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Polywork personal portfolio

How to tell your story on Polywork

At its core, Polywork is an identity product – a personal portfolio for you to slowly climb out of the narrow occupational box you’ve been relegated to and instead showcase all of the things that make up your impressive (but sadly hidden) online resume.

Polywork’s vast community of creatives, professionals, and creative professionals all have a story to tell, but may not feel they can as easily share their true narrative. Let’s fix that.

What’s in a Polywork narrative?

Here, we want to show you that it's possible through the following examples of how a few individuals build their personal portfolios that not only stand out, but also tell a compelling story of what they’re up to inside and outside of their work lives.

1. Putting the advocate at equal footing with developer

Pachi Parra is a developer advocate for GitHub by day and, as they put it, a public learner at all times. Here, Pachi shares more on that concept:

Pachi’s profile is a tribute to multiple talents and passions, and includes:

  • Her resume
  • Her highlights in dev, mentoring, and streaming
  • Links to all of her leadership roles out of her day-to-day job

2. Software engineer by day, content creator by mid-day

Nick Taylor’s story may be about bending time, considering his active newsletter, streaming, podcast appearances and writing on open source projects, all of which appear front and center on his page, as seen below.

Nick also makes great use of his Polywork banner image, pointing to his site, iamdeveloper.com (llamas not included).

3. Leader, by example

Cassidy Williams “makes memes and dreams…and software” through her day job as CTO with Contenda, coupled with her other pursuits highlighted in Polywork.

Cassidy is a leader in placing humanity in the fore of her work and in Polywork, taking full advantage of her bio to explain that she uses Polywork to showcase her content creation efforts, including:

  • Easily access to her blog posts through Highlights
  • Embedded YouTube videos
  • Updates, including when she’s live streaming/memeing on her Twitch channel

4. Multidisciplinary multimedia

Aaron Gustafson aims to make “the web (and world) a little more egalitarian every day” through not only his day job with Microsoft, but as an author and speaker around the world.

Viewers can easily navigate his online resume, which includes:

  • His writing
  • Media appearances
  • Presentations
  • Mentorship program

5. The pen is as mighty as the SEO

Singapore-based Chu Jie Ying mixes writing, images, and multimedia to give viewers a full story of her career in SEO...

…and how she balances that with deep thinking around perfect being the enemy of good.

The best ways to tell your story on Polywork

We hope the above serve as inspiration for the story you’re building on Polywork. To recap, a few helpful tips:

1. Don’t overlook your bio. We know it’s difficult to talk about yourself, but the best way for people on your page to understand your story starts with your bio. No need to write a novel (less is more still applies), but getting to know you isn’t just what you do, but the diverse interests that likely brought you to Polywork in the first place.

2. Multi-media is a plus. Have a podcast or Twitch stream or are thinking of launching one? Polywork’s community of makers and creatives make up a global audience to introduce to and engage with your content. Better yet, a lot of them have even become valued guests.

3. More is more. Epic updates are not necessary on Polywork. That’s ok! One way to make your page stand out is by starting with written highlights and adding in any images from work, life, and anything in between that bring people closer to the real you.