Talk is Cheap
August 2, 2011
I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn and Stackoverflow Carrers but there has been something bugging me about both sites for a while.
They are all talk…
Before you drive by my house and throws eggs at me, please allow me to explain.
Both of these sites have been huge for my IT career. I’ve made some great connections with people on both sites and have had great career opprotunities as a result of my information being publically available. So what the heck am I complaining about?
How about I explain it with a picture?
This is a screen-shot of a section of my LinkedIn profile. What does this tell you? I’m a software contractor that builds SaaS applications and that I’m the co-founder of a tech startup. Well that’s great and all but what have I done? When I say my role at SideBox is application architecture or product design, what does that really tell the reader?
##Words
It’s one thing if your resume says “creator of Ruby on Rails”. That’s clearly self explaintory who that person is and what he is capable of.
When I look at profiles like the example above they are just words. They only tell part of the story. In some cases, they aren’t accurate descriptions of a persons skill-set, rather they just prove that they can write well, or had help fluffing-up their resume.
Here is a fun example. Let’s say that I write on my resume that I have advanced experience building interactive and responsive internet applications. Sounds nice right? But what happens when you hire me and this is what I deliver for you:
picture from http://www.lingscars.com/
##Visual
This is why I built Tekfolio.me - a place for programmers (or designers, or pm’s, or photographers, or anyone) to build an online visual portfolio of the interesting things they have worked on.
After all, wouldn’t you rather see something like this that complemented my resume:
Tekfolio.me is a place for you to post screen-shots, wireframes, and working examples of projects that you have worked on. You can post links to working examples, source code repositories, and related blog entries that further complement your work. Also, you can add assets to your potfolio with lengthy descriptions of each image. For example, in this iPhone application, I felt it was important to show several screen-shots of the different views I created within the iPhone application.
##Why
Before I went down this path, I searched and search for existing cloud based online portfolios. Just about everything I found, and there are some great ones, are taylored to just designers and photographers. That’s great but what about coders? Not everyone has 1,000 follower on GitHub.
Don’t get me wrong. LinkedIn and StackOverflow have made huge advances in destroying the traditional concept of the resume. Integrations like GitHub are perfect examples of this. Tekfolio.me is not a resume site, does not compete with resume sites, and doesn’t plan on replacing resume sites. Tekfolio.me complements your career with real visual examples!
Please feel free to view my profile on Tekfolio. I’m going to add several more projects over the next few days so please bookmark and refresh.
The site is in private beta, sort of. It’s my friendly way of saying hey, I’m solo on this project so please allow me to work out some of the kinks here and there. If you’d like your own Tekfolio.me account, please drop me a line at billy@tekfolio.me and I’ll help you get started. Pro-tip, you can just click the sign-in link and create a new account with out the email. Go for it, I don’t mind ;)
Like the idea? Have ideas of your own you want to share? Is my perfect software buggy? Please post your feedback here.