Due Friday 21 August, submitted via AXIS. You hand in a URL — not a repo, not a screenshot, not a zip.
What it has to do
| Make it work | Understand it when you can answer |
|---|---|
| The link opens on a school computer, a phone, and a machine you’ve never logged into | Why “it works on my laptop” and “it’s live” are different claims |
| It says who you are, in your own words | What a stranger knows about you after ten seconds |
| It shows at least one project, and what you were trying to do | Why the write-up around a project is worth more than the project |
| The design is a decision you made and can defend | What you chose not to do, and why |
done when You paste the link into a browser on a computer that is not yours, in a window that is not logged into anything, and your site loads.
The decisions
Nothing below has one right answer. Research your options, pick one, and be able to say why you picked it.
| Figure out | Understand it when you can answer |
|---|---|
| Where the site is going to live | How a website is actually hosted, and what the services on offer differ on |
| What you’re building it with | What the “stack” is — frontend, middle, backend — and which parts yours even has |
| Whether it’s safe to put on the internet | What of yours is visible to anyone who views the page, and what should never be in it |
| How to set the job up before you start | What an agent needs from you up front to get it right the first time instead of the fifth |
why you're being asked to choose rather than told what to use
Every one of these has a default that works. The reason you’re picking is that a year from now the defaults will have changed and the question won’t have. Being handed a stack teaches you that stack; choosing one teaches you how to choose.
On the writing
The words are the assignment as much as the layout. “Hi I’m a student who likes coding” tells a reader nothing. Say what you’re actually into, what you’ve built, what you got wrong and fixed.
why the language carries so much of the mark
Everyone in the room has the same agents, so everyone can produce a page that looks fine. What an agent cannot do is know what you think, what you’ve done, or what you want. The generic-sounding portfolio is the one that got typed by something with no information about you — and it reads that way immediately.
Build the smallest version of my portfolio site that satisfies the plan below and gets deployed to a public URL.
GOAL: [paste yours] SCAFFOLD: [paste yours] EVALUATE: [paste yours]
Ask me anything you need before you start. Leave every sentence about me as TODO — I’m writing those myself.
Your site is live and looks good. How do you know it's finished? reveal
Because you wrote the standard down before you started and it passes. If the only answer is “it looks done,” you skipped Evaluate — and so did the agent.