How I Built This (And Why I Didn't Overthink It)
Needed a portfolio, needed it fast. Here's the honest story of how I built it - and why keeping it simple was the right call.
The honest truth
I'm a backend engineer. Frontends are not my natural habitat, and the whole point of a portfolio is what it links to, not how it's built. Spending weeks on infrastructure just to have a place to show my work felt like exactly the wrong trade-off.
So I leaned heavily on Claude Code to get it off the ground. I picked Next.js 15 with the App Router - it handles routing, static generation, and MDX blog posts out of the box, which meant I could focus on content rather than the set up. Spinning up a separate BE and FE for a personal site? That felt like exactly the kind of overengineering I was trying to avoid.
In the end, I got a full working page adapted to my needs in less than a day. Pretty impressive, huh?
What's under the hood
Tailwind CSS for styling, MDX for blog posts (Markdown with optional React components, no database needed), and a couple of utility functions to read and parse .mdx files at build time. That's about it.
It's not fancy. It works!
What actually matters
The projects. The writing. Whether any of this is useful to whoever ends up here.
I'll keep adding to it as I go - more posts, more projects. The goal is to share what I'm learning, not to have the most impressive static site generator setup.
Thanks for reading.