Projects for Your Personal Portfolio

The Significance of a Personal Technical Portfolio

Software development and engineering is one of the few fields that remain widely accessible to people from diverse backgrounds. While many formally educated engineers argue that a degree is essential, others believe it should not be a strict requirement. In reality, highly competitive and demanding engineering roles tend to be filled by individuals with strong academic credentials or formal training—both due to competition and the nature of the job itself. Conversely, less technically demanding roles are often more accessible to those without a formal degree. During the COVID era, tech positions became even more attractive due to lucrative salaries, leading to a boom in coding bootcamps. However, the job market now appears to be undergoing a rebalancing.

Given this openness, having a technical portfolio is particularly crucial for those who lack a computer science (CS) or related technical degree. Your portfolio is where you prove you can "walk the walk." I know this firsthand because I am one of those people. I built my first HTML page in 1998, and as you can imagine, I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on what makes a strong portfolio — and to continuously refine mine.

In this article, I want to share the lessons I've learned, my reflections on working on personal projects, and insights into creating an impactful portfolio. The core argument is that to maximize the positive influence of your portfolio on your career, your projects should:

• Connect to your passion – Work on something that genuinely excites you.
• Benefit others in the real world – Create solutions that have a meaningful impact.
• Be sufficiently complex – Ensure your project demonstrates problem-solving skills and depth.

Ready to dive deeper into how to build an exceptional technical portfolio? Let’s get started. 🚀

Passion for Your Project Is Key to Long-Term Continuity

My computer is a graveyard of interesting, fun ideas. While I’ve learned a lot from experimenting with fleeting concepts, I can’t say it was the most efficient use of my time. For example, I wrote scripts that generated random questions with visual graphics, and even built my own karaoke software. Each project took me a couple of days—I satisfied my curiosity, used them in a few real-life situations, and then abandoned them.

I have dozens of projects I invested significant time into, only to leave them unfinished. Many of them contain innovative ideas that could find applications in a business environment. But the real issue? I don’t truly care about them. I’m not passionate about karaoke or music software. I’m glad others are working on those areas, but for me, these projects remained toy projects—fun but half-baked ideas. I don’t plan to include them in my portfolio because I can’t talk about them with genuine enthusiasm.

The Lesson Here?

Avoid filling your portfolio with purely fun projects that don’t align with your deeper interests. They’ll consume time but provide little return on investment. The world is full of limitless ideas and skills to explore, but your time is finite — use it wisely.

A Positive Example

So, what does real passion look like? In my case, I’m deeply invested in languages, language technologies, dictionaries, and NLP. In the 2000s, I started a dictionary project purely because I wanted something for myself. It began as a basic two-column Excel file, then evolved into a dictionary script written in Perl, searching through text files. I hosted it on free platforms like brinkster.com and tripod.com—which were big at the time.

By 2012, I took it a step further: I bought a dedicated domain (ajapsozluk.com) and created a proper website. You can see the persistence — from 2000 to 2012, I never abandoned the project. There have been other dictionary websites, and there will be more in the future. But even today, in 2025, I still work on it. Why? Because this project connects to me on a deeper level—it stems from my fundamental passion for languages. When I reflect on it, I realize my mother was a schoolteacher in language and literature, and I was exposed to linguistics from a young age.

Your Learning Should Serve Your Passion

Most of us learn coding from free courses, tutorials, and videos. While these are valuable, don’t let them dictate your projects. Their exercises aren’t necessarily tailored to your interests or needs. Instead, make sure you’re applying the skills you learn to your own projects—not just following assignments for the sake of completion.

I know that discovering, identifying, or defining your passion isn’t always easy. It may take time. But the earlier you recognize what truly excites you, the more efficiently you can invest your time—and create projects that will last.

Your Project Should Serve Users in the Real World

When we look for a job or start our own business, we aim to serve people. Uber focuses on mobility, AWS specializes in cloud services, and countless startups follow similar paths. Maybe you want to create a startup of your own. If you want your project to be long-lived, you need to identify a fundamental human need—mobility, food, communication, entertainment—and build services that either provide these essentials directly or support their production and delivery.

Of course, you can’t build a massive platform alone as an individual, but your project should have a clear vision behind it.

Clarifying your ideas and connecting with real-world needs makes it easier to articulate your goals. When your project aligns with a real societal need, it becomes more tangible and relevant. This connection is valuable in job interviews, particularly in behavioral questions like “Who are you?” and “Why do you want to work at XYZ company?” Instead of saying, “I built a toy project on my computer,” you’ll present a project with real-world impact, which is far more compelling.

Getting feedback from real users is invaluable. No matter how genius an idea may seem, if it isn’t contextualized within human experience, it doesn’t mean anything—it simply doesn’t exist. Once you expose your project to the world, you’ll receive valuable, constructive feedback. Sure, some people will criticize it, but most feedback will help you improve.

Handling criticism is part of the process

Some users will point out flaws, and that’s a good thing. Real users don’t care whether you’re doing it for free or for profit—they just expect results. In fact, this is ideal because it means you're getting honest feedback, rather than criticism softened by sympathy for an amateur project. As Bjarne Stroustrup famously said: “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” If people complain, it means your project is being used—and that’s an achievement.

Deploying your project in the real world forces you to grow. You’ll encounter network latency, scraping efforts, cyberattacks, and data loss—things that won’t appear in small-scale, local projects. It’s far better to learn about these issues before facing them in a professional role.

I’ve learned many things the hard way—from SQL injection vulnerabilities, storing plain-text passwords, and bad cookie practices to serious data loss. For instance, I once deleted a huge dictionary database, which caused major trouble for me. Since that day, I treat databases like radioactive material.

The real-world environment is like driving on a highway, rather than a quiet backyard. Mistakes happen fast, tolerance for errors is low, and you must be ready for unexpected challenges. When your project interacts with multiple systems, you’ll encounter things you never thought about in a simple local setup. Terms like HTTPS, CORS, and CNAME suddenly become crucial, rather than just theoretical.

So, if you want your project to thrive, take it beyond your computer. Let real users engage with it, receive feedback, refine it, and keep growing.

Your Project should have a Unique Added Value

For a project to be truly meaningful, it must have a unique quality that sets it apart. It needs to add value that cannot be found elsewhere. If your project is simply a duplicate of an existing product, it will struggle to survive in the long run.

Of course, creating something entirely original is not easy, especially when you're still in the learning phase. Suppose you’re a user of a well-known product but notice that it lacks a particular feature. You can develop that missing functionality as part of your own project. One day, the larger company may incorporate that feature into their product, but there will always be new gaps to fill. As long as humanity continues to innovate, there will always be missing features in products. If something is useful to you, it is likely to be beneficial to others for the same reasons.

Returning to my passion for language technologies, I can provide a personal example. In 2012, I developed a spellchecking script in Visual Basic for Applications for my native language, which was missing from Microsoft Word—and as of 2025, it still is. The project initially took a month of full-time work, but in the end, I had created a tool that any Windows user could utilize. I still rely on it today, and many users have told me that it serves them well. Being both a user and a stakeholder in my own project keeps me motivated to continue improving it.

The key takeaway is that toy projects, such as a calculator built in JavaScript or a simple to-do list app, are not ideal portfolio pieces unless they introduce a distinctive feature that isn’t already covered by standard software preinstalled in modern operating systems. These projects may be suitable for high school assignments, but they do not provide sufficient depth for an aspiring professional’s portfolio.

The Project should be Sufficiently-Complex

For a project to truly foster learning, it must have a certain level of complexity. Developing important engineering concepts and practicing advanced skills requires more than just basic implementations. For example, if I were to start a new web application project in 2025, I would design it with a separate backend and frontend, ensuring that it allows me to work with software design patterns, data structures, algorithms, modern frameworks, and essential development tools.

For absolute beginners, writing plain PHP, Python, or JavaScript code can be acceptable for about three months. But this initial warm-up phase should be concluded as soon as possible, transitioning into the use of frameworks like Bootstrap, Tailwind, Angular, React, Django, Symfony, and others. Of course, diving into frameworks without first grasping fundamental technical concepts makes no sense, but at the same time, your next portfolio project should not be built in vanilla HTML or Python alone. The purpose of a portfolio project is not simply to create something with a flashy UI or to build a product that will sustain you financially. It is meant to be a learning tool, something that, at a key moment in the future, will serve as proof of your skills and maturity.

The process of learning modern frameworks will teach you more than what you could learn through isolated efforts based on your limited understanding of a programming language or technology. You could try to build a user authentication system from scratch over a couple of days, but it is almost guaranteed that your approach would differ significantly from industry standards.

Do you know why? Because, contrary to common belief, most scientific concepts, including those in computer science, are highly non-intuitive. By non-intuitive, I mean for non-genius people like myself. Gravity, for example—I can barely wrap my head around it even today, centuries after Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery. Looking at the field we are discussing, consider sorting algorithms like insertion sort and quicksort. Given enough time, human intuition can lead us to develop something like insertion sort, but arriving at the intuition behind quicksort is highly improbable—unless, of course, you are a genius or a computer scientist who has spent time researching it. Quicksort is incredibly logical in the true sense of the word, but not for those of us with ordinary IQs.

Trying to "re-discover" essential concepts using vanilla code or homemade solutions will take an unnecessary amount of time, which is not suited for the fast-paced environment of today. By using frameworks, you are benefiting from refined and concentrated knowledge in a short period. This is why minimizing the "vanilla" phase of your evolution into an engineer is crucial. Trust me, modern frameworks still leave plenty of room for pure coding experimentation. You can even end up building horribly inefficient applications with modern frameworks, but at least you will be exposed to best practices early in your professional development journey.

You can spend some money on your portfolio

One final tip: your portfolio is an investment in yourself and your future. If you can afford it, spending some money on your projects can be beneficial. The main reason behind this suggestion is that free services often come with limitations, preventing you from experiencing the full scope of a real-world development environment. While this is less of an issue now—since major cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure offer generous free-tier quotas for first-time users—the fundamental point still holds.

A small investment in hosting, AI services, or other professional tools can significantly enhance the quality of your work. If spending a bit allows you to access API endpoints, work with industry-standard services like CloudWatch, SNS, or Power Automate, and helps you become a better engineer, then it’s money well spent. This doesn’t mean that these technologies are impossibly difficult to learn once you land a job, but familiarity with them can speed up your job-search process and make you stand out in interviews. If you approach your portfolio investments wisely, your first salary can likely cover all the costs you put into it.

This practice also sharpens your critical thinking. Spending money on your portfolio forces you to assess its value: is this project truly worth the investment? That question closes a full cycle of self-reflection. Is your portfolio project a meaningful, worthwhile endeavor? Do you, as its creator, genuinely believe in it? Or is it just a toy you’re experimenting with? Developing this kind of self-awareness and critical perspective will help you grow into a more capable professional.