everyone I'm sure and in this video I'm going to walk through a super easy way to make a portfolio website without any coding using GitHub pages so it's about that time of year people are graduating graduating college maybe you're graduating grad school and now it's time to enter the workforce and if you're like a lot of people you've probably heard of data science and how data scientists are doing all these cool things you know they're building chat gpts they're building models they're using machine learning and AI to solve business problems and create impacts and this sounds like a really fun and exciting field to be a part of as someone that works in data science a big problem for a lot of data scientists is not so much knowing your stuff like the technical side of things but it's the ability to show your stuff and sell yourself and this is just something that you never really do When developing the skill set to become a data scientist but if you're trying to get a job whether that's full-time at a company or you want to go into freelancing or Consulting being able to sell yourself is a critical part of the process so one thing that I found super helpful in getting data science work is having a website portfolio that employers can go to to see my experience my projects and just get to know me but the problem is I'm a data scientist I can build you a machine learning model but don't ask me to build you a website because it's not going to be great so I'm totally incompetent with HTML CSS any kind of like web dev type of stuff and if you're a data scientist it's likely that you're in a similar boat but lucky for us our friend GitHub has this built-in functionality for generating and hosting websites completely for free without requiring any kind of web development experience whatsoever so GitHub Pages makes this spinning up a website super simple and I use this functionality a lot in grad school in spinning up websites for my own portfolio and for projects that I was working on quickly running through here what the steps are you have these two options you can build a website from scratch and just host it on GitHub or you can go a much easier route where GitHub will generate you a website automatically from your readme file using a package called Jekyll And so here all you gotta do is fill out your readme file with what you want in your portfolio and then Jekyll will take that text and generate a website based on the theme that you choose not too long ago like one two years ago this was like really really stupid simple just looking at this website it's a pages.github.com just a few steps so you go to the repository settings and then it used to have this Theme Chooser built in so you just say like which branch you have your readme file in and then you just like choose a theme and then you have this user interface this GUI where you could just click which theme you wanted and it would just automatically generate the website so when I first wanted to make this video I'm like okay yeah it's gonna be super simple show people how they can make a website completely for free free without any web development experience whatsoever but when I came to spin up my website this button was not there anymore this kind of let me down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what happened couldn't find anything anywhere no one's made a YouTube video about this no one's written a Blog about this github's documentation was not very helpful to me however after messing around with it for a couple hours I finally figured it out and now I'm gonna walk through step by step how you can build your website using GitHub pages and this built-in functionality so this is what the final product looks like so it's a really clean design cool looking website you have your picture here you think about your name like whatever job you're looking for I didn't do any kind of coding whatsoever I just typed up a markdown file and this was automatically generated so I was able to throw this together in less than 30 minutes because a lot of the stuff it's just like copy pasting from your LinkedIn or your resume or something similar and so this is the final product now I'll walk through the steps to build this so first step go to your GitHub Pro profile if you don't have a GitHub profile go ahead and make one it should be straightforward and a good idea if you're trying to get a job in data science here at our GitHub profile we're going to go ahead and click repositories and you can see this is the example portfolio I made this past week but we're not going to go there we're going to start over from scratch and click new and then we should get a screen like this so create a new repository repository name so we have two options here option one is if you want this portfolio website name to just be your GitHub username.github.io you just type that in right here so Shaheen T is my username GitHub dot IO this will appear in the search bar and this will be your website name I already created a website portfolio using this website name so it's not going to work for me but if you haven't done this already then it should work for you the second option is you can give it any repository name you like so it could just be portfolio well it could be data science it could be data scientist you know whatever you want and what's going to happen in the search bar for example if you make your repository name portfolio what's going to appear in the search bar is going to be your GitHub username.github dot IO slash whatever you make this repository name so if I make a portfolio it'll be Shaheen T github.io portfolio Okay so we'll go ahead and name it portfolio we don't need a description here and it's probably best that we don't have one but we're going to initialize our repository with a readme file so we'll click that this is gonna make it really quick and easy to spin up our website I'm not going to have a git ignore we're not going to add a license that's not necessary so just to recap we make our repository name either our GitHub username.github.io or whatever other name that we like so just go in portfolio here don't need a description and just be sure to click read me and then we're gonna create repository and there we go so now we have the super Bare Bones repository so we already have a readme file here but we're going to need to add one more file called a config file so to do that we can just go to add file create new file and we'll call it config.yml and so now that GitHub got rid of this choose theme button in the interface so let me go back now that they got rid of this choose theme button here and you can't have this super easy user interface for picking your theme you have to do it using this config.yaml file and so this is actually super simple and it's not much more difficult than this interface so I'm going to kind of jump ahead and this is the config file for the example that I've already put together we can just go ahead and like copy paste this so title would be at the top left corner of the portfolio website so you can just put your name here logo we can actually comment this out for now because this is going to be the relative path of the image you want on that left hand side so let me just go back so this is where the title appears this logo relative path is where this image is located in your GitHub repo but since we're starting fresh I'm going to comment that out if you want to add text below here so if we added a description to our repo it would appear here or we can overwrite that by manually putting a description here so show downloads true it's just giving you these options to download the zip the tar or go to the GitHub so I put true for my example portfolio if people want to steal the code but for yours I mean this is optional if you want people to be able to download your code you can make it false or just comment it out and then finally the key thing is this theme so instead of being able to click on the theme we have to manually kind of type it out using this syntax here so I went with this Jekyll theme minimal so that's what we're seeing here it's super Sleek super nice I think it makes a lot of sense for a portfolio but if you don't like that for every reason there are a bunch of other supported themes for example let's click on architect and we can see what that looks like so that looks like this a little different different design but again this will be generated automatically based on your readme file in the GitHub repository so I'll share this link it's pages.github.com themes and I'll share it below if you want to explore the other theme options okay so we have our title we're going to have show downloads we're going to just comment this out we don't really need that and then we're just left here so really right now all you need is the title and the theme that you want to choose you go ahead and hit commit changes and so now you have two files in your repository you have your readme file and your config file and now you can just start adding stuff in here so like data scientist education work experience uh data scientists full of points here we go big impact project one big impact project two let's see what else is good to have here education your work experience what else do I have projects yes that's important so projects see uh and then so on and so forth so you can start just building some stuff out I'm just doing this so when we spin up the website something appears so just through something really simple together here and so still we just have a readme file in this simple config.yaml file and then the last step is to go to settings here we're in settings then we're going to scroll down to pages and then we have this section here build and deployment so here we're going to leave the source as is we're going to deploy from a branch and then under Branch we're just going to hit Main and then we're going to keep it as root because we want GitHub pages to look at the readme file and the config file in our root directory and we're going to hit save so now notice that we didn't have that super simple GUI to select our theme and then if you hit add a jackal theme you get some instructions here but I got tripped up on theme theme name because this isn't the right syntax here so this uh typo here it's uh made this like really straightforward task like a two-hour task for me so you can put just Minima or minimal here you have to put Jekyll Dash theme Dash Minima so if you were in a similar boat and you were struggling for hours like me it's just a simple syntax issue and that's why the website's not working anyway going back so if we go here to actions we see it's already been built but if we came back earlier we would have seen this is like processing and something's happening but we built Pages was built and deployed so if we click over here to deployment we can hit this view deployment option here and it'll take us to our website so oh look at that then you can look in your search bar what the website name is so for me it's shaheent.github.io portfolio and then if we look over here we see our readme file built out we have data scientists which was in the title so I'll go back so we can compare so we have our readme file here so data scientist education work experience projects EEG band discovery that looks a little different but looks better here on the website and then we just build it out and so we can kind of do it on the cooking shows where I don't walk through the process here and just kind of jump to the final product and so going to this example portfolio repo here are a few simple things to do one I'll definitely add a assets slash image path and then dump all the images you want to use in your portfolio here going back next big thing is so we'll go ahead and edit this readme and so configuring a readme file is a lot easier than building a website with HTML you can just copy paste this or clone the repo and use this as a starting point you can customize the structure you can start completely from scratch whatever makes sense for you just a couple things you know you can add links here so this is the standard GitHub syntax you just say what you want the text to appear as and then this is what the link is that people click on if you want to add images you put the title of whatever image and then you put the relative path to the image so again it's in this assets image subdirectory and then that's the file name and then so on and so forth so really go to town on this you know you can spend probably hours just tweaking and fine-tuning it but this is hopefully a nice jump start and it'll get you something pretty close to a final product okay so I rambled on a bit at the end there but hopefully this is helpful you know it's hard to get that first job and bring to the data science field so I hope this kind of accelerates that process for you and if you enjoyed this video please consider liking subscribing and sharing the video with others if you have any questions about like building a portfolio or like getting a job data science you know feel free to drop those in the comment section below I do read all the comments and I try to respond to all the questions that I receive and as always thank you for your time and thanks for watching