I was very pleased to hear that one of my ex-students built a portfolio site to demonstrate her skills in data science, and she was hired to become a business analyst that deals with geolocation and parking.

You can read more about the reasons for a portfolio website, and my experience here: https://gefyra.co/start-your-portfolio-site/

As such, I’m going to show you how I would personally do a portfolio website, and I will also include the reasons why I would do it this way.

There’s one thing you must understand. A data visualization dashboard for portfolios can be created with any web development framework. As long as someone can hit a URL and see your work, you’re probably good.

Why I chose WordPress as my platform to showcase my work?

Let’s talk about some demerits of using WordPress to showcase your work:

  • Most companies don’t want you to develop on a WordPress platform because it’s way too easy. If I were to hire, I would want somebody who has at least an intermediate level of coding experience.
    • But if you know how to build plugins and use WordPress’ hooks, I would be impressed.
  • Most companies don’t use WordPress to build a data visualization dashboard. WordPress is designed to be a blogging tool, and there are limitations to using WordPress.
  • WordPress doesn’t scale well out-of-the-box because it’s designed to be a single site use. You’ll still need to dig deep into coding to make things work, but you’ll have to get used to WordPress’ way of doing things.

But why do I use WordPress as a platform to showcase my work?

  • I need the blogging aspect of WordPress, and it suits my needs perfectly. I desire to teach and evangelize my content as much as building out prototypes for people to play with.
  • Practically because it’s easy to use. Their 5 minutes installation works out of the box.
    • Many of my ex-students didn’t have a technical background, and building web frameworks such as Flask or Express.js for Node is going to be a high learning curve.
  • I want to focus on data science instead of data engineering. Other web frameworks are going to give the power of flexibility, but it requires coding and it would take time away from what I want to do.
  • WordPress has a relatively potent plugin system, which might come in handy if I want to package prototypes or products.

So don’t follow what I do blindly, and it’s not set in stone that I’m going to rely on WordPress forever. If you want to showcase your work professionally and impress companies:

  • Build your portfolio on Typescript/Nodejs and React.js. You will impress because you show that you know how to code, and you can do data science too.
  • If you can describe Machine Learning (ML) pipelines and prototype it, that would be amazing as well.
  • Other popular frameworks are Flask and Django, but my advice is to work with things that you’re familiar with.

If you want to focus as a data scientist, then try to delegate technical overheads to established systems as much as possible. It’s no point trying to build the most impressive system and yet not get to the goals that you want.

I will be breaking this tutorial down into different sections so that we can divide-and-conquer the work done here. So bookmark this page and stay tuned for more updates!