About building a portfolio

Building a portfolio is a great way to showcase your work and interests, and it can be a good enough motivator to keep you going once you start. It’s a great way to show your skills and experience to potential employers or clients, and it can help you stand out from the crowd.

That being said, building a portfolio can be a daunting task, especially if you’re just starting out.

I am putting this page together to showcase some of my side projects, not necessarily to impress anyone, but to keep track of my progress and to have a place where I can look back and see how far I’ve come. All this takes time and effort and has to happen outside of my regular job, that’s why the projects listed here are rather small and simple.

All of the projects have originated from a need I had at some point. Rather than looking for a ready-made solution, I decided to build it myself. This way I could learn something new and have a solution that fits my needs and imagination.

Portfolio projects

As previously mentioned, the projects listed here are rather small and simple. I decided to build them so that I can learn something new and solve a problem I had at some point. We, as software engineers, love building up and trying new things, and when you can pair that up with a need you want to solve, it can lead to a fun and rewarding experience.

Git animated

This is a series of posts and videos that I put together to help me visualize what happens under the hood when you run a git command. The interesting part, I would say, was animating what happens in the case of some of the commands. The animation was done using Manim, a Python library for creating mathematical animations. The posts and videos can be found here. It’s a four part series, and I will be adding more as the need arises. The GitHub repository can be found here.

Is it aired yet?

As I enjoy, sometims too much, watching TV series, I wanted to have a simple web-based interface to check when the next episode is going to air. I stubbornly refused to use any of the existing solutions, so I decided to build my own. The project was built using PyScript, an open source platform for Python in the browser. The data is fetched from the TVDB API, and rendered in a rather simplistic table. The project can be found here. The GitHub repository can be found here.

Note: the API requires a token, which is valid for a month, so depending when you access the page, the token might have expired. As I am writing this, the token is valid until 2024-10-08.

Workouts tracker

I mentioned in a previous post that I had started working out more consistently. I wanted a way to keep track of the exercises I am doing and the weights I am using. I could have used a simple spreadsheet, but where’s the fun in that? So I decided to build a simple web-based interface, using PyScript, that plots all the exercises I have done and the weights I have used. Additionally, I can see for each exercise the progression of the weights I have used. The project can be found here, and the GitHub repository here.