I've always wanted my own portfolio. A year back, I saw someone made a CSS library based off of 1.6 on Hacker News and immediately KNEW I had to use it as a base for my own website. At the time I had just done some work using React and Material UI with micro-frontends at Motorola (and at the time AI was shitty) and was deep into listening on front-end adjacent technologies like learning about the event-loop or how React was first to popularize the virtual DOM.
Even before then, during my time in college (2019-2023) bootcamps were very popular and it seemed being a web-dev was both the path of least-resistance AND what all the cool kids were doing. So I took some classes at UCSC in Full Stack Web Development and it ended up being my favorite series of classes in college for its interactive practicality. I thought, at the time, that I knew I wanted to be a web-dev, and that's where all the fun was to be had.
Fast forward to 2024, I had just landed my first job at a shady company doing a mix of embedded programming, sales engineering, and tech support. I made minimum wage and commonly worked 45-50 hours per week. Now, you may ask, how it came to be that I arrived at this position --- but like I said, it was a pretty shady company. Needless to say I quickly quit (the circumstances were actually non-career related, but that's another story), moved onto another IT adjacent role in health where they paid me nearly double, and even let me program a POC for a rewards system. Of course, this wasn't software engineering, and despite how poorly I was treated at my first job, the first job actually revived a spark in me for programming. Somewhere along that path I started consuming content around coding and I began obsessing over the idea of working at a company processing big data or dealing with large amounts of scale.
Naturally, I started to lean into fantasizing about distributed systems and backend engineering. When I landed my first, real developer job at Motorola Solutions you could not BELEIVE the dread I had when my first project was to create an admin dashboard to manage the Client Credentials Flow (OAuth 2.0) in React. I had come FULLY circle from wishing I was doing "trendy" web-dev to ruminating over the thought of my career dying because I had just became another React engineer. How ironic. Also on a side note, during that entire project I was the ONLY frontend-dev in my team and adjacent. I actually think they gave me that task because no one on my team (full of tenured engineers) had done much modern web-dev at the time. So I'm pretty sure I shipped some half-baked code that woud make even 2024 GPT models cry --- I'm not sure if it's even being used today. I just know the PM for it unfortunatley got laid off.
Anyways, needless to say this little short story is all just a setup for me to inform you that I HAD to use AI to generate my entire website. There was totally no way I was going to spend my time doing front-end again just to display static html neatly. In all seriousness, I wouldn't have been able to make somethig like this this fast (in a few hours) and make it look as nice with how little time I'd be willing to invest. Going back to the beginning, the reason I knew I needed to make my website with a 1.6 theme was because I found gaming to be a heavy influence on where I ended up today. I probably would have never been a software engineer otherwise. Counter-strike was one of my very first games on PC, I have about 2.5k hours across 2 acounts in CS:GO and it led me into being pretty good at other competitive fps games. Lastly, I can't in my good conscience claim something as mine if I did not properly attribute the work that it took. So there you go, yeah, I'm a baddie that slopped some 1.6 flavored html.
So I'm only mentioning this because I wanted to bring out a quality I strive to uphold: fundamentals. I'm serious when I said I was kinda good at fps games, whatever it took me to get to that stage are the same elemnts I try to apply in other areas of my life --- because if I didn't, I'd start moping around thinking I got nothing out of wasting my thousands of hours of my childhood away. This means that I genuinely, intrinsically care about learning things deeply the right way. This means understanding the principles of why things work they way they do, and building a natural intuition that allows me to one day grow strong taste and reach the "edge" of the most novel discussions. So when I skip learning how to properly consume a CSS library and create something as simple as static html pages, it spawns an incessent anti-pattern in my brain that I have to scratch. But it's only front-end, and AI can do that so it's okay right? Anyone?
And finally, this brings me back to my first sentence: "I've always wanted my own portfolio." At the time, my only real purpose for having a website was to look good for companies so I can get hired into a place that pays me well and provides me with a wealth of engineers in which I can learn best practices from. Now, I'm a little slightly more grown and just want a place for my own. This place STILL would be kept as a presentation for my professional life, but it's only an undertone. In a world where everyone in my generation is making uninspired, ai-slop I can't bring myself to see the point of such a thing as a portfolio anymore. That's why I want to make sure this website isn't all about career or another flavor for a resume. I want it to be something more authentic, and to show that I am what I say I am, and to show that betting on myself takes me a lot farther than becoming someone else. And if not --- ggs I guess.
(computer please format my text, apply nice formatting, do not change the content, make it readable, computer show me how to deploy my website)
Computer's brief review: this post has the energy of someone trying to write a simple portfolio update and accidentally opening a ranked match against their entire relationship with software, taste, AI, Counter-Strike, and capitalism. Strong voice, zero camping.