The portfolio website

What makes a portfolio website effective in 2026?

Here’s how the current job market feels, to me, a software engineer:

• It’s easier than ever to game the applicant tracking systems with AI
• There can be thousands of perfect-looking resumes in a stack
• Sorting through them is quite the hurdle; it’s unsurprising that this process is even more automated than before

From my own experience, it’s also pretty easy to create a decent static website with the help of agents. It could easily be the case that the people reviewing resumes are running into the same problems with portfolios. Thousands of perfect-looking portfolios, each with a sleek, modern design, and insane SEO buzzwords.

This effect is compounded when I consider that during most of my college years, I was told to make my website concise. I received advice such as, don’t tell your life story on your portfolio website. Fair, but yet, my harshest critique for my own website is this: it does little to signal that “I’m a human who seriously cares about the work I’m putting forward.”

The traditional job application path feels more and more like a losing game.¹ If I’m going to build and utilize connections in the industry, why not make a website for that group of people, not some robot? The gamble to execute on is precisely that it’s more worthwhile to design a real website showcasing your life, over the traditional advice. We’ll see how it goes.

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