Have you ever felt frustrated by the traditional way of creating a portfolio? Do you feel like you are not able to showcase your personal and professional journey in an engaging and meaningful way? Do you wish you could share more than just a list of your experiences, projects, education, and skills?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you might be interested in MyPortfolio, a web application that I am currently developing. MyPortfolio is a web application that allows users to create personalized portfolios using stories instead of the traditional list-based approach. The main goal of the web application is to enable users to share their personal and professional journeys by narrating stories that highlight their experiences, projects, education, and skills that led them to achieve their goals.
Why Stories?
Stories are powerful tools for communication and persuasion. They can capture the attention of the audience, evoke emotions, and convey messages in a memorable way. Stories can also help us to understand ourselves and others better, as they reveal our motivations, challenges, and achievements.
That is why I decided to use stories as the main element of MyPortfolio. I believe that stories can help users to create more engaging and meaningful portfolios that reflect their unique journeys. Stories can also help users to highlight the most important aspects of their journeys, such as the details that they find interesting, the challenges that they faced, and the skills that they learned or improved.
In MyPortfolio, users can create stories for every single detail of their journeys, without making their portfolios boring or unattractive to the readers. Users can also organize their stories into categories, such as experiences, projects, education, and skills. Users can also link their stories to each other, creating a coherent and comprehensive narrative of their journeys.
How Did I Come Up With the Idea of MyPortfolio?
The idea of MyPortfolio came from my own dissatisfaction with the traditional way of creating a portfolio. I wanted to create something that was more engaging and that allowed me to highlight the most important aspects of my journey. I wanted to create something that would allow me to share my personal and professional journey by narrating stories that highlight my experiences, projects, education, and skills that led me to achieve my goals.
I was inspired by the fact that I love to tell stories and to listen to stories. I think that stories are a great way to connect with people and to express ourselves. I was motivated to start this project because I wanted to create something that would allow me to share my stories with the world and to inspire others to do the same.
What Are the Main Features and Technologies of MyPortfolio?
MyPortfolio is a web application that consists of a Java-based microservices backend hosted in Docker containers and a microfrontend-based frontend using React and Next.js. The database is a SQL DB. The application has different features and functionalities depending on who is using it.
If you are a visitor, you can explore the registered users (professionals) and filter them by some criteria, such as field or skill. You can also see some statistics about the registered users, such as the numbers by field or by skill. You can directly contact a user (for now via email, but in the future there will be a chat embedded in the app).
You can also enter a user profile, read the main story which is the story that describes the user as a person, take a quick look at where the user is working right now, the last education and the last or current project. You can also easily navigate through the user's diary which contains all the experiences/educations/projects and see them as a list or even as an engaging timeline.
You can also enter a single experience/education/project and read related skills and navigate through the related stories.
If you are a registered user, once the project will be complete, you will be able to create your own profile, write your own stories, add your own experiences/educations/projects and add your own skills. You will have a ton of analytics to see if your portfolio is engaging enough and what about it is more interesting. You'll also have a useful AI integration that will help you to write your stories quickly and easily. If you are a company that wants to be able to have multiple persons working on the company's portfolio, you will be able to do so thanks to some cool collaboration features that will allow multiple users to work on the same portfolio.
What Were the Main Challenges and How Did I Overcome Them?
One of the main challenges that I faced while developing MyPortfolio was learning new technologies, new approaches, new architectures and tools. I wanted to use this project as an opportunity to learn and improve my skills as a developer. However, learning new things also meant facing difficulties and uncertainties along the way.
Some of the new things that I learned and used for this project were:
- Spring Boot: a framework for creating Java-based web applications that simplifies the configuration and deployment process.
- React: a library for creating user interfaces using components that can be reused and composed.
- Next.js: a framework for creating React-based web applications that supports server-side rendering, static site generation, and dynamic routing.
- Microservices: an architectural style that divides a complex application into smaller, independent, and loosely coupled services that communicate with each other through APIs.
- Microfrontends: an architectural style that divides a complex frontend into smaller, independent, and loosely coupled components that can be developed and deployed separately.
- Docker: a platform that allows to create, run, and share applications using containers that isolate the application from the underlying environment.
- SQL: a language for managing data in relational databases.
To learn how to use these technologies, approaches, architectures and tools, I followed online tutorials, courses, blogs, and documentation. I also looked at some examples and projects that used them. I tried to understand the concepts, the benefits, and the drawbacks of each one. I also experimented with them by creating small prototypes and testing them. I learned from my mistakes and improved my code quality and performance. I also used some tools and practices that helped me to manage and monitor my development process, such as GitHub, Maven and Postman.
Learning new things was challenging but also rewarding. I enjoyed the process of discovering new possibilities and creating new solutions. I also gained more confidence and competence as a developer. I think that learning new things is essential for any developer who wants to keep up with the fast-changing and evolving world of technology.
What Are the Main Goals and Next Steps for MyPortfolio?
The main goal of MyPortfolio is to enable users to share their personal and professional journeys by narrating stories that highlight their experiences, projects, education, and skills that led them to achieve their goals. I want to create a web application that is engaging, meaningful, and useful for both the users who create their portfolios and the users who visit them. I want to create a web application that can help users to connect with each other, to learn from each other, and to inspire each other.
The next steps or improvements that I want to make for MyPortfolio are to implement all the missing parts related to the registered users. Another next step that I want to make is to start talking about this project online. Until now, it was more like something that I wasn't sure to be able to complete, but now that I'm almost done with it, I want to start sharing it with the world and get some feedback from other people. I want to know what other people think about my project, what they like and what they don't like, what they suggest and what they criticize. I want to use their feedback to improve my project and to make it better. I also hope that my project can inspire other people to create their own portfolios using stories and to share their own journeys with the world. 🌍
