Stop Building Portfolio Projects. They're Making You Worse.
There's a piece of advice that gets repeated constantly to people trying to break into tech: build more projects. Make your portfolio bigger. Add another framework, another API, another polished README with a Vercel deploy link. I think that advice is mostly wrong, or at least wrong about what it optimizes for. Portfolio projects optimize for looking impressive. Real projects optimize for being…
The advice to build more portfolio projects to break into tech is often repeated, but the author believes it's mostly misguided. Portfolio projects aim to look impressive, not to be useful. Real-world projects, however, should focus on being useful. Portfolio projects usually lack users, which means they never face real-world challenges like bugs or real users, hindering learning opportunities.
In contrast, projects built to solve personal problems gain users, even if it's just the creator, and this provides valuable feedback. The author suggests shipping a small, useful version of a project first, and refining architecture based on actual need. This approach allows engineers to learn from real-world challenges, develop professional habits like understanding root causes of bugs, and ship something that works instead of endlessly refining an incomplete project. The key is to ship the useful version, not chase the impressive one.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
