Self-Taught Developer Journal, Day 12: Portfolio Building, TOP Landing Page Cont.
Tags: beginners, codenewbie, devjournal, webdev
Published: 2021-12-04 05:30:59

Today I learned...

That I want to try a different approach to blogging when it comes to my projects. I realized I might learn better by talking through my thought process as I am working on it. I might compile it all to one article later, but for now, this will be an experiment.

## Thinking Through The Odin Project Landing Page
(**I am redoing the project so this will be from the beginning**)
For the project, they provides us two design images, one of the full design and one of the colors and fonts. 
![The Odin Project Project Landing Page Full Design Image](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/qcwlb2cle80pmz7kpksx.png) 

Looking at the image, there are four sections. The project assignment provides suggestions to start with one section at a time beginning from the top and to add the HTML first then style it with CSS. We don't need to make the project look nice on mobile so I don't need to worry about that.

In the HTML page, I added five *div* elements and gave four id attributes for each section and left the last one with no id, but added the footer element within the last div.

Tomorrow, I will continue adding more of the HTML elements then begin the styling.

## Portfolio Building
Today, I listened in on a *How to Build a Professional Development Portfolio Review* Twitter space with [Shashi Lo](https://twitter.com/shashiwhocodes), [Tech Rally (Alex Lee)] (https://twitter.com/TheTechRally), and [Mike Chen](https://twitter.com/genericmikechen). 

A little background, I discovered Shashi on Twitter when he posted [this tweet](https://twitter.com/shashiwhocodes/status/1463558580595003396?s=20) asking "As an aspiring Web Developer, do you feel ready to start applying for your first full-time tech job?". I thought the reply thread had great information I could reference later and I quickly bookmarked it.

I looked more into Shashi's profile and saw how he has a passion for helping junior web developers. I've been following him ever since and his content has been super helpful. I am very grateful to people like him who choose to spend their time to try and help others. Thank you to Shashi and others who are helping new developers (there are more I've followed, but will add them as resources later).

For the Twitter space, the talk was insightful. We got to hear Shashi, Mike, and Alex share what they look for in portfolios and advice when building one. Here are some notes I took during the talk:

* **Don’t spend too much time on the portfolio site design, use a design template** 
  * As new developers, we are having to learning a lot. To alleviate it, using templates made by good designers reduces the need for us to have to learn design and build it from scratch.
  * The aesthetics of the portfolio matter.
* **Invest in yourself**
  * Take the time and effort to present your best self like putting money into buying your own domain. 
  * If you can't invest in yourself then how can employers or others.
* **Make yourself marketable!**
* **The portfolio doesn’t have to be perfect** 
  * It's meant to have something to start with and be able to put something out there.

## Resources
[The Odin Project Landing Page Project](https://www.theodinproject.com/paths/foundations/courses/foundations/lessons/landing-page)

Day 11: https://dev.to/jennifer_tieu/self-taught-developer-journal-day-11-take-a-break-34g
Please refer to [Starting My Self-Taught Developer Journey]( https://dev.to/jennifer_tieu/starting-my-self-taught-developer-journey-2dga) for context.