What to Put in Your Developer Portfolio in 2026

A developer portfolio does not get you hired on its own. What it does is make the claims on your resume checkable, and give interviewers something concrete to talk about. That changes what belongs in it: less decoration, more evidence.

This checklist is drawn from published hiring advice and from the questions developers keep asking in communities like r/cscareerquestions, r/webdev and r/learnprogramming: is GitHub enough, how many projects, do tutorial projects count, does anyone even click the link? makerhandle is our product; the checklist works whatever you build your portfolio with.

First, be honest about who looks

Some developers who track visits say recruiters rarely open their portfolio, and that fits how screening works. Recruiters triage quickly; a 2018 eye-tracking study by Ladders measured an average first look at a resume of about 7.4 seconds. Engineers who interview you are more likely to open your links, often right before the call.

So your portfolio has two jobs: be readable in seconds by someone non-technical, and hold up for five minutes of scrutiny by an engineer.

The top of the page

The first screen should answer, without scrolling:

Who you are and what you want. "Backend developer, Go and Postgres, looking for my first full-time role." One line.
Your best project, first, with a screenshot.
How to reach you. Email, GitHub and LinkedIn. If you are job hunting, say so.

Skip the skills grid with percentage bars. Nobody knows what "JavaScript 80%" means, and your projects show your skills better.

How many projects

Three to five, chosen for the job you want. Nielsen Norman Group recommends three to five detailed case studies for design portfolios, after surveying 204 hiring managers, and the same logic holds for engineering: reviewers have limited time, and a weak sixth project dilutes five good ones.

If you have more, keep them in a short list below, or link your GitHub for the rest.

Which projects

Pick by relevance, then by depth:

Something that matches the role. Applying for mobile? Lead with an app. Data engineering? A pipeline, not a landing page.
Something real people used. A tool for your club, an open source fix that got merged, a side project with ten users. Real users create real problems, which make the best interview stories.
Something with a hard part. A tricky bug, a performance problem, a design trade-off.

Tutorial projects are the most common question. To-do apps, weather apps and course clones are everywhere, and reviewers recognize them. You do not need to hide one, but extend it with something the tutorial did not cover, and say what you added. See what counts as a portfolio project.

What each project needs

For every project:

One line on what it is and who it is for.
Your role. Solo, or which part of a team project you built.
The stack, short: the five technologies that matter, not every package.
A screenshot or two, with captions.
A live link, or a short video if it cannot stay online.
The source, if it is public, with a README that says how to run it.
A short write-up: the problem, two decisions, the outcome.

The write-up is where most portfolios are thin. We wrote a step-by-step guide: how to write a project case study that gets you hired.

Where GitHub fits

Keep your GitHub tidy, because engineers will check it. A profile README appears at the top of your profile when you create a public repository named after your username, and you can pin up to six repositories. Give pinned repos a README with a screenshot and a one-paragraph summary.

But do not make GitHub the only link on your resume. Recruiters find a repository list hard to judge, and it has no room for your role or for work that is not on GitHub. Link the two both ways. More in makerhandle vs a GitHub profile README.

What to leave out

Skill bars and logo walls. Show skills through projects.
Dead links. Mark finished-and-offline projects as such and give them a video instead.
Every project you ever started. Curate.
A portfolio that is itself unfinished. A half-built custom site says more than you want it to. A simple page that is complete beats an ambitious one that is not.

Should you build it yourself?

Only if you will keep it current, or if the site is itself a front-end showcase. Reviewers judge the projects on your portfolio far more than the portfolio itself, and a hand-built site that still lists your projects from two jobs ago does you no favors. We compare the options, from GitHub Pages to Carrd and Framer, in portfolio website builders compared.

A 2026 note on AI

Reviewers in 2026 know that a working CRUD app can be generated in an afternoon. That makes the write-up more valuable, not less: the decisions you made, the bug you chased, what you would change. If you used AI tools heavily, say how. It is a normal part of the work now, and saying so is better than being asked.

Putting it together on makerhandle

makerhandle gives you a portfolio page with a card for each project, and a project page for each one with the role, timeline, stack, highlights, a Markdown write-up, a captioned gallery, a video and links to the source, live demo or app stores. An Open to work toggle adds a badge and a contact button. Five projects are free; Pro is $20 a year for unlimited projects and your own domain.

See makerhandle for developers, or if you are still studying, makerhandle for students.