After weeks of hard work, I’m excited to finally share my developer portfolio with the world! My goal was to create a clean, functional, and professional site that not only highlights my skills and projects but also offers a simple, user-friendly experience. In this post, I’ll walk you through the main features of the site and share a few key lessons I learned along the way.
Key Features
1. Minimalistic UI
I did not use any UI Libraries, I wanted to build clean, minimal UI components that keep the design simple and to the point, without distracting from the content.
2. Mobile-friendly UI and Theme Toggle
The website is responsive, and you can easily switch between light mode and dark mode, making the site comfortable to view in any environment, especially on mobile.
3. Straight-to-the-Point Homepage
The homepage is designed to be no-nonsense—about me, projects, posts and contact links are all there upfront, so visitors get the essentials right away.
4. Blog (Infrequently Updated)
I’ve also added a blog, where I’ll occasionally share my thoughts and updates as I work on new projects or features.
The Hidden Costs of a Portfolio
Absolutely free for now, but might have to incur some costs in future.
- Domain: $20/year for the custom domain.
- Free-ish Tools: Other services like MongoDB and Vercel (for hosting) are free for now, but may incur costs if my usage increases.
Future Plans and Enhancements
- Adding an LLM Chatbot: I want to add a chatbotwhich can answer questions regarding general topics about me, Planning to use OpenAI API but lets see.might switch to Claude.
- Switching Databases: I may replace MongoDB with Supabase, but that’s still undecided.
- Hosting: I’ll stick with Vercel for now, but if needed, I’ll switch to self-hosting using a PaaS like Coolify.
- Managing Blog Posts: Right now, blog posts are part of the project source, which triggers a rebuild on every commit. In the future, I may switch to a proper CMS or just use Obsidian to manage blog content more efficiently.
Thanks for checking out my portfolio! I’m excited to keep improving it and learning from the process. Feel free to explore and reach out if you have any questions.