Ten browser tabs open, and I've deleted more than I've written tonight. That's usually how these things start with me. I'm rebuilding my site, my portfolio deck, my resume, basically my entire public-facing self, from zero, again, and I keep going back and forth between "this is exciting" and "why do I have to do this right now, of all times." Both are true at once, apparently. That's allowed.
I was happy with the old version. Genuinely happy, not just the kind of happy you settle for because you're tired of looking at it. It was minimal. Clean lines, a lot of white space, almost nothing on the page except the things that actually mattered. I liked that about it for a long time. There's a kind of confidence in restraint, in trusting that people will fill in the blanks themselves if you just give them enough. I still believe that, mostly.
But somewhere along the way, minimal started to feel... thin. Like I was hiding behind the whitespace instead of using it. And now everyone's sites look like the ones you see on Framer, that specific flavor of clean-but-busy, a lot more information, a lot more sections, a lot more "here's exactly who I am and what I've done and why you should care," laid out in a way that still somehow looks effortless even though it very clearly isn't. I want that now. Not because minimal was wrong, but because I think I have more to say than I used to give myself credit for, and I've been under-selling it on purpose, hiding behind good taste instead of actually showing the work.
Gathering all that information is taking forever, of course. Nobody warns you that the hardest part of "add more information" is remembering what the information even is. Old projects, old case studies, screenshots that don't exist anymore because the product got redesigned three times since I touched it, numbers I half-remember and need to go dig up again. I keep opening old folders and going "oh right, I did that too," which is a nice feeling for about four seconds before it turns into "why isn't this documented anywhere, past me, you had time."
The other thing I keep leaning into is interaction. I like when a site doesn't just sit there. I want things to move when you touch them, respond, feel alive a little. I'm adding a lot of it this time, deliberately, so that someone lands on the page and doesn't immediately bounce, so there's a reason to stick around for thirty more seconds, then a minute, then five. I don't want a brochure. I want something you poke at.
Which is how I ended up adding a little AI assistant to help people navigate the site. I'll be honest about the reasoning, because that's the whole point of writing this down: partly it's genuinely useful, someone can just ask it "show me his backend work" or "what's he looking for right now" and skip the hunting. But also, yeah, it's mainstream right now, everyone's doing it, and I'd be lying if I said that had zero pull on me. Haha. I guess I'm allowed to do the useful thing and the trendy thing at the same time, they're not mutually exclusive, I just feel the need to admit out loud that both reasons are real instead of pretending it was purely a UX decision made in a vacuum.
There's something a little funny about rebuilding my "professional self" right after everything with the layoff. Like, okay, the industry moves fast, I said that myself a few nights ago, and here I am matching its pace, chasing the current look, adding the current trend, trying to prove I still belong in the room even while I'm not totally sure I want to stay in the room. I guess a portfolio is always a little bit of a performance. You're not really showing people who you are, you're showing them who you were on your best days, organized nicely, with the boring parts cut out.
Still. I like building this stuff. I forgot how much, honestly, until I opened the empty project tonight and just started placing blocks around. There's something calming about it, oddly, even with the deadline pressure of "I need this done so I can actually apply to things." Design, structure, information architecture, deciding what goes above the fold and what gets buried three scrolls down — it's its own kind of problem-solving, not that different from the debugging sessions I miss so much from the old team. Different tools, same itch.
I don't know yet what the final version will look like. Probably not what I'm imagining right now, it never is. I'll probably delete half of what I build this week by next week. That's fine, that's the process, I guess. For now it's late, the tabs are still open, and I've got a resume file sitting untouched in another window, judging me quietly for prioritizing the fun part first.
I'll get to it. Just... one more section on this page first.