Advanced example
One deep project carrying the portfolio
Self-taught, changing career after four years in another field. No degree, no commercial experience. Applying for junior roles at product companies.
Target role
Junior software engineer
The header
The only job of the header is to answer “who is this and what do they build?” before anyone scrolls.
Sam Okonkwo — software engineer
Self-taught developer, previously a logistics analyst. I build distributed back-end systems in Go. Open to junior roles.
The projects
Two projects, ordered by strength rather than by date.
1. queuelite
A distributed task queue with retries, backoff and a dead-letter queue. Used in production by two of my own services.
| Stack | Go, PostgreSQL, Docker Compose |
|---|---|
| Evidence shown | Source, architecture write-up, chaos-test results, a dashboard demo video |
The technical decision it leads on. Used SELECT ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED in Postgres rather than adding Redis, which removed an entire piece of infrastructure at the cost of throughput I did not need.
2. Observability stack
Metrics, logs and distributed tracing across my own services, plus a written post-mortem from a deliberately broken deploy.
| Stack | OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo |
|---|---|
| Evidence shown | Dashboards, the incident write-up, configuration repository |
The technical decision it leads on. Sampled traces at 10% after finding full tracing added 8ms of p99 latency on the queue's hot path.
Why this portfolio works
- One genuinely deep project carries the whole portfolio, which is the right strategy without a degree to lean on.
- The two projects are connected — the observability work instruments the queue — so it reads as a system rather than a list.
- The incident post-mortem is an artefact almost no junior candidate has.
- Previous career is stated plainly as context rather than apologised for.
- Every performance claim comes with a number and a method.
What it would still improve
Every portfolio has gaps. Naming them is more useful than pretending the example is finished.
- Nothing user-facing. One small front-end piece would answer the 'can they build a UI' question that will otherwise come up.
- Two projects is thin if one of them is not read closely.
The ten-second read
Someone who has built real infrastructure and can reason about failure. The lack of a degree stops being the first thing you notice.
What to take from this
Copy the structure, not the content. The claim, the projects, the technical decisions and the voice have to be yours — those are the parts a reviewer is assessing, and a borrowed About section reads as exactly what it is.
If you want to work through your own version, the complete walkthrough is here and the free toolkit has the checklists and the case-study template that produce the project write-ups above.
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