Build a portfolio of 3 projects

📑 Building a portfolio: the rule of 3

To be taken seriously as a technical person (or any area, really), you need to have something to show. Anyone can say “I can code in Python”. You have to make something to prove it.

When I was starting out, a mentor gave me the advice:

Build a portfolio of three great projects.

Initially, for me, this just meant striving to get three projects under my belt. I went to hackathons, interned at companies and designed my own.

Once I achieved that, I kept looking at how I could build on them or replace them with new and cooler projects.

It’s so simple, but I’ve found it a useful way to frame it. You’re only as good as your top three projects.

To this day, the lower right-hand side of my CV is dedicated to my top three projects at that moment in time.

If a round of job applications comes up, or if somebody asks me about work I’ve done, I know what to talk about. These three projects are always in mind.

📂 So how do you get projects?

I’m a big advocate of designing our own projects, both for learning and for potentially contributing to community. But it’s not always easy, particularly when starting out.

A good source of ‘ready-made’ projects to work on is Kaggle. They provide a dataset and often specific challenges. You can also see other people’s solutions, which is a great source of learning.

A great way to devise a project within a team is to attend hackathons. These are typically weekend sprints to develop a solution to a problem and are held in most major cities around the world.

You can also look to your community. If you’re a medic, are there any hospitals or start-ups doing interesting projects? Could you help in some small way?

One thing I found really helpful was attending a project-based course. So much so, that I’ll devote the next email to it.