I Rebuilt My Portfolio 3 Times — This Is What Finally Worked

Version one existed to check a box. I needed something online, I found a template, I shipped it in a weekend. It worked — until a recruiter asked me what I built and I realised I couldn't point to a single decision I'd made on the page they were looking at. That's a bad feeling.

Version two was more deliberate. I learned React, built it from scratch, and was genuinely proud of the code. But I'd made it for other developers. The animations were technically impressive. The layout was clean. There was almost nothing that communicated who I was or what problems I was good at solving. A designer friend looked at it for thirty seconds and said: 'It's fine. It just doesn't feel like a person made it.'

For version three, I started with one question: what do I want someone to feel sixty seconds after landing on this page? Not think. Feel. The answer shaped every layout decision — the parallax hero, the 3D element, the handwritten-style section headings. I wanted it to feel like someone who cares deeply about craft.

I also made one rule: no component goes in unless I can explain why it's there to a non-developer. That killed about forty percent of my ideas. What was left was leaner, more intentional, and for the first time, actually mine.