Hello World: A Portfolio 10+ Years in the Making

The journey to this portfolio — and personal website — has been anything but linear. It started over a decade ago with a scrappy little site built on Weebly (back when that was still a thing, long before Squarespace acquired it). At the time, I wasn’t thinking about tech stacks or static site generators. I just wanted a page online. Something that said, “I exist. This is mine.”

That initial curiosity quickly evolved. My next attempt was hosted through North Metro TAFE’s servers using WordPress — a bit janky, if I’m honest, but it worked. I remember manually FTPing files, trying not to crash the server while learning the basics of content management systems, templating, and plugin hell. It wasn’t pretty, but each version taught me something new — how to fix things I’d broken, how to debug logs I didn’t understand, and eventually, how to build smarter systems.

From there, I experimented with my first headless CMS, using Strapi on a free-tier deployment and disk drive. This was the first time I really got interested in decoupling the frontend from the backend and started thinking about sites as programmable systems rather than just static documents. The start of Headless CMS systems.

Fast forward to now: this portfolio is now built with BaseHub, a lightweight and flexible platform that turned out to be perfect for what I needed: a simple, clean setup that includes a markdown editor and media storage without the bloat or cost.

Part of the motivation for switching platforms came from a growing frustration with Render. It wasn’t the hosting itself - which was solid, and free - but the cost. Paying USD$7/month just to keep a persistent disk alive for my PostgreSQL database felt excessive for a personal site that didn’t really need a full backend and used barely any of the disk I was paying for. Once I gave myself permission to simplify and think in first-principles, the rest fell into place.

This rebuild was also a chance to explore something I’d been itching to try: AI-assisted programming. I wanted to experiment with delegating coding tasks to an agent. By describing a problem or feature and letting the system take a crack at it. It was surprisingly effective for scaffolding this project. I still had to review a lot (of course), but the speed of iteration was amazing. And it got a lot of the way on its own without needing much more prompting. It felt like pairing with an always-available yet reasonably competent junior dev.

So that’s where this site comes from: years of breaking things, fixing them, trying new tools, learning new tech, and most importantly, always building. I don’t expect this to be the last iteration, either. It never really will be.

If you made it this far you might also be interested in my LinkedIn or Threads