Into the Making of My Portfolio

It all started with a dream... and a stupidly ambitious deadline.

Portfolio websites are the absolute worst thing a developer has to build. You can build entire backend pipelines and wrestle distributed systems without blinking, but the second you have to show off who you are on a blank webpage, your brain simply gives up.

"I decided to challenge myself by designing and building a portfolio website in just four days. I hate JavaScript BTW. (this was said by me a year ago, now i ship 10k TS lines a week.)"

This is the story of three wildly different eras: the desperate four-day grind from three years ago, the intermediate version I threw together on August 31st, and the chaotic three-hour fever dream I shipped on September 25, 2026.

Act I: The 4-Day JavaScript Nightmare

Three years ago, the very first iteration was pure, unfiltered suffering.

I set a challenge to design and build an entire portfolio from scratch in four days flat. There was just one massive roadblock: I hate JavaScript. Always have, probably always will. Center-a-div logic and DOM trickery felt like a whole circle of hell compared to backend engineering.

It became a whirlwind of caffeine, ungodly late-night Discord calls, and getting carried by the bois whenever CSS flexbox decided to act like an alien lifeform.

It was messy, slightly terrifying, and powered mostly by spite. On night four, I pushed the final commit, swore I would never touch frontend code again, and called it a day.

It survived for years, but eventually grew stale.

Interlude: The August 31st Reboot

Fast-forward to August 31, 2026.

I finally scrapped the three-year-old dinosaur and built an updated version. It was cleaner, functional, and got the job done, but after living with it for less than a month, it still felt way too safe. It was missing personality. It did not hit the specific creative itch I actually wanted to show off.

So today, I decided to blow it up again.

Act II: The 3-Hour Fever Dream

Woke up today, September 25th, looked at the month-old August build, and decided I wanted something genuinely crazy.

No more generic tech-bro grids or boring sterile cards. I wanted something abstract, retro-themed, and minimal, loaded with beach components, washed palettes, and raw typography that actually had a soul.

Instead of spending weeks drowning in Figma wireframes, I did things differently.

I hopped onto Awwwards, scoped out high-end layouts for twenty minutes, and soaked in the visual direction. Then I fired up Claude Opus 5.5 Medium to handle the heavy frontend lifting so I wouldn't have to suffer through raw JavaScript boilerplate all over again.

We hammered through the design in three hours flat. We built out the minimal retro vibe, styled the custom beach components, ripped out the robotic AI fluff, and dialed in the layout until it looked tactile and punchy.

By the third hour, it was done and live.

Wrapping Up

Building a portfolio doesn't need to take six months of existential dread.

The original site three years ago taught me how to grind through a stack I despised. The August reboot reminded me that clean isn't enough if it lacks character. And today's build proved that having a clear taste and moving fast beats endless overthinking every single time.

Pick an aesthetic, set a ridiculous timer, stop procrastinating, and push the damn code.

If I as a backend dev can scrap an old site and ship a full retro beach-themed portfolio in three hours flat, you have zero excuses left. Get your lazy ass up and go build yours.