My Portfolio Website Evolution

August 14, 2023

My First Portfolio

About a year ago, I created my first-ever portfolio using React, but there were a few pitfalls with my prior portfolio website…

My previous portfolio website wasn’t bad. These pictures were at the end of its lifecycle. The website was considerably worse when I first started out, but the incremental improvements helped build it into a little more feasible portfolio. It was simple and had all the essentials you would want in a portfolio. The problem was, it was kind of slow… It also had many unnecessary animations including an incredible amount of scrolling animations which probably didn’t help with the speed. I also felt the design was a little lacking – too many things happening at once, and it just didn’t match with the minimalist design I envisioned. And so, I finally decided it was time for a new website.

Astro

After better understanding what a portfolio website required and a little guidance from a friend (Thank you Nick), I decided my second portfolio website would be built with Astro. The framework’s speed is great, and it proved much simpler to learn than React. The simplicity of the framework, my superior experience in web dev, and being able to reuse certain components from my React app made this website take significantly less time to build. I aim to continue to add more features and support throughout this website’s lifecycle just like I did with my previous website.

End Result

I knew the reduction of unnecessary animations on my part as a developer and Astro’s partial hydration and minimalist JS approach would result in a much faster experience. I expected the new site to be faster, but somehow, Astro’s speed still managed to surprise me. If you are reading this, I hope you enjoy the faster, sleeker overall experience, at least until I decide to refactor again lol.