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Yet another portfolio feedback request.

Started by May 30, 2014 10:11 PM
11 comments, last by theflamingskunk 10 years, 5 months ago

Hi guys. I've set my portfolio / blog website 3 weeks ago in order to start looking for an AAA studio employment. I am mostly interested in computer graphics programming (DirectX11 preferably). Can I ask you to have a look at my site and tell me if there's anything wrong with the content of it?

I've never worked in a big corporation before but I've heard rumours that companies like that tend to judge your personality by looking at resume / portfolio and they are not interested in too ambitious kind of people. If you agree with that statement, could you please give me some feedback wether my portfolio contains anything indicating my overambition?

http://kadeyopolis.comoj.com/portfolio

The domain i've put the website on is a free one so it does have annoying commercial popping up if u don't have Ad Block installed.

I'd appreciate any kind of feedback! smile.png

Loading the site and suddenly *BOOM* wall of difficult-to-read text.

I don't know what to click or why to click it.

First up, general usability of the web site. You probably don't know much of this since you are not applying for a UI job, but they are still important.

Your wordpress theme is just barely on the edge of readable. Light gray on dark gray that you have chosen has a contrast index that is borderline on the readability index. You are not applying for a UI or UX development job so you likely don't have the background in understanding things like contrast ratios and such.

I would strongly recommend getting a theme with a higher contrast. White on black, black on white, white on blue, blue on white, black on yellow, black on gray, all of them have a higher readability index than light gray on dark gray.

The combination of black, white, and blue, with a blue/gray accent, are well-regarded and consistently rank as the most easily readable. Note that nearly all the big names, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, major businesses like IBM, and most of the other major web sites use this for their primary scheme. Even this site uses it. There are lots of solid, well-researched, heavily-studied, good reasons to stick with the colors. You probably should, too.

Enough on the color scheme, on to the content.

I'm greeted by a wall of text. This isn't 1993, show me pictures. The big banner of images isn't really helpful, especially as it doesn't pair with your projects and is covered with "wonderplugin.com" ads. Just put the images inline.

Don't make me watch videos, every one of those big projects with video should have a picture with it.

Every one of the projects underlines when I hover over them, but they don't link anywhere. Some give me a javascripted popup with an image, but that isn't what I want.

The Cannon Fodder game looks interesting, where is the download link? Your graphics algorithms look interesting, download link? Lots of the academic projects look interesting, download link? Sources link? The OpenGL and CUDA projects look interesting, Download and Source links?

For your resume:

I would move your education to the top, and include an expected graduation date rather than the date you started the program.

The relevant experience section should be rewritten. That is not what employers mean when they use the word "experience". More on that in a moment.

It does not describe what you have done, or give me any reason to look at your web site. Cut the "Technical Skills" entirely, since it doesn't really mean anything. The "5ya, 2yp" system you devised does not help your cause.

Take all the items under "technical skills" and "relevant experience" and save them off to the side.

Replace them with a section labeled "projects". Inside the new "Projects" section copy and paste the text from your web site portfolio, then move all the words that you removed with the technical skills section and drop them into those projects as applicable. All the academic projects form your web site should be copied into the education section of your resume, under the appropriate school.

So your education section might look like this:

Warsaw University of Technology - MSc ....

CAD/Cam Systems Enineering

MSc thesis (in progress): real time ... realistic rain

Selected projects (found online at http://kadeyopolis.comoj.com/portfolio/)

* PUMA - Tech demo application showing PUMA robotic arm welding on a reflective surface and casting a volume shadow on the 3D environment
* DUCK-Tech demo application showing anisotropically illuminated duck swiming on a reflective water surface with differential equations based spherical waves
* JELLY BEAN
Group (2) tech demo application showing bezier cube mesh real-time manipulation in a 3D environment.
Personal Projects
Videos of all projects on web site
CANON FODDER 2D
A finished game created in C# and XNA. Isometric view. You are solider fighting during World War II. 4 levels, sophisticated menu and audio system.
AIR CONTROL 2DVIDEO
2D planes fly over the game location. A player needs to select them and draw a collision-free trajectory to the airport so they can land safely. Various real-time texturing and pattern techniques. Written in C++ and whatever.
PAPER SOCCER
Pitch consists of a chessboard-like grid. Player needs to score a goal by bouncing off the available segments. Sophisticated AI algorithm opponent. I’ve created visualization & input. Alfa-Beta AI algorithm base (not data structures) written in C++ and OpenGL
POINT&CLICK ADEVNTURE GAME SYSTEM
A hobby project aprproach to create a point&click 2D adventure game system. Manual graph creation basing on the background texture. A* based path finding between graph nodes for movement purposes of the animated character. Written in F# and whatever.
That would make a much more compelling resume rather than a bland list describing that you have worked with meshes, curves, and algorithms.
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Wow, this is really something.
Thank you so much for all the feedback of yours. I'm gonna get things fixed asap as I didn't really get any answers from the places I've applied to so far :( Maybe that's the reason.

Is it any better now?

http://kadeyopolis.comoj.com/portfolio/

I can't put all the projects online as some of them are uni tasks and the following years would find it easily and cheat by having a ready solutions.

Furthermore as it comes to CV. Is there any point in listing all the projects there? Do you think hiring person would not feel incentive to visit the website after seeing CV?

The profile page looks SO much nicer to me. I can immediately see something about each project in an image with the words. I can quickly go back and forth between the description and the image and decide if that is one I would like to dig deeper into.

It is fine to not post all the source, you have a big enough collection. Some of them do look interesting enough for me to want to click through to find the source, so that is a good thing.


The resume/CV still needs a lot of work. YES, you want to list the projects. What you have now does not give me any incentive to look deeper.

My eyes glaze over when I see this wall of words:

VERY STRONG MATHEMATICAL BACKGROUND
Vector/matrix/tensor/quaternion algebra (linear/non-linear) • calculus • graph theory •statistics • differential equations • manifolds • geometric modelling (curves, surfaces: Bézier, B-Spline, NURBS; interpolation methods, patches, trimming), etc.
GRAPHICS
3D Rendering Pipeline • shaders • scene graphs • lighting models • shadow mapping, volume shadows • texturing/blending/stenciling techniques • stereoscopy • adaptive visualization • clipping • picking • ray tracing • antialiasing techniques • noise functions • procedural terrain/water/clouds/fog generation • particle systems • forward/inverse kinematics • tessellation stages • post processing compute shader based techniques
PHYSICS
Basic collision detection • basic kinematic chains (Rag Dolls) • dynamics • equations of motion


If I let my mind stay focused on it, I immediately wonder if these are just a list of topics you read in a book, or if you have actually done anything with them.

Sadly at the entry level too many people just crack open their textbooks and recite chapter names. It looks almost identical to what you posted there.

Instead, if you list project after project with those same key words, and each project is closely aligned to game development (which yours are), then each one of those projects makes me more and more interested in you. Instead of having my eyes glaze over, I start to look for a web site for the videos and source.

You have a bunch of entries that say cryptic things like "HLSL, FX (2y.a.)". You could instead have a list of 20 different projects, each one listing those keywords. Then I can see a bunch of project with OpenGL, a bunch with DirectX, a bunch with HLSL, a few with real-time shadowing... and then I don't need to guess at what "MonoGame intermediate" and "XNA advanced" mean. I can make my own assessment to just how intermediate or how advanced you really are.

Thank you very, very much!

I've spend almost whole night and day in order to polish things as you suggested and I find them more intuitive and applicable indeed.

I've refactorized PDF CV as this is the one I'm sending with applications anyway. I've also purchased a hosting server for myself so there are no commercials anymore and the address is pure http://kadeyopolis.com. Of course I've redirected previous domain to this one so everybody who was using previous one still had an access here.

If you still find a minute of your free time to check the CV I'd appreciate it a lot!

RESUME

Thank you once again and good luck with everything smile.png

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Very much improved.

Instead of two pages of keywords without context, I can now look the list over and see project after project that relates to games.

Thank you again. I owe you a decent portion of cupcakes, Sir ;D

IMG_20140603_230439.jpg

You'll get more if I get hired anytime soon ;-)

Resume seems like it 404-ed

Resume seems like it 404-ed

Yup, looks like in the extensive editing history there were problems with the ?.

It is still on his web site, just click the link on the top and hit 'resume'. :-)

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