Final portfolio brief and ship checklist
The previous lesson's checklist is internal: does the system actually work. This one is external: can someone who has never seen your capstone understand what you built, why it mattered, and what you personally decided - in under two minutes of reading, or ninety seconds of you talking.
Write the case-study README
- Problem - one paragraph, plain language, no jargon a hiring manager would not know.
- Architecture - one diagram or a short ordered list: agents, memory, tools, data, and how a request moves through them.
- Stack - name the real tools (FastAPI, LangGraph/ADK, your vector store, your memory store, your eval harness, your host) so a technical reader can place your skill level immediately.
- Evals - what TRACE found, the taxonomy you built, and at least one concrete fix with a before/after number. This is the paragraph that separates you from everyone who shipped a demo with no evidence it works.
- Memory - what you keep, when you write it, where it lives, how you retrieve it, when you forget it. Five short answers, not five paragraphs.
- Live URL and a 30-60 second screen recording, in case the live system is down when someone checks.
Turn it into interview talking points
Pick three decisions you actually made and be ready to defend each one in a single breath: why an agent and not a fixed workflow, what your evals caught that you did not expect, and one memory or security tradeoff you chose deliberately. Interviewers remember specific decisions, not feature lists.
Decision: what you chose. Why: the tradeoff you weighed (cost, latency, control, risk). Evidence: what you measured, saw, or shipped that proves it was the right call.
Ship the checklist
Before you call the capstone portfolio-ready
- README covers problem, architecture, stack, evals, and memory in a stranger-readable page
- At least one before/after metric from a TRACE fix is written down, not just remembered
- Live URL works in incognito, plus a recorded backup demo
- You can state, out loud, why each of your three biggest architecture decisions was the right one
- LinkedIn post or portfolio-site entry published with a link or recording, crediting the programme
Good to have
- A short blog post walking through one failure your evals caught and the fix
- Screenshots of the eval suite pass rate before and after your fix
- The repo pinned and cleaned up (README first, no stray debug files at the root)
Tip
Reuse, do not duplicate
This is not a second production-readiness pass: use the previous lesson's checklist for that. This lesson is purely about turning a working system into something a stranger, recruiter, or interviewer can understand and remember.
Done when
- README covers problem, architecture, stack, evals, and memory
- At least one before/after metric is written down
- You can explain three architecture decisions in one breath each
- Portfolio post (LinkedIn or site) is published