[nluken]

I'm a still relatively early career back end developer, and github basically acts as a portfolio for anything that potential companies would want to see.

Think about what a portfolio site demonstrates. For a front end developer, these sites provide an opportunity to flex your design intuition and raw development skills by putting something flashy together. Your site could make a difference because it's demonstrating that you can do the day-to-day tasks you're being hired to do.

For a back end developer, the results of our work are less immediately obvious for someone who isn't already technically inclined, and by the time you talk to someone like that, you've already cleared the initial screening bar that a portfolio site would get a front end dev past. There's no real visual component to the work I do, so a site doesn't demonstrate anything related to my job. I still maintain a personal site with some rough details, but I don't think it's really helpful for my career.

I would also consider that front end devs generally enjoy working on the front end, while back end devs generally enjoy their work on the back end. So I'm way less likely to do web dev in my spare time, especially since 90% of portfolio sites have no back end whatsoever.