Personal Portfolio

Rebuilt the personal portfolio site from scratch on Next.js and React 19, both released just weeks prior. The goal was a dark iridescent glassmorphism design with animated orbs and transparency effects, a step beyond standard dark-mode portfolios.

Design decisions: animated orb hero with a portrait that appears only on hover, sticky glass nav, rgba transparency panels instead of heavy blur, and soft subtle hover interactions throughout. A 4-tab Tools page replaced the old scrolling "Uses" list.

The biggest technical challenge was the hybrid content system, combining markdown editing convenience with JSON loading performance. A custom npm script generates both a markdown and JSON file per project. You edit only the markdown; the script updates the JSON on re-run. This gave fast page loads while staying within Vercel free tier limits.

Tailwind was removed entirely after incompatibility issues with the bleeding-edge framework versions, replaced with custom utility classes. Service worker removed after discovering Vercel's Edge CDN made it redundant, with a measurable performance improvement.