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Building a Data Science Portfolio Website in 15 Minutes
I tried Porfoliodown: The Data Science Portfolio Website Builder – here are my thoughts.
So you want to be a data scientist? You’ll need a data science portfolio.
A data science portfolio website is one of the best ways to launch your career, proving to hiring managers and recruiters that you can actually do the job.
Unfortunately, the skills necessary to make a beautiful website are often very different from the skills you’ll need to learn to become a data scientist–web design and development are a far cry from statistics and machine learning.
Enter portfoliodown. Portfoliodown is a new R package developed by Matt Dancho at Business Science to help data scientists create free portfolio websites quickly and easily. But does it really work?
In this article, I try out portfoliodown so you don’t have to, testing their claim that you can “make a data science portfolio in under 15 minutes.” I’ll share my experience following along with the Business Science portfoliodown demo and customizing their template to meet my needs. I’ll conclude by giving my final verdict on portfoliodown and comparing my actual data science portfolio website created with Wix (sethbilliau.com) to my new portfoliodown website (sethbilliau.netlify.app/).
Using Portfoliodown
Creating a Portfoliodown website is as painless as advertised. There are only a few steps in the process — I’ll walk through my experience below, but feel free to refer to the official Business Science portfoliodown tutorial as an additional guide.
Download the portfoliodown website template
Though portfoliodown is an R package, you don’t actually need to know a lot of R to use it. In fact, the following block of code is the only R code that I wrote during the whole process! It is, however, an important block of code that installs portfoliodown, creates a project directory, downloads the portfoliodown website template, and hosts the newly-created website locally.
