What should be in a web developer's portfolio?

Question

Freelance

Good afternoon.
Life forces you to freelance. Previously, he worked only in the office and did not know troubles. And now you need to sharply and briskly transfer to freelance. I have no experience in remote and one-time work, so I ran into some difficulties. By myself, I am a web developer: mainly the server part, but if necessary, I can make up and write for the frontend. In general, I will make a turnkey website.
It is clear that you need a portfolio. I rummaged through my work - I found a few projects that I can show to others. Two of them are sites that I made completely by myself (except for the design). And a couple of CRM-apps, from which there are only screenshots on which the text is smeared.
Actually the difficulty is as follows: what should a programmer show in a portfolio?
I can post screenshots of crm-ok. I can post screenshots and links to sites that I made. But it's all layout. And most of my work is back-end. How to demonstrate it to customers? Give a link to the github? So it is unlikely that they will understand something there, and most likely they will not look.
Dear freelance programmers, tell me, what do you put in your portfolio?
UPD: I forgot to ask: do you need a business card site? Or is the information on the exchanges enough?

Answer 1

1. The customer who hires such a developer is not a fool, so do not be afraid to voice technical features to him, for example:
- wrote a system for entering logs into mongoDB
- wrote a system for analyzing text logs for such and such a purpose
- developed a server script in such and such a language, he does someone with such and such a goal
- optimized this and that part of the server in such and such a way, as a result of
2. Features:
- creating a site from scratch (design, layout are yours, but if it’s difficult to help with this (negotiate with the designer and layout designer))
- site development
- load optimization, installation of plugins for wordpress
, etc.

Answer 2

At Icons8 , our entire team is remote, in different cities, and we don't meet offline. Here is what the guys show us and what we pay attention to:
1. Tell us about yourself in good Russian. This is universal advice for all occasions: everything can be told and explained, and if you cannot agree with the employer at this stage, then this is a red flag. Further it will be worse.
2. Screenshots of systems. The overall level of the product is important: how technically interesting is it, how professional is the design? This step can be skipped if the interface is bad: it will be better than scary screenshots with the explanation "we were not assigned a designer, we did it ourselves."
3. Link to gihab- it will probably be more interesting for you to work with a customer who knows what a git is :) And vice versa, it's better not to show this:
4. Questions to the employer . It is better if they are open (assuming a detailed answer) and on the topic of programming (and not "who pays a commission of 12 rubles for salary transfers" - these are trifles).
The best question I've ever heard was "how is your job structured".
PS: Here is an example of our vacancy brainstorage.me/jobs/8613 and here is a great answer:

Answer 3

Also, just recently I decided what is called freelancing) I have little experience, I began to look for various articles about freelancing. I read a couple of articles on Habré. Everywhere a lot of very different information, some say one thing, and others another. I decided to start with some small orders, business card sites and forms for clients to do for sites. To develop a portfolio, get the first orders. Indeed, without a portfolio and reviews, it is simply unthinkable to push with someone on freelance. For starters, I went to the exchange https://divly.ru/ucalc where you just need to create forms.
The work turned out to be not dusty, constant orders, I managed to earn a good penny. Well done for a portfolio. Customers even come back with these small orders. And some ask for help on other projects)
So, the portfolio can be collected on small orders. And also earn. Then move on to larger ones. In the portfolio, you can put any orders that you are not ashamed to show. In general, they said right here, you still need to be able to talk to customers correctly)

Answer 4

I think you need to go from the opposite - why do you need a portfolio? And you need to show what is interesting to the customer. Anyway, do you need a job or show your portfolio to everyone? I still haven’t put together a portfolio, and on the website of my studio there are only contacts, and nothing, there’s a lot of work, there are orders.