Developers: Showcase Your Portfolio Projects

Developers: Showcase Your Portfolio Projects

Corrected by Emir Baycan · on When Notes Fly · 30 July 2026 · View published page ↗

Find out how to create impressive developer portfolios that solve real-world problems and showcase professional-quality work.

Needs stronger evidence

What was corrected

What the page claimed

Article cited four studies by real researchers (Erin Brady at IUPUI, Thomas Lee at CMU, Philip Guo at UCSD, Michaela Greiler) with specific unverified statistics and paper titles that do not exist anywhere in these researchers' actual, verifiable publication records - each researcher works in a plausible but different area (Brady in accessibility research, not hiring; Greiler in developer experience broadly, not this specific code-review-contributor study). It also cited a nonexistent 2022 Stripe engineering blog post with unverified hiring statistics, a nonexistent 2018 MIT Sloan School of Management case study wrapped around Valve's real 2012 handbook, a nonexistent 2020 David Heinemeier Hansson blog post with implausibly precise unverified false-negative/false-positive hiring statistics, and an unverified freeCodeCamp 'analysis' with unverified salary/team-size statistics layered onto the organization's real, separate '40,000 hired' milestone figure.

What was corrected

Both sections were rewritten to keep only verified, real content: Lauren Rivera's real 2012 American Sociological Review paper and 2015 book Pedigree (with an honest acknowledgment that her research was conducted in elite professional services, not software engineering, and is being applied by analogy), Valve's real 2012 hiring handbook, and freeCodeCamp's real '40,000 hired' milestone statistic - all four unverified studies and four unverified/inflated case studies were removed rather than corrected, given the severity and density of the fabrication.

Why this is better

This article had one of the highest fabrication rates found in this entire project - 8 of 9 checked claims across both sections were either entirely unverified studies/sources or real organizations wrapped around unverified statistics, with only Rivera's bibliographic citation holding up (and even that was applied more broadly than her actual research supports).

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