Career
How I Built My Portfolio: Design, Code, and Lessons Learned
A behind-the-scenes look at building a developer portfolio with React, TypeScript, Vite, and Tailwind — visual identity, hero animations, markdown blog,...
Published 2026-04-02 by Aditya Mandal.
How I Built My Portfolio: Design, Code, and Lessons Learned Every developer reaches a point where a GitHub profile and a résumé no longer tell the full story. For me that point arrived after shipping my fourth production app — I had real, measurable work, but nowhere to point people when they asked "so, what do you actually build?" A portfolio is the answer to that question. It is the one place where you control the narrative completely: the projects you lead with, the words you use, the way the page feels when someone loads it. No recruiter template, no algorithm deciding what shows up first. Just you and your craft. I gave myself three goals before writing a single line of code. First, the site had to load in under a second on a cold connection — if a hiring manager is skimming ten portfolios over lunch, a slow one gets closed. Second, it had to be genuinely mine: a visual identity I designed rather than a theme I downloaded. Third, it had to be maintainable for the next five years, which meant a typed codebase, markdown-driven content, and a deploy pipeline I could run from my phone if I had to. This article is the full walkthrough of how I got there — the decisions, the code, and the things I would do differently if I started again. You will read about defining a portfolio's purpose and audience, choosing a stack, designing a system, and building each section of the site with real snippets from the repository. By the end you should have a concrete blueprint for shipping your own — or at least a strong opinion about which parts to steal. Defining the Portfolio's Purpose and Audience Before I opened my editor I spent an afternoon writing down who the site was actually for. This sounds obvious, but it is the step most people skip, and skipping it is why so many portfol