I built this portfolio to test how I make decisions under constraints.
I'm not a frontend developer. I didn't use a template.
I treated this like a product.
This is not a visual project. It's a decision-making project.
Full control over structure, interaction, and content. Simple enough to maintain. Fast to load. Nothing I didn't understand and couldn't debug myself.
Effect: Every interaction on this site — the cursor trail, the coin burst, the scroll fade-ins, the theme toggle — is code I can read, explain, and change. No dependency debt. No black box.
The pixel motif, cursor trail, coin burst when you hit the bottom, the 8-bit resume — one system with one intent. Something you move through, not scroll past.
Effect: Recruiters who get to the bottom of the page hit the coin burst. It's a designed moment, not a footer. The aesthetic signals precision and deliberateness — the same values that show up in the work.
Two AI coding agents extended what I could ship. I directed, caught mistakes, validated results. The AI executed. The decisions were mine. The velocity was collaborative.
Effect: Shipped a portfolio with custom interactions, a full case study system, an 8-bit interactive resume, and a bonus meta case study — in a timeframe that wouldn't have been possible building solo.
When the AI repeatedly stretched images to full width against explicit instructions, I wrote DESIGN.md — a constraint document checked into the repo.
Effect: The AI followed it from that point forward. The document became the source of truth for visual rules — a design system for the build process itself.
// Building the structure in code — no templates
Every screenshot Claude added mid-session was AI-generated fiction — NEXUS CORE dashboards, AETHER SYSTEMS mockups, QuantumFlow neon diagrams. None of it was real work. I caught it, removed all 12 fakes, and replaced them with 20+ real screenshots from my actual projects. Then wrote DESIGN.md so it wouldn't happen again.
// The AI-generated fakes. None of it was real work.
// Design iterations before landing on the final direction
Six agents ran in parallel — accessibility, performance, content, code, interaction, security. I compiled the report and triaged myself.
The domain took 10 minutes. The .app TLD enforces HTTPS by spec — security shipped free. The email took longer: Zoho hit a regional paywall not documented anywhere in their UI. Switched to Cloudflare routing, migrated DNS mid-project, configured MX, SPF, and DKIM in one pass. Routes into Gmail. No second mailbox, no monthly fee.
Detailed case study available for recruiter conversations — every decision, constraint, and trade-off documented.