Module 4 · Career, projects and honesty Lesson 12 of 15
Build the portfolio project: a deployed tool you and two other people use
Build something small with real users: a study log, an attendance tracker, an event sign-up. Deploy it, and get three people to use it for a week. It is the thing you will talk about in the interview, so it has to be small enough to finish in a fortnight and concrete enough to show a person in one minute.
The concept
Build something small with real users: a study log, an attendance tracker, an event sign-up. Deploy it, and get three people to use it for a week. Finish it before you start the next one. A half-built idea shows nothing; a small finished thing shows that you can finish.
Use the tool as a collaborator, not an author: ask it for a plan, a critique and a checklist, and write the work yourself. In the interview the questions will be about the decisions — why this, why not that — and only the work you did yourself has answers.
Write one paragraph beside the project: what problem it solves, what you used, and what you would do differently next time. That paragraph is the interview.
Worked example
Finished, it is a live URL, a small amount of real data, and three people who noticed when you broke it.
Your practice task
Ask each of the three users what they would change. Fix one of those things, and write down why you did not fix the others.
Do this before moving on. Reading a solution teaches the shape of it; typing it teaches you.
Key takeaway
Build something small with real users: a study log, an attendance tracker, an event sign-up.
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You finished every lesson.
Your certificate is ready, and the projects you built are the proof to attach to an application.
Almost there
15 lessons left of 15
Finish every lesson to unlock the certificate. Each one ends in a practice task — do them and the final project brief writes itself.