Rebuilding my Portfolio Website

I first started working on a portfolio website in 2023. The idea of having my own website that I could control fully and customize each little thing was pretty cool to me, however my main goal was learning how to build a full-stack website from scratch. About one long year later, by following a guide on YouTube I had a fully functioning full-stack webapp built using Python.

As with any project that takes a long time to build, I really liked my first website. However, it was just way too unattractive, unorganized, and uninteresting. So, I decided almost two full years later: “What if I rebuilt the entire thing keeping some of the website’s structure, but getting rid of all the unappealing bloat?”

A month later and I am very happy with the results — the website feels much cleaner from both a visual perspective and the actual codebase. I polished the Home page and added this writing page as well as a page for all my projects. Mostly, though, I removed things that just didn't really fit in the old website. For example, the old blogging app part was completely out of place since I built it as a separate thing, and it made the codebase a mess.

I followed a pretty standard development path, using React, Next.js and Tailwind CSS. The website still has the contact form which uses AWS SES (simple email service) and it is now deployed on Vercel for free. Before that, I was spending almost 20 dollars monthly on hosting.