/

Simple UI so that content is the king! Just 4 main pages but also organizes content in a way a user would like to see!


One of my favorites is Alex MacCaw's site. It's cleanly designed and communicates his achievements clearly.

http://alexmaccaw.com/


Jeremy Kun's blog, Math ∩ Programming: https://jeremykun.com/

He is _super_ smart and his posts often sneak into the homepage here.


My favorite would be https://www.remotepixel.ca, which is both beautiful and full of high quality and useful work.


I haven't seen very many personal project sites I'm afraid, but Neil Cicierega's looks nice:

http://neilcic.com/


I'll share mine: http://cabada.mx

It's a grid of all the "cool" personal projects I've made since I started coding.


I'm biased (this is my husband's website) but I like the conciseness of https://shazow.net/ a lot.


Shameless plug for my own: http://www.johnloeber.com. I designed it for maximal clarity and readability.


Your site gives me a cert error in Chrome: NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID


Shoot, I supplied an HTTPS link when I should have given HTTP.


It's interesting to see how many of the sites (those that are being presented by other than the owners, anyway) are getting crushed by the spike of traffic from HN.


https://mjavascript.com

https://ponyfoo.com


I made a simple one in a style of unsent email: https://valiafetisov.com

Would be glad to hear any feedback!


Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/


A plug for my own! http://nikhilsrivastava.com/

Would love any comments/critiques!


I just made my own, responsive design based on the bootstrap framework.

https://www.webjames.co.uk


Very clean, it looks nice. Has it gotten you any work/connections?

Also I think "TLDR;" in the headings should be "TL;DR"


You may want to consider starting a technical blog. As long as you are okay with doing some work to get some good content on there. I would suggest finding a niche that you like and create an entire blog about it. If you put it right on your resume, they will see you as an expert in the topic. I have a blog just on the topic of SQL Server. Potential employers that use that technology always seem to see that as a good sign that I understand the technology. Furthermore, if you do a technical blog... you are learning more about the topic... which is an added benefit.


This musical toy splash page from me http://georgehenryrowe.co.uk/


I really dislike mine. Don't use it. I am not a web designer.

http://www.jaruzel.com/


This looks decent


Here's mine too, I guess: http://lawrencewu.me/

Would love some honest feedback on it!


I'm not so keen on the .plan files. But looks alright


10 years, 10 provinces, 1 photographer. Ice Fishing Huts in Canada. http://icehuts.ca


http://www.dhteumeuleu.com/

And it was open source before it was cool.


warning: posting my own website https://glebbahmutov.com/

Has links to blog / slides / github and list of GitHub projects with search. Allows people and myself to quickly find something. Getting recruiters' pitches (and occasional hand crafted emails to join teams) every day.


I like this one. https://www.igvita.com/


Stuart Memo: https://stuartmemo.com/


I really like my own, so I'll post it here:

http://rayalez.com


http://zephyrosanemos.com/


http://jetsetradio.live/


Mine is quite different: http://rafael.pt


https://camlistore.org/


https://regex101.com/


http://www.johnbernier.com


I love the style, I am very temped to steal this from you.

Is the link at the top right really necessary though?


> http://leonardofed.io


http://rudrakos.com


http://mdislam.com


Facebook was once a personal project. I would definitely like to hire that person.


No employer is going to take a hiring decision by looking at your personal website.

You know, I've dealt with many clients who ask for flying text, moving pictures and looping videos in their websites. Don't be that client to yourself. When we work with such clients, we usually start probing with lots of WHYs, and the other "W" questions, something in the lines of

- "Why, according to you, do you believe that is the best way of displaying the information?"

- "Why do you believe that all the 5 points are equally important?"

- "Who are your most ideal users?"

etc, etc, etc. We kept probing till it comes down to the simplest, bare-bone answers, at best -- YES or NO. For instance, "YES, the user will need to provide just the email ID and nothing else."

Now, apply that to your own personal website, get down to the simplest core of your personality/quality/characteristics/qualification. Better yet, think of your target industry and come up with a compelling, different take on it and make it interesting for your prospective employer.

One of the biggest mistakes most "providers" make, is talking about themselves, as that is the easiest. Instead, talk of the recipient, be it the employer, the client or the user. They talk of themselves since they everything about themselves more than anyone else, so they stay in that comfort zone. Go, venture to your prospects, focus on them and not you.

Do that, and they will be the one to come to you and "ask you for more." When they start asking for more, the journey forward is easy - now unfold your story, build it up, surprise them. Go on.

The narcissism part:

Personally, I've had people surprised, smiled, and intrigued at conferences, events with my business card[1, 2] and they usually go to my website[3].

1. Front - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1308/photos/business-car...

2. Back - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1308/photos/business-car...

3. https://brajeshwar.me/


I think my personal one came out pretty well :D

https://github.com/Awk34/aksite http://andrewk.me


I dig mine: http://milge.com

It's all client side. Runs on JSON, JS, HTML and CSS. Super cheap to host. I'm mainly documenting my journey into metal fabrication as a programmer.


Inspired by brutalism, I made my website: www.momcilo.xyz


Im also one of 'those' people, i like my own.. https://www.filmitright.co.uk/


Dan, your project sounds cool and interesting. Feedback on the site:

-Don't make us wait so long (so far down on the page) to find out what you're doing. I'd like to see this immediately: "Film it Right is a new and exciting tool created for amateur and independent filmmakers".

-You could move your own pictures and names to the bottom. People tend to first look for a reason to care, then lastly look at who did it.


Wow thanks! I wasn't expecting any feedback, I am however very grateful for yours and I'll make those changes to it.

I will be putting the finished beta version of the website live in the new year. I'd love to hear feedback from you for that as well?


http://dbbd.sg – a personal fav of mine, utilizes design for better content presentation and organization.


That is absolutely amazing.


Coworker. (jbernhard.xyz)[jbernhard.xyz]


I like the simplicity of www.enrad.io


Stack over


paulstamatiou.com


[flagged]


But how else will they break the illusive 10 unique visits in a month?

Seriously though, these threads always end up the same unfortunately. There are 3-4 submissions that match the question, 6-12 that don't actually answer the question but are interesting nonetheless (e.g. someone's very well done and interesting resume/CV website), and 30+ people spamming their own poorly made or cookie cutter site with no useful information.


oh my god these are so ugly lmao, engineers are really not designers...




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