How to Make Your Own Portfolio Website Using Quarto

Why to make a portfolio website?

A portfolio website is a great way to maximize your luck surface area. If you do a lot of great stuff but nobody knows about it, it’s significantly less valuable to you and to others. A portfolio website helps to remedy that situation by creating a venue for you to show your work.

The mathematical below demonstrates why I think this is important. The blog post linked below gives a deeper explanation.

A mathematical illustration of luck surface area.

Modified from “Let It Rip”.

How to Make It

This slide deck walks you through how to create your portfolio website using a open-source scientific publishing tool called Quarto. There are many different tools and platforms available and you should just pick one rather than spend too much time deliberating. However, I like Quarto for several reasons:

  • All the code for your website is written in Markdown.
  • The markdown format makes it very amenable to tracking in a version control tool like Git.
  • You can easily publish for free on Github Pages with a one-liner from the command line.
  • Quarto handles math formatting, figure captions, and references with ease.

How to Publish It

The trickiest part of making your portfolio website is the last step of getting it live on the web. I’ve recorded a quick video tutorial below to show you how. The Quarto docs are also very helpful resource on this point.