Hey everyone so I have built a website (my portfolio) of projects I have done with my home lab so far to also help with applying for my first position in the IT field. I’ve been actively trying to get in the field applying for help desk or anything entry level while Im in school. I should be done in May of 2027 and have my Associates in applied science in computer information systems but any feed back on some projects I could take on or do to help bolster my portfolio or anything i can do to fix it up or even fix up my resume (its linked onto the website as well) would truly be welcomed!!!
There is a 6 year gap (Nov 2013 - Dec 2019) in your work experience summary. That will raise some serious questions unless you can offer specifics, which the potential employer will accept as “contributing” to advancement of your career.
Presentation-wise, the font size is too small for people who prefer to work with a paper copy. Recommend restyling to take that into account, but if you want to restrict to 2 pages, then you need to condense, because the volume of information is too “dense” for the print page size (assumed to be Letter).
Keep in mind that today, filtering is done by automated scan and OCR and keyword/phrase filtering … so choose your wording carefully, to ensure that the focus is correctly “recognized”.
For the web site, all I can say is that it seems extensive, but if intended as an extended marketing tool, it might be better that you always have only 1 screen of data for any page, with everything a click away from a visible hierarchical index. But that is just my opinion.
Good luck!
4 Likes
Man, thank you. This is the kind of feedback I was actually hoping for, so I appreciate you taking the time.
The gap catch is a fair one and I am going to fix it. To be straight with you though, it is not really a gap in my work history. I have a lot of work history. What happened is I cut the jobs that were not IT related to keep the focus tight for the help desk roles I am applying to, and doing that left a hole on the page that I did not think about from a screener’s point of view. I do explain it in every cover letter I send, but you are right that the resume has to stand on its own, because there is no guarantee anybody reads the letter. Easy fix. I am going to add a short additional experience block at the bottom with the employers, titles and dates and no bullets, so the timeline is unbroken without pulling attention away from the IT side.
On the font size and density, guilty. That is entirely the cost of forcing everything into two pages. Bumping the text up means something has to come out, so I am going to cut the homelab section down to my strongest few bullets and let the website carry the rest of it. That was probably the right move anyway.
The scanning and keyword point is well taken. I am going to keep two versions going forward. A plain single column one for the application portals i do online so it clean, and the styled one for when I am handing it to an actual person.
On the site, I want to answer the marketing tool part honestly, because I think that is where we see it differently. I am not really using it as a brochure. I do not have professional IT experience yet, so those project write ups are standing in for a work history. The detail is the whole point of them. Somebody who wants to know if I can actually do this has to be able to see what I built, what broke on me and how I got it back. If I cut every page down to one screen I think I would be trimming out the exact part that is doing the work for me.
The index idea I am taking though, and thank you for it. Having everything one click away from a visible list is a good call no matter how deep the individual pages run, and right now the only real way to find a project is to scroll the homepage looking for it. That is worth fixing and it does not cost me anything.
Seriously though, thank you. The gap thing especially. That one was worth the whole post.
5 Likes
When choosing your words, yes be specific, but where you need to “pare down”, chose the ones that are “pregnant wth meaning”, which will “entice” and drive a desire to ask for more detail. But don’t overdo that, because it could give the wrong impression.
Without being too detailed, each position and related tenure needs to be listed. If the position title doesn’t make it obvious, an associated one-liner with “portable skills applied/gained” is critical from an evaluator’s standpoint. That is one way to show a “continuous progression” in skills acquisition/mastery.
Not always apparent, the non-IT experience could actually be the wedge into a business where they hope the candidate has exposure to their non-IT business challenges … so, hopefully, those non-IT roles can be turned to your advantage if those types of business are in your sights.
(P.S. I worked in P&W Canada Mfg Eng 1979-1984, Process Planning and Process Development)
Just a point of curiosity and clarification, did your position as “Gas Turbine Systems Technician” require the acquisition of the combustion or mechanical knowledge, or was it limited to the instumentation side? If the others as well, again, depending on the target employer, that could be significant to underline business challenge awareness.
Just an afterthought, in case those didn’t cross your mind, would the areas of IT associated with remote/local management of
-
Power-Generating stations, or
-
Hydrocarbon Transmission Pipeline monitoring and boost-pressure pumping stations
be among your target markets? Security associated with PLC (programmable logic controller) remote access is an exposure in every country!
(P.S. At 55, I obtained a 1 year post-grad College Certificate in H.R. Management, which is what guides my comments.)
Again, I wish you well!
Friendly neighbour from the North!
6 Likes
I think your portfolio website looks really cool—just to verify, but to me, the text reads a bit “AI-generated”. I apologise if this is not the case, I hate that I have to ask these days, but it might come across as such to others as well. Is this the case or not? Any way, I’d go with authenticity over “perfect” writing.
4 Likes
Fantastic and professional-looking website. You show that you’ve really mastered the technology to the best possible effect. As colleagues above have stated, there are a few small wrinkles but I know you’ll smooth these out over time. They are too minor for me to even mention.
How did you design and build it? (I want one 
)
4 Likes
You have mentioned that you are applying for hepdesk position. Ok, I do know that helpdesks differ. Nevertheless the skills you do demonstrate apply for junior sysadmin at least. You are overqualified for ‘classic’ first and maybe second helpdesk line.
3 Likes
Thanks for coming back with the detail. This is the most useful thing anybody has told me in this thread.
You were right about the gap and I was wrong to wave it off. I said it was not really a gap, and then I went and looked at my own resume properly. The 2016 to 2018 job is actually on there. It is just sitting at the very bottom, underneath a job that ended in 2013, because my experience section is not in strict date order. So anybody scanning the dates top to bottom reads the Navy as my last entry and sees a six year hole. You did not miss it. I sadly had it hidden it at the bottom but will address and fix it.
The one line on portable skills per position is the part I had not considered at all. I was thinking of those entries as dead weight I would have to justify. Framing them as continuous progression changes what I put next to them.
Your point about non IT experience being a wedge is something that got me thinking. I work at a hospital right now and I had been treating that as unrelated to the IT applications. But if I am applying to a hospital IT department, I already know what HIPAA constraints do to everyday work, and I know you do not just reboot a machine mid shift because somebody is using it for patient care. Most people applying next to me have never set foot in one. I was hiding the most relevant thing I have and I will add it to my resume.
To answer your question, my rate was Gas Turbine Systems Technician Electrical, so my end was electrical and control rather than combustion. I troubleshot electronic and control circuitry down to component level from schematics, repaired cabling, wiring and connectors, and did preventive maintenance on the digital data equipment. I also ended up looking after the engineering department’s computers and its network, which is the thread that eventually pulled me toward IT. The mechanical rate (GSM) owned the combustion side and the engines themselves. So instrumentation and control is the honest answer, with plant awareness from standing watch rather than from turning wrenches on the turbines.
On power generation and pipeline monitoring, let me be honest. Those are not doors I can walk through yet. I am trying to land a first help desk role, and chasing industrial control security right now would split my attention and leave me with neither. But I did not know remote PLC access security was that wide open a problem, and I am in Texas, so there is no shortage of that work down here after doing a quick google search.
Thank you again. Seriously.
5 Likes
No apology needed, it is a fair question and you are right.
I use hermes agent loaded with nemotron 3 ultra 550b as an editor as I can write down what I do and I know what I mean when I’m reading my work but I don’t always get the point across that I want. So I write the rough version, then lean on it to tighten things up, and somewhere in that process the pages lost my actual voice and picked up that flat polished tone you are noticing though I always try to go back after it tightens it up for me and fix what I can. The lab is real, the projects are mine, the things that broke actually broke on me at midnight, but you are reading a layer of varnish on top of all that.
Thanks for saying something instead of just thinking it.
3 Likes
I am happy to break it down on what all I use but basically It is an Astro static site, so the whole thing builds down to plain HTML and CSS with no framework running client side. That is why it feels quick.
Where it gets fun is the hosting. It is not on a hosting provider. It runs as a container on a three node Kubernetes cluster in my closet, on a decade old workstation somebody else gave up on. It reaches the internet through a Cloudflare Tunnel, which means I have zero ports forwarded on my router, which is good because my internet is behind carrier grade NAT and I could not forward a port even if I wanted to(hopefully getting fiber in the next few years in my area).
Deployment is a GitHub actions pipeline I tag a release, it builds the image, pushes it to the registry, and I roll the cluster over to the new version. Uptime and certificate expiry are watched by Prometheus and Grafana, and the alerts land in a Discord channel I have set up as I did not want to pay for slaxs and I don’t like telegram.
There is a full write up of the whole thing on the site under the projects index if you want the actual configs. And if you want to build one, the honest advice is to start with the static site and normal hosting. Everything I just described came after, and it exists because I wanted to learn it, not because my portfolio needs it.
6 Likes
Of course, I am happy to see you’re taking all these points well! Just saying, but this is my perspective, I prefer an authentic voice over a “layer of varnish” that might lack a bit of personality.
Any way, good luck with the entire process! 
4 Likes
Wow!! And thank you for the detailed and very clear explanation. I’ve always been too paranoid to set up anything on my two NAS boxes that is public facing. 
I’ve heard a lot about Cloudflare but never been brave enough to try it out. I was on the look-out for a time-series database and came across Prometheus but chose QuestDb – super fast and understandable because it uses parts of postgresql. I was using it to store telemetry data from a control system. Also used Grafana, so nice to use!
As I am writing a book 
using LaTeX I use Gitea on my NAS to save all my changes but only so that I can switch to my laptop. I can’t access it from outside my house.
Pretty pathetic really! 
4 Likes
A few last comments for reflection …
[1] Exposure to ID theft
If you are looking at the IT security market, may I point out that, from a security standpoint, sharing the level of details that you have offered, both in the resume PDF and on your site, could be a stepping stone toward exposure to ID theft. I don’t know if the individual in the foreground of the Home page is intended to be you but, if so, that is inadvisable for the stated reason.
The public site should be limited to demonstrating the technologies mastered and reflect which of those you believe best-suited as applied to various GUI/task contexts.
If you do wish to share via electronic channel, it is advisable that you have a “private and secure” site, which can only be accessed if you verbally provide the login ID/password combo unique to each prospective employer (to track who actually accessed it and when). That way, the private site could be as “revealing” as required. Also, you could conceive the site such that, for each ID, you have an access checklist which, for example, would only allow visibility of “extra” military details if the employer is specifically looking for a placement related to a confirmed military contract. Essentially, the checklist would allow easy customization of the item collation for each custom-packaged grouping of details shared.
[2] Limiting opportunities for fraudsters
Given the discussion we’ve had here, once you feel that you have “harvested” all that you can, it is strongly recommended that you delete any posts containing “sensitive” personal information, as soon as possible, again from the standpoint of security.
Good luck!
4 Likes
Appreciate you circling back on this, and no, that point wasn’t lost on me. You’re right on both counts.
On [1]: the guy in the Home page hero isn’t me, it’s a public-domain Navy photo, so no face exposure there. But the resume PDF was the real problem and you nailed it. I’ve since stripped it down: first name and last initial only, no phone number, no personal email, and “Texas” instead of my actual town. The full version with real contact details only goes out once an actual conversation with an employer starts. Your idea of a gated private site with per-employer credentials is smart, especially the access-checklist angle for military-specific details. I may build that out later, but for now trimming the public PDF closed most of the aggregation risk without hurting discoverability.
On [2]: already on it. Went back through and scrubbed the sensitive details out of the older posts and the git history behind the site, so the un-redacted resume isn’t sitting in an old commit somewhere either.
Good feedback all around, the kind that actually makes you think about your own attack surface instead of just other people’s. Thanks for taking the time.
4 Likes
@Itachixkurosaki
I like your website; it’s just what I need for my interest in Kubernetes.
Perhaps I missed it – how did you carry out the scans here?
2 Likes
Appreciate that, seriously.
So the scans. Nothing exotic. It is a Kali VM sitting inside the lab running OpenVAS/GVM. But the tool honestly was not the interesting part. Where I plugged it in was.
Here is the thing I got obsessed with. A vulnerability scan only tells you what the scanner can reach. So I ran the same targets from three different spots in my network and compared what came back.
Spot one, my DMZ segment. This is where a public facing box would live. Scan finished in 91 seconds with zero results. And I got excited about that, because zero results there does not mean my cluster is clean. It means the firewall told Kali to go away before it ever touched the server segment. A scan that fails to find anything is proof the rule works. I count that as a win.
Spot two, inside the server segment. Now I am pretending I already own a box on that network. Insider position. This is the scan that actually produced findings.
Spot three, over the VPN mesh. Same nodes, but hitting them on their overlay addresses to see what my remote admin path looks like from the outside. Zero findings at every severity, because SSH is the only thing living on that path.
5 Likes
Thanks for the explanation. I haven’t tried it before, but I’ll give it a go.
2 Likes