Posts tagged portfolio

Over the last year since I left university I’ve been plowing most of my time and effort into completing a fairly large project for the company that I currently work for. It’s been quite hard going at times and has really stretched me to the limits of my current knowledge and understanding, and in that has been very beneficial. However during this time I have let my own personal growth go by the wayside, or at least become very much a 2nd class citizen. This is a fact that I became very aware of recently when asked to show my portfolio to someone and had little to show for the last year other than a stack of tutorial code from various screencasts, podcasts and books.

So it’s time that I got back in the game. I’ve decided to do this in two ways. The first will be to carry on developing my coding skills by taking the main personal project that I have, my Honours Project, and refactoring it to come in line with what I now know about TDD/BDD and other good coding practices. Once I have completed that, or at least once the current feature set is clean and elegant, I’ll start to look for OSS projects to work on. Any suggestions welcome!

Secondly, I need to improve my soft skills. I’ve a further blog post brewing on this so I won’t delve too far just now. Suffice to say that a knowledge of the history and roots of software development, accompanied with a knowledge of best practices, will improve me as a developer just as much as, if not more than, learning languages and tools.