Why I Built My Portfolio
I built my first portfolio while I was nearing graduating college. My first website I ever built was an Amazon clone and I really enjoyed the process of web development. Naturally I began building a personal portfolio website for myself to test my skills.
How I Built My Portfolio
Over the years I elevated my tech stack, starting from the beginning to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to now using Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and TypeScript for my portfolios.
Challenges in Creating My Portfolio
I always struggle when designing my portfolios, I find it hard to design something that feels rightfully "me".
How I Overcame Those Challenges
I initially began searching through inspiration sites like Dribbble for design inspiration for developer portfolios, but after coming up short several times on good inspiration I built webportfolios.dev.
Inspiration
Through promoting my website, webportfolios.dev, I was able to get in touch with lots of creative developers with unique portfolios. Slowly overtime I began to piece together elements I liked from each of these portfolios into something that felt more "me".
Lessons
Since 2020 (when I built my first portfolio) I learned that the most important thing about a portfolio isn't so much the design; it's the purpose. I would often try to over design my portfolio and fill it with heavy animations while I was using my portfolio to submit to job applications. I learned quickly that I was draining too much time on my portfolio rather than building projects, so I have since only designed minimal portfolios.
Future Plans for My Portfolio
I'm quite happy with the current state of my portfolio, it already has next/mdx locally implemented for when I decide to start blogging. The only changes I see for the future is possibly tweaking the dark color theme, I had initially used some of the colors from a theme I was using in my nvim config but have since changed.
