A developer portfolio serves a different evaluation than a design portfolio — visitors are assessing technical judgment and real project depth, not just visual taste, and the site should be built with that in mind.
What recruiters and technical hiring managers actually check
Real project depth over volume. Three well-documented projects with a genuine explanation of technical decisions and tradeoffs outperform ten one-line project mentions. The evaluation is "can this person reason about a real problem," not "how many things have they touched."
Actual links to working code or live demos. A project listed without a GitHub link or live URL reads as unverifiable — the strongest signal a developer portfolio can send is "here's the actual thing, go look at it," not just a description.
The site's own technical execution. For a developer specifically, the portfolio site itself is implicitly part of the evaluation — a developer portfolio that's slow, has broken responsive behavior, or ships obviously unoptimized assets undercuts the pitch in a way it wouldn't for a non-technical portfolio, because visitors reasonably expect a developer's own site to be well-built.
What a good developer portfolio template structurally supports
A blog section alongside project showcases (writing about technical topics is a strong, differentiating signal many portfolios skip), clear project case-study pages with room for technical detail, and fast, clean execution that itself demonstrates competence.
The blog-plus-portfolio combination specifically
Technical writing does real work a project list alone can't — it demonstrates how you think, not just what you've built. A developer portfolio template with a built-in blog layout removes the friction of maintaining writing and project work as two separate, disconnected things.
A concrete starting point
This site's free developer portfolio template combines a project showcase with a built-in blog layout specifically for this use case — worth checking the live demo to see how the two sections work together before deciding whether it fits your own project mix.