How to build a developer portfolio in 3 minutes (without GitHub Pages)

4 min read

The standard advice for a developer portfolio is to spin up GitHub Pages. It is free, you own every line, and you get to show off that you can build a site by hand. All true. It is also the reason a lot of devs have a half-finished portfolio sitting on a subdomain they have not touched in eight months.

Why GitHub Pages stalls people

None of the steps are hard on their own. You clone a template, fight the Jekyll or Next config for a bit, buy a domain, point the DNS, wait for it to propagate, then realize the template still needs real design work before you would show it to anyone. Each step is twenty minutes. Together they are a weekend you keep pushing to next weekend.

And once it is live, it rots. Dependencies go stale. The design starts to look like 2021. You ship a new project and never get around to adding it. The portfolio that was supposed to sell you quietly works against you.

What a portfolio actually needs

Strip it back to what a recruiter or another dev wants in the minute they spend on you:

• One line on who you are and what you build
• Three to six projects, each with a screenshot and a link
• Your stack
• Links to GitHub, X, and wherever else you live online

That is the whole job. It is not a hand-tuned CSS grid you stayed up until 1am perfecting. The grid is fun to build and almost nobody looking at your work will notice it.

The faster path

Sign in with GitHub and your repos come in. Drop a screenshot on the ones worth showing, write a sentence each, publish. The page lives at aksara.so/yourname. No build step, no DNS, no SSL to renew, nothing to maintain. When you ship something new, you add it in about thirty seconds.

You get the page that sells you without the weekend that never happens.

When GitHub Pages still makes sense

To be fair: if your portfolio is the project, build it by hand. If you want to show off frontend range with a wild custom site, that site is your best work and it should be bespoke. For everyone else who just needs their projects visible and a link to share, skip the yak-shave.