The questions you'll actually have.

Start with this question: What do I want someone to think about me after spending five minutes on this site? That's your north star. Everything you include either supports that answer or it doesn't.

A few questions worth sitting with:

• What work have you done that you're genuinely proud of — not just "it was fine" but actually proud?
• What problems have you solved that took real thinking?
• What are you curious about right now, that a stranger might find interesting or surprising?
• What do you want to learn this summer? Could that learning process itself be a portfolio piece?

You don't need a lot of pieces. You need a few pieces that are honest, specific, and well-documented. A single project explained clearly is stronger than five projects summarized vaguely.

Then you build a passion project — and it's equally valid for this competition. Equally.

A passion project is something you build because you're genuinely curious about a problem or question. It could be:

• Analyzing a dataset about something you care about and publishing your findings
• Building a tool that solves a real problem in your life or community
• Learning a skill (a programming language, a design tool, a framework) and documenting the process
• Exploring a question — economic, social, technical — and writing up what you found

The test isn't "did I have a professional sponsor?" The test is "did I do real work, think hard, and document it honestly?" Passion projects often show more initiative than internship documentation because they're entirely self-directed.

Start by getting curious. What's a problem you've encountered recently that you wanted to understand better? That's usually the best starting point.

Great — now you need to be thoughtful about what you can share publicly.

Check with your employer first. Many companies have NDAs or confidentiality policies that restrict what you can publish. Read anything you signed when you started. When in doubt, ask your supervisor or HR: "I'm building a portfolio project — is there a policy about what I can share publicly from my work here?"

Most employers are supportive of students building portfolios, especially if you:

• Anonymize sensitive data (remove client names, internal figures, proprietary details)
• Describe the type of work rather than exposing the specifics
• Focus on your thinking process and contribution, not the company's confidential information
• Get explicit approval before publishing anything that references the company

A well-documented case study that anonymizes client details can actually demonstrate more sophistication than raw screenshots — it shows you understand the professional context of what you're sharing.

Here's the principle: more work you do, the simpler it needs to look.

A portfolio loaded with animations, gradients, and clutter usually signals that the creator is compensating for the absence of real content. A clean, spare portfolio with strong work underneath it signals confidence. It says: the work is what matters here.

Polished doesn't mean elaborate. It means:

• Everything loads
• Nothing is broken on mobile
• Text is readable — good contrast, reasonable font size
• The structure is clear — a reviewer can find what they're looking for
• You've written enough context that the work speaks for itself

The last point is the one most people skip. A portfolio piece without context is just a screenshot. Tell the reviewer: what was the problem, what did you do, what happened, what did you learn. Four sentences is often enough.

Yes — and you should. Here's the honest framing:

AI amplifies the work you put in. If you've thought hard about what you want to build, who you are, and what you want to communicate — AI will help you execute that faster and better than you could alone. If you haven't done that thinking, AI will produce generic output that communicates nothing about you specifically.

AI is a collaborator, not a substitute for judgment. It can:

• Write and debug HTML/CSS you direct it to write
• Suggest structure when you describe what you're trying to communicate
• Help you refine language when you've already said what you mean
• Explain concepts and errors when you're stuck

What it cannot do: decide what's interesting about you, figure out what you actually built, or produce something honest without honest input. The thinking is still yours.

Reviewers will be evaluating authenticity and clarity of thought. Work that reads as generic AI output without real substance will be recognized as exactly that.

A team will review entries. Each category is evaluated on its own criteria, but across all categories reviewers will be looking for:

• Clarity of thinking — is it clear what you did, why, and what happened?
• Quality of execution — does it work? Is it coherent? Does it reflect care?
• Authenticity — does this feel like a real person's real work, or a performance?
• Communication — does the portfolio tell a story that a stranger can follow?

For each category specifically:

• Business: Evidence of real impact, professional-quality deliverables, clear client or project context
• Personal: Passion projects and who you are beyond a résumé — does it feel authentic and genuinely revealing of you?
• Design: Visual hierarchy, typography, layout, mobile experience — design as communication, not decoration
• Problem Solving: Does it actually do something? Is the problem real and hard? Is the approach rigorous or creative, and documented in a way that shows thinking, not just output?

Being stuck is a normal state. Here's a productive sequence:

1. Ask Claude Code. Describe what you're trying to do, what you've tried, and what the result was. Be specific. Vague questions get vague answers.
2. Search the web. If you hit a technical error, copy the exact error message into Google. If you have a conceptual question, try phrasing it several different ways. Stack Overflow and GitHub Docs are excellent resources.
3. Ask a peer. Not "can you do this for me" but "I'm trying to X, I've tried Y and Z, and I'm stuck — does this make sense to you?" Explaining a problem out loud often solves it.
4. Take a break and come back. This is not a platitude — many problems that feel unsolvable after 30 minutes resolve themselves after sleep.

The discomfort of being stuck is not a sign you're doing it wrong. It's the feeling of learning. Every professional developer gets stuck multiple times a day.

Submit through the submission form. You'll enter your name, email, your live portfolio URL (e.g., https://your-username.github.io), the category you're entering, and a short note on what you learned and how you grew.

You submit one category per entry. If your portfolio could reasonably compete in more than one category, just submit the form again for each — it takes a minute.

Deadline: August 24, 2026, at 11:59pm Pacific.

There are no extensions. The deadline is the deadline. If you haven't launched something by then, you haven't submitted — and the goal of launching something is more important than waiting until it's perfect.

After the submission deadline, reviewers will evaluate entries against the criteria for each category. Review will happen within a few weeks of the deadline — exact timeline to be confirmed.

Winners will be announced at a celebratory event (details to be confirmed) shortly after the review period. All entrants are invited.

But here's what's true regardless of the outcome: you built something, you shipped it, and you have a live URL. The competition is a frame. The portfolio is the point.