Portfolio v1

The first version of my personal portfolio, built from scratch in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript over about three months in late 2023. No frameworks, no build tools - just hand-written markup and stylesheets, with everything wired together by raw DOM APIs and a few targeted libraries. Animations and scroll-driven transitions ran through GSAP, which gave me the control to fine-tune timing and easing curves until the experience felt smooth on every section.

I used Firebase as the backend for everything dynamic - the Realtime Database stored my software project metadata so I could update entries without redeploying, Cloud Storage hosted all the project images, and Firebase Hosting served the site itself. Tech stack icons came from the GitHub language colors registry; I’d fetch the language list per repo from the GitHub API and map each language to its color, then render a custom card UI that mimicked GitHub’s own theme but with the data presentation I wanted.

The design projects section was the part I was most excited about. My Behance presence didn’t capture the work the way I wanted, so I built a custom gallery to showcase years of design work - apparel, branding, posters, mockups - in a layout that gave each piece more breathing room. Responsiveness was handled entirely with CSS clamps and media queries, no JavaScript-based breakpoint logic.

This site is the predecessor to the current portfolio you’re reading. I rebuilt everything in Astro for the second version - faster, leaner, and easier to author content for - but the original is what taught me how much hand-tuning it takes to make a site genuinely feel polished on every device.