The skill radar: A better way to visualize and classify your knowledge
tl;dr: Build your own skill radar with this code from Github.
When you’re building a portfolio you may want to show which skills you have.
My site exists since ~2016 and I never found a way which makes me happy enough to show what I can. A list of skills just never made me happy, though I’m using it til now. But: This makes it look like a lot of buzz words which don’t show how much experience I have and how confident I feel in the technologies.
For example I am interested in Rust and Wasm, but never did a professional project or a large project. But this could be an interesting information for future workplaces or so.
One solution for this is a GitHub profile. But the stuff I’m doing in my private time differs in comparison to the stuff I’m doing in my professional time.
So everything has it’s advantages and disadvantages.
More often I see lists like the following one:
Kubernetes ||||||||||---- 80%
Java |||||||||||||| 100%
For sure this can show you how confident I am with these technologies. But what does Java - 100% mean? That I am a pro and know everything about it? Or that I am using it in my daily work? Percentages just don’t show how deep the knowledge is. That’s why this should be avoided in my opinion.
Skill radar to the rescue
A better way to show what skills you have and how deep they are requires the following:
- Categories for the skills. For a better overview.
- Classification of the skills. For an insight of how deep the knowledge is.
In the best case the classification doesn’t happen with numbers and more with words which have a semantic. this makes it possible to argue better about it. For sure it is far easier to say ‘I have profound knowledge of Kubernetes’ than ‘I know Kubernetes for 80%’. When will you reach 90%? And why isn’t it 70%?
The idea of the categories and classifications isn’t new and came into my mind when I was thinking about the tech radar by thoughtworks. It has four categories which show in four rings the recommendation, confidence and commitment for the usage of technologies.
Adapting this idea we can use it to classify the skills and display them on the radar like shown in the following image:
The categories
The categories (the four quadrants) of technologies depend on you, the developer. A cloud developer has another categories than an embedded developer or site reliability engineer.
You can define them as you want. For me as a developer with the focus on cloud applications, I have defined the following categories:
- Languages & Frameworks - The langues and frameworks I am using (e.g. Java or NestJS).
- Platforms & Infrastructure - The platforms and infrastructure tools I have worked at/with (e.g. Azure, Kubernetes).
- Tools - The tools I am using (e.g. Kibana, VSCode).
- Techniques - The techniques I am used to (e.g. OOP, Scrum, Containerization).
The classification
The semantics of the classification (the four rings) has the intention to classify it into four stages of knowledge:
- Interested - The stuff I am interested in, but didn’t get to use it.
- Adopting - The stuff I started to adopt already and have first, basic experience in.
- Profound - The technologies I am using in my day to day life and gathered already lot of experience. Confident enough to use it without the need of studying the basics and knowing the best way to set it up and use it.
- Special - The technologies I have very deep knowledge how the inner things are working. A lot of hours studying and ‘mastering’ them have been invested.
You can also read the rings from the inner to the outer as the ‘core’ knowledge: The inner ring represents my core knowledge on which I’m building up the knowledge of the other until they reach the special ring (in a perfect world).
Notices for categorizing
Technologies are changing fast and very often new interesting things appear which can be set into the interested ring or some aren’t relevant anymore. Furthermore as you gather more experience, you may want to move a skill into an inner ring.
So a review from time to time is important.
Also it is important to have a healthy mindset about own skills. I don’t think that I have the knowledge about the whole Spring Boot or Java world. But I think I have used it so much hours in professional contexts, that I can start a job in it and work on large-scale projects.
Building an own radar
As the generation is not a one-time generation, it would be nice to have an automatic generation which can be changed easy.
For this I have adapted the Zalando tech radar which is easy to configure and maintainable.
All code lays in a small index.html and contains the libraries and adapter.
You can add your own skills by creating a new Entry object and pushing it into the entries array:
entries.push(
Entry.init()
.withLabel("Java")
.inQuadrant(LANGUAGES_FRAMEWORKS.index)
.inRing(SPECIAL.index)
.asJSON()
)
Open the index.html in your browser and you will see the radar.
You can find the code and documentation on Github (PRs are welcome, I invested a very small amount of time).
Pros and cons of a skill radar
Lets’ have a look at the pros and cons of visualizing skills on a radar:
Pros:
- Gives more information than just a list or percentages.
- I think for most of the people a visualization is catching longer than just a list.
- Easy to modify.
Cons:
- Maybe a too big overhead - is anyone outside my bubble interested in such a big visualization?
- If you want to give a fast overview, than this is not the right way.
As you can see, this way has also disadvantages. I don’t think that this is the perfect solution. But if you want to give deep insights into your skills, then it is the best way.
Conclusion
This post showed a better way to visualize and show the skills which you are interested in.
Four categories should be enough and the classification in four rings can vary from interested to special. This gives an insight of how deep the knowledge is. Furthermore it is a nice tracker which shows into which topics you’re interested.
Have a look on my radar and fun building your own!