About this project

I’m accepting job offers and freelance jobs again. Having, an interesting looking portfolio potentially opens more doors for you, well that’s what wise people have said.

I used to have a portfolio though, back in my college days but I lost it, years ago.

Lost it? How’s that possible?

I used to host my website for free at a hosting service that was owned by a friend of mine. It was quite generous! A couple of years later he sold his hosting company to someone and the new owner completely eradicated this freeloader from the server as he should’ve done.

Why I did not use Git or backed everything up

Frankly, I didn’t knew how to use Git at that time (2012), as University never taught me how to do it, we learned how to use SVN instead, which is a really outdated compared to a solution like Github or Gitlab.

I did have a copy of my portfolio on my previous laptop, but its hard drive got corrupted due to a microwaved logic board! Yes, Bali’s Electricity is not kind to electronics.

I was just too careless.

Regret

I ventured in Entrepreneurship, I failed most of my ideas while a few of them worked out. I thought I would never need my portfolio again anyway.

Yes some of them worked out, at the cost of my financial foundation. I’m taking it easy for a while and decided to rebuild my Financial foundation again by offering my knowledge and experience to others. I have student debts to repay too.

You know what would’ve been great? a cool looking portfolio that can kinda compensate for my knowledge gap due to my entrepreneurial ventures.

Oh wait a minute.

Everything you publish on the Internet stays on the Internet

Yes there’s some truth in that. In my case it was luckily true!

I didn’t expect anything, as I considered it a long shot to get my old portfolio back. So, I went to the Wayback Machine, and omg! I found my old portfolio! The jQuery code still worked like a charm!

I was so happy to have it back, as I used this portfolio to kick in some doors and land my first dev internship at the Mediamonks.

Cleaning everything up with ChatGPT

I decided to clean everything up and at least remove jQuery, as I stopped using jQuery everywhere in favour of Vanilla Javascript.

I tried asking to ChatGPT if it can rewrite certain chunks of code from jQuery to Vanilla Javascript. It actually worked really great!

I never added mobile support, but since my website is not very usable on mobile anyways, I decided to hide the parallax story on mobile devices. The full experience will be visible on tablets and laptop or desktops.

My portfolio in 2023

So here it is, reincarnated and of course pushed to Github.

I rebuilt this entire website statically using Next.js, on Cloudflare Pages. My backend ‘CMS’ is powered by Notion, as I’m using Notion on a daily base anyway, I might as well manage my blog posts and portfolio projects in Notion and redeploy the website everytime it’s updated.

I don’t need to configure a VPS to host a backend, since Notion is already hosted for me, and I just had to hook my Github Repo to a Cloudflare pages project and connect a domain name.

SSL certificate is done for you and setting up was really a breeze.

I’m very grateful to have my personal blog and portfolio up and running again.

I can’t imagine building websites differently. Jamstack like websites are truly a game-changer for me!