Hi all!

I posted a journal entry but it got off the recent journal list and it's hard to notice without searching.
It would be great to get some feedback on it.

Thanks!

There's a lot there and it takes a bit of hunting to get at the stuff that I'm interested in or want to find out a little more about. I might suggest having a page that acts more like a combination of a table of contents and summary page which takes you to more details about each thing you want to cover.

In the story of your programming career you mention deficiencies in projects, things you didn't do, and dropping projects for something else. Reading about troubles you've experienced, choices you made, and how you've progress to advanced projects can be interesting to other programmers as it's the sort of thing that we all go through and can relate to. I'm not sure how it would come across to prospective employers, even in non-programming related professions. On the one hand you show you have knowledge of concepts that (I imagine) could be very useful in the engineering field. On the other, you show that you get distracted with other stuff, you don't finish projects, and occasionally confess to gaps in knowledge. Being able to write up a project postmortem is a good thing of course. Analyzing what went right and wrong with a project can be valuable. I think you might not want to do that casually on the main page.

Over all, it's as appropriate a journal entry as any that are around here. I say keep writing as you have been and from time to time update a page to work as a table of contents.

Thanks for the feedback!

If it comes off like I don't finish projects, that's bad. Another thing that may be a bad sign that my girlfriend was "mmkay... But what are these programs actually good for?" She's an architect with a very technical thinking, so maybe the entry does come off like a bunch of fancy unfinished stuff that don't do anything useful.

I took a look at your "Project" link Kseh, and I think I get the idea.

I should only talk about finished projects (there are finished and actually useful/used programs) and maybe mention others in a summary emphasizing that they are learning projects to learn specific topics.
The journal should be a blog.

Another question. What if there are no executables? Should I make all of the programs releasable, even if that means I can't use this portfolio for a while? Or is it okay to have only videos and images? I could work on releasing the programs, but that takes a lot of time, and unfortunately the company that I worked at pretty much collapsed, so I need to get a new job quickly and I want to apply to software developer positions too.

Hello,
yes it is (or at least it was, when I checked a few hours ago, if you changed it) a bit disorganized and comes across mostly as a repository of various random projects, finished or not. But that is easily fixed by sorting things around. Is there a way to make multiple pages, because then you could make subcategories to clean everything up, and it will come across as more readable as well (it gets a bit confusing with different projects iterated one after the other).

Another question. What if there are no executables? Should I make all of the programs releasable, even if that means I can't use this portfolio for a while? Or is it okay to have only videos and images? I could work on releasing the programs, but that takes a lot of time, and unfortunately the company that I worked at pretty much collapsed, so I need to get a new job quickly and I want to apply to software developer positions too.[/quote]
Please, please, please release code if you can unless what you are doing is professionnal. It irritates me to no end when I see some guy's web page which shows some awesome videos about something I was thinking about/wanted to implement, a couple documents and a paragraph along the lines of "my implementation does such and such", and then provide no sample/reference code at all. The result? What they worked on is essentially impossible to use for a large part of the internet community.

Releasing executables along is always nice too if people want to check it out quickly (see how it runs on their computer, etc...) but that's not a requirement. Especially if they are full-fledged software, I would personally only release executables for things that are more of the "proof of concept" type. You know, the kind of thing visitors download, think "oh, that's cool" and then shelf away the program.

Perhaps saying that it looks like you don't finish projects wasn't right. Consider the following from your journal post that stood out for me:

• I could have done the mathematics for it, but I aborted the search for info how to use RGB modes on DOS, because I was introduced to OpenGL on Windows platform.
  
• The gameplay was polished, but otherwise it wasn't.
  
• I'm not sure when I was engaged in assembly programming, but it didn't last long. I needed that for speeding up my DOS applications. I didn't know that time, that assembly itself won't speed up my stuff...
  
• but I didn't implement a solver
  
• It started with using GLUT, but soon I dropped it and started to learn Win32 programming.
  
• I moved to other projects before I got into Shader programming (see later).
  
• Using the minesweeper "engine", I made a small game prototype of a game that looked promising when I fantasised about it. It turned out to be not so promising...
  
• This program is very close to being finished, but my contract ended, so little bug-fixes, small improvements and the proper release never happened. ... so most of it was polished, and it just worked and did it's job.
  
  [/quote]
  
  I don't think you only need to talk about finished projects but I do think it's better not to point out too many flaws. I have a ton of flaws in the projects on my site and I wanted to do more with each project. The flaws I do point out, I feel that it's more to my advantage to point them out. Ask yourself, do the statements above add value to you and the projects that you're showcasing on this page?
  If this is to be a key element in your upcoming search for a job then you may want to tailor the page for that purpose and consider doing a page more suited for programming peers another time.
  
  I can't say whether going with a blog or the GD journal system is better. In either case you'll probably encounter organizational issues which is my understanding of what you were trying to address with this one journal entry. Produce a single, organized page that you can send prospective employers to that highlights various projects that you feel may be of interest and include links to existing pages which include more details. At least, that is how I interpret what you're trying for.
  
  Also, I want to point out that having worked on a project that is in use by the company you were developing it for might be of particular interest to a prospective employer. Also, you may want to consider the journal page you link to. With the entire section being at the bottom and it's possible people don't read that far down and that seems to be where the projects are that you may want to highlight more.
  
  You already have images and videos. Whether or not you release any executable is ultimately your call. I don't know if it'd be to your advantage or not. I imagine a lot of companies might be very cautious about downloading software from a job applicant onto their computers. Certainly come prepared to any interviews with anything you can think of that'd give you an advantage.

Thanks again for the feedback!

I made another version, this time not in the journal. I have taken some formatting ideas from Kseh's site...

The feedback was really useful, I know that I tend to talk too much, this new version is a lot cleaner, and I reversed the order of the projects too, so the most recent and most interesting programs are on top of the list.
I don't know if it's a good idea to post lines-of-code counters, these numbers seem pretty low.

What do you think?

http://matelipkovics.blogspot.com/

Very nice. It's like night and day compared to the journal entry and I think you are very well set the way it is.

Personally, I don't think you need the lines of code counts. They might be great to have if you were applying for a job where optimization was an important part of your work. But I'm thinking you might be trying to indicate higher complexity for a project by showing the line count but the descriptions that you have seem to sufficiently get that across.

Thanks again!

What do you think about the programs?
It would be good to know if they run well on other computers, or if they are "interesting" enough. So what do you (anybody) think about this portfolio's applications?