Portfolio repositories that hiring managers open twice

We treat the README as part of the product. Students draft a narrative arc: problem, constraints, decisions, and known limitations. Hiring managers skim quickly; they reward clarity over buzzwords.

Diagrams stay hand-drawn style on purpose. Fancy tooling often hides unclear boundaries. A simple box-and-arrow sketch forces explicit choices about synchronous calls versus async handoffs.

Local setup must finish in under fifteen minutes on a fresh laptop. If a step requires tribal knowledge, we rewrite until a classmate can follow blindly. Docker Compose files include comments explaining why each service exists.

We end with a dry run: record the demo once, watch it at 1.5x speed, and note every moment of hesitation. Those timestamps become a punch list for polish.