Why I keep a small portfolio.

Most portfolios I look at are doing too much. Animated hero sections, three.js orbs, scroll-jacked timelines. They look impressive for a moment, then I close the tab and remember none of it.

I wanted the opposite. Something that loads instantly, reads like a printed page, and stays out of its own way. Five routes, hairline rules instead of cards, one piece of neon per page. The accents are SVG sketches I drew once and reuse — no icon library, no badges from another decade.

The other thing I wanted: an editing surface I can use from a phone in five minutes. Half the things I want to change about this site are tiny — a typo, a date that rolled over, a sentence I rewrote in my head on the bus. If editing means opening a laptop, opening an editor, finding the line, committing, pushing — I won't do it. So the content lives in plain MDX and YAML files in content/, the data and the layout don't share a file, and there's a Pages CMS admin sitting on top that lets me push edits straight from a phone browser. Cloudflare picks up the commit and redeploys in under a minute.

The trade I'm making is "looks impressive" for "stays current." For a site nobody opens twice, looks-impressive wins. For something I'll be tending for years, currency wins easily.