Why I Built This
Every developer needs a place to show their work, and in 2017 I decided it was time to build mine. I was learning web development and figured the best way to solidify what I was picking up was to actually ship something. A portfolio site felt like the natural choice—practical enough to be useful, simple enough to be achievable.
The real motivation was wanting something that felt like mine. Template sites existed, but they all looked the same. I wanted to understand how websites actually worked, from the ground up.
What I Learned
This project was my introduction to frontend fundamentals. Writing HTML by hand taught me how the DOM actually structures a page. CSS showed me both how powerful styling can be and how frustrating it is when things don’t align the way you expect. JavaScript added interactivity, though looking back, most of what I wrote was probably unnecessary.
Bootstrap was a revelation at the time. The idea that I could drop in a class and get a responsive grid or a styled button felt like magic. It also taught me the tradeoff between convenience and understanding—I could make things look decent quickly, but I didn’t always know why they worked.
I spent way too long picking colors and fonts. I changed the layout probably a dozen times. But that’s part of the process when you’re learning.
Looking Back
Compared to the current version of this site, the v1 portfolio was rough. No build tools, no component architecture, no TypeScript. Just files in a folder. The code wasn’t organized well, and making changes meant editing the same HTML in multiple places.
But it worked. It loaded fast because there wasn’t much to load. And more importantly, it got me comfortable with the basics that everything else builds on. You can’t appreciate what frameworks give you until you’ve done things the hard way first.
I still have the code somewhere. It’s embarrassing in the way that old code always is, but it represents where I started. That counts for something.