How to build a powerful data engineering portfolio website (even if you suck at frontend) in 4 weeks
This is the no-BS guide for data engineers who want to publish a legit tech portfolio that looks good and works. Without wasting time on design rabbit holes.
This mini-course is part of the Level-up data engineering playlist. Click here to explore the full series.
Greetings, Data Engineer,
You and I worked on many projects with this publication. You built a pipeline with SpaceX data, learned type hinting, mastered Airflow, told stories, made your your work rock-solid with tests.
It’s time to show the world what you can do. This mini-course helps you create a personal portfolio website, so you can prove your expertise, own your story, and get noticed.
How to work with this mini-course
Just reading the article alone would take you over 20 minutes. So:
Bookmark this guide and set a reminder to revisit it weekly.
Skim the entire article once to understand the big picture.
Each week, complete the exercises before applying them to your own projects.
Take your time. Don’t rush to implement everything at once. Master each step before moving to the next.
Also, you will need about an hour to read the whole thing and write the code at once. It’s much easier to spend 15 minutes per week!
Why build a personal portfolio website
People Google you
People look you up. Always.
You meet someone at a meetup. You apply for a job. You comment on a LinkedIn post. Someone reads your name. Then they type it into Google.
What happens next?
If nothing shows up, it feels like you’re invisible. If your old Twitter from 2014 is the top result, it sets the wrong tone. But if a clean, professional portfolio website appears—suddenly, you look serious.
Your site is your handshake. It tells your story before you ever speak.
Explain your skills to everyone
You might have skills. You might write clean Airflow DAGs, scale Redshift clusters, or build CI pipelines for data tests.
But not everyone knows what any of this means.
A portfolio website helps. It lets you speak to different people. The hiring manager who skims. The HR recruiter who screens. The other data engineer who reviews your GitHub.
Each visitor gets a piece of the puzzle. You shape the message.
This is where you connect the dots for them.
You already have projects
You may not feel ready.
But if you’ve been following our level-up series, you’re more ready than you think. You’ve built side projects. You’ve explored new tools. Maybe you even wrote a few posts on LinkedIn.
All of that is gold.
You can start small. A project doesn’t have to be big. A working DAG. A cleaned dataset. A tiny Python script.
It all matters.
Show, don't tell
Resumes tell. Portfolios show.
You don’t just say “I know Python.” You show the repo. The screenshots. The CI badge. The Airflow graph.
People trust what they see. And when they trust you, they want to work with you.
That’s the whole point.
How you and I will build it
There are too many options
There are thousands of ways to build a portfolio website.
You could use Squarespace. It's polished. It’s fast. It also costs money, and customisation is limited.
You could use tools like Carrd or Popsy. They're cheaper. Easier. A few clicks and your site goes live. But they won’t stretch your skills.
I also like sharing Notion pages. Yes, it looks clean. Yes, it's easy. But you're here to learn. To grow. To stand out.
We’re going hands-on.
We’ll use Hugo
You and I will build a site using Hugo, a static site generator.
Why Hugo?
It’s fast. It’s popular. It’s used by real engineers and large companies. It compiles your markdown into HTML in milliseconds. It doesn’t require React or complex frontend work.
Most importantly, Hugo teaches you practical skills:
Folder structure
Templating
Markdown
Command-line fluency
CI/CD
These skills transfer. They show up in your dev work. They make you a sharper data engineer.
Also, this means, you can build and host your website completely for free only using Git and GitHub.
We’ll use a theme
Don’t worry. You won’t design the site from scratch. I don’t want us to die in the frontend hell.
You’ll pick a theme.
There are hundreds. Clean. Minimal. Some for writers. Some for developers. You’ll choose one. Tweak a few colours. Add your content.
This saves time. It keeps things fun. It gets you straight to the heart of the site, your story.
We’ll deploy with CI/CD
Your site lives in a GitHub repo.
Every time you push, it updates automatically. We’ll use GitHub Actions to do that.
You’ll learn how CI/CD works. How to configure it. How to set it up with Hugo.
We’ll also add a custom domain. Optional, but powerful.
You’ll control your personal brand. Fully.
Let’s do it
Before we begin
Building websites is very unnatural for data engineers. You may feel overwhelmed and get stuck. Here’s how I can help:
You can see the complete result on this web page.
Ask a question by responding to this email or over the chat.