I created a professional portfolio framework that supports project descriptions and technical essays for precisely this reason: it gives the developer a better opportunity to provide the reader with a sense of who they are:
Most academic research groups need a website that provides information about the group's research activities, publications, members, recent news, and so forth. Many of us accomplish this by adapting a WordPress template. This is really simple to set up, but time consuming to maintain. For example, what if you want a page listing all of the group's publications, but you also want to list relevant publications on the page for an individual research project?
As part of my pandemic stress reduction activities, I decided to play around with React and Bootstrap in order to design a new version of my research group's website. My goals were:
* A static site deployed using GitHub pages. No more WordPress. No backend database.
* A SPA (Single Page Application). Just one page. Because that's what the cool kids do. More seriously, I wanted to enable the viewers to get a decent overview of my research group just by scrolling and without any clicking.
* Very mobile friendly. My goal is little to no usability cost for using your phone's browser.
* Easy to maintain. For example, to add a new publication, just update your .bib file (which you have anyway), run a script, and information about the new publication appears in multiple locations throughout the site.
These goals produced some interesting design choices, such as the use of what I call "horizontal" and "vertical" drill downs. I'll let you be the judge of whether and how well it succeeds. That said, I am quite certain the current site is much better than the WordPress site it replaced.
It occurs to me that others might be interested in how I did it, and potentially using my code as a basis for their own academic research group website, so I've set up the source repo as a template with an MIT License.
I teach software engineering to about 120 undergraduates a year, and require them to build a professional portfolio during the first week of class. I used to have them use WordPress, but the results were very uneven. To enable them to focus on content until their skills were sufficient to create a non-embarrassing custom design, I created the open source project TechFolios:
My research group investigated this approach to software metrics collection and analysis for about 10 years with an open source project called "Hackystat". We wrote around 50 papers and there was a startup based on our approach (that was later aquihired.) You can find a list of papers we wrote here:
The first one, "Searching under the streetlight for useful software metrics" is our attempt to summarize the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.
There are significant challenges associated with making this kind of data actionable, and significant political/social issues associated with collecting this data at all.
I teach software engineering using an "athletic" pedagogy which means (in part) that I publish YouTube videos showing how I complete small (i.e. 10-30 minute problems) in an efficient manner. Students then try to complete the problems as fast as I do. Once a week, in class, they are assigned a new problem that they must complete correctly within a short time period or else receive no credit.
This provides a mixture of learning by watching a more experienced practitioner do the work, along with active engagement.
For example, here is the website for the software engineering class I am teaching this semester:
https://techfolios.github.io/