Hi everyone — I am trying to get a job in web development after a decade in a mostly unrelated field.

I am looking for ideas and tips to create a portfolio to send with applications. All of the websites I worked on ages ago have been taken offline or redesigned by someone else. I do have a website I created for my music, but it’s just vanilla HTML. I also have a personal website which is really the only thing I have to show.

I know HTML/CSS quite well, but that’s basically it. I’ve worked with WordPress for years but only just recently began learning enough PHP to do anything custom. I don’t really know Javascript much at all.

I have quite a few paid courses through Udemy for all these different areas but even as I have completed them, I don’t feel confident in knowledge of the different languages. These courses nearly always come with projects that the students create with the instructor. Should I use these as part of my portfolio? For some reason I never felt right doing that, since I didn’t build it myself.

So I guess I’m curious (if any of you are web developers) if you have suggestions for how to fill out a portfolio without any previous work examples.

Side note: I wasn’t sure how to word the title or my question particularly well so please edit it more clearly, Those Who Can Edit.

edit: thank you to everyone who took the time to reply to this. it’s all been very helpful and i appreciate everyone’s input immensely!

I have a little web app running on Deno Deploy and I want to see how it handles people connecting from multiple regions. There's a BroadcastChannel class that lets you send messages to any servers running in other regions, but to test it, I need to make connections in multiple regions, so there's more than one server running.

What are good ways to test this, either interactively or by writing tests? Maybe use a VPN? What's your favorite?

Hey there! Any web developers/designers out there that have resources on creating websites that are fully accessible? I am getting back into web development after a decade away and want to learn the correct way. Thanks for any tips!

I use Github and Netlify to run some simple websites for free. It works well. However, I've been thinking of experimenting with a database-backed website for fun and Netlify doesn't have any persistence.

What's a good way to do this that scales to zero when nobody's using it? I want to be able to forget about it entirely for months or years at a time. When someone visits, it should start up and run on demand without costing me $20 a month on standby.

Back in the day, I used Google App Engine for this. I learned a lot of datastore tricks to get around its poor latency, but I'm lazy and don't want to do that anymore. I'm pretty sure I want a SQL database and full text search. Either sqlite or Postgres would do, but I doubt there's a cheap enough way to run Postgres.

Litestream looks interesting and so does LiteFS, except that it's pre-1.0 and I don't know what changes fly.io will make that I have to keep up with. If I used Litestream, I'd have to figure out how to run it and where to store the replication logs.

Edit: one nice-to-have is being able to easily dump the database and run it locally or on another cloud provider. (I don't anticipate it getting so big that it's impractical.)

I'm a full stack dev and my current use of JavaScript language is limited to making the best (read trivial) use of jquery for DOM manipulation in my web apps which primarily use PHP or Python (Flask/Django) as backend.

Now, have you watched that popular thriller movie called Inception which is based on a radical sci-fi concept that an idea or thought can be implanted into someone remotely?

Just like that, I often find myself facing this strange idea that JavaScript is supposed to be just a toy running inside the web browser. No idea where exactly this idea came from! Each time I try to learn JS or think of getting deeper with things like npm, react, etc., this idea just pops up and kinda stops me from doing anything!

Is there any way to get rid of this idea somehow?

TLDR:

I need a website that let's signed in users vote on each others photos, and stores that data on who voted for what in a database.

Background

I run a facebook group of about 2,000 members. This group is designed for analog (any non-digital format) photographers to swap high quality artistic prints with each oter. The community was essentially dead and the admin wanted to throw in the towel so I took over. We've made progress, the group growth jumped by over 500% in the first month after I took over.

Right now trading prints doesn't work well. People make a post using the facebook selling format, and those who are interested comment with the image they'd like to trade for. The problem is that the posts get limited visibility due to facebook's algorithms, and stale posts hang around. All of this reduces over all activity, and the majority of posts don't end up in a trade.

My solution is to do a trade event with everyone participating at the same time. Since facebook doesn't lend itself to this I'd like to whip up a quick site for the event. My time is so limited these days I really don't have the capacity to build something from scratch, and the group certainly doesn't have any other developers to help out with it (it skews heavily on the older side).

I'd like to find an open source project that lets users sign in (sign in using facebook would be a bonus) and upload/vote on images. After the voting closes, I'll write code to pair everyone up in a way that optimizes for everyone getting to make a trade. If Alice votes for Bob's image, and Bob votes for Alice's image, they would get paired up to make the swap.

I feel okay writing the code to map out swaps, but I'm pretty terrible at web design and especially at front end design. I've looked across github, but I wanted to reach out and see if anyone could recommend something that I might of missed.

I don't expect to have 2,000 members participate, I think it may be as few as under 100, so hopefully I won't need to worry about scale.

Thanks in advance for the help!

I'm going to be building a simple blog for myself.

Partially I just want something really simple and customizable, and also it will be a fun little programming project.

I'll be using PHP and mySQL for the backend. I won't be using any sort of framework as it shouldn't be necessary for a very simple blog. I'm fairly comfortable with JavaScript.

What I'm imagining is some sort of JavaScript library I can just download, link to my html and then turn a textarea into a simple wysiwyg editor. It could be as simple as a markdown editor or something with a little more features.

It has to be free. Open source would be a plus.

If anyone has any recommendations or advice I would be very grateful. Thanks!