From Josh Comeau

Intro

• High-level summary of what the project is
• List of core functionalities / interesting features
• Your role in the project. were you exclusively doing development, or did you do design? If you worked in groups, what parts did you tackle?
• Technologies used
• Links to live demo + source code (if applicable)

Purpose & Goal

• Why did you build this project? Why is it important to you
• What was the expected outcome of the project?
• What were the initial designs?
• Any other preliminary planning that you did which helps build a narrative

Spotlight

• What is the “killer feature” of your project? What feature does it have that took the most work, or was the most technically impressive? Some possible examples:

  • User authentication
  • A feed of items fetched from a database
  • A particularly tricky UI element (eg. autocomplete, calendar, drag-and-drop)
  • Anything you’re proud of!

• What were the technical hurdles that got in your way? Any major problems you hit during development?

• How did you solve those problems? What was the solution? Go deep here, and write with a developer in mind.

Current Status

• This section is optional. If the project is actively being used by real people, talk a little bit about the current status, who uses it, why they use it, what they say to you about it, stuff like that.
• If the project was contrived specifically for the portfolio, omit this section.

Lessons Learned

• What did you learn doing this project? Feel free to list multiple things. Also feel free to cover non-technical lessons. It’s great to talk about how you learned to use an advanced feature of a framework or library, but it’s just as valuable to talk about project-management experience, or things you learned about shipping projects.
• If you used a framework or other libraries/tools, was it a good choice? How did it help? In which ways was it insufficient?
• Is your project accessible? What did you learn about accessibility, while building this project? Describing how you tested your project using keyboard navigation or a screen- reader can make for a really compelling story!
• How has this affected the work you’ve done since then? Real examples of how this project built your knowledge for future projects is fantastic.

If you have screenshots of your project (or photos of the process, eg early sketches), you should sprinkle them around this page. Weave them into the narrative, use them to highlight the things you’re talking about in the text.