dumbprism 
The beginning
Well, it all started when I was in my second semester of my college and I had this course that goes with the name User Interface Design. At first, me and Sasank thought that this was going to be fun since they are going to teach us about UI/UX principles , design trends, colors, Figma, but we went too far. Far beyond our imaginations. It was a name given for web development, in every other institution to sound funky (that’s what I think). Anyways, So our professor, gave this task to us to create a basic portfolio where it had all details of us and a fake work experience and some achievements. This was my first time, when I heard the term portfolio.
A portfolio website is a website that showcases your skills, work, and experiences . It’s a digital resume or gallery that you can use to present your work to potential clients, employers, or collaborators.
Well, that was when I first began creating one. But it was just for the sake of a task for grades. The portfolio was left untouched, with no responsiveness, big fonts, no UI principles followed. It was a nightmare for both a developer and a designer genuinely.
The above images depicts my portfolio for the assignment.
The Spark
As time passed by, Sasank took the job of creating a portfolio quite seriously and even I had that gist to create one. Well, I started designing my portfolio. I surfed Behance, Pintrest, Instagram, just for inspirations. This was the first time, I was using these platforms for a work purpose. I did find some inspirations, created a separate group for it in my browser and tried to replicate some UI elements which I found cool.
The break
As I kept looking for more and more inspirations, I was so overwhelmed that one fine day, I said,
Ah, I'll do this later
and this mindset went for a whole semester, I always had something to convince myself to not do my portfolio. Now, when I look back I feel I deliberately kept myself busy learning or doing something else rather than creating my portfolio.
The Spark 2
During my semester break, I looked back at my portfolio and this time i had a pretty good bag of skills to actually get kick started again. At least the skills that were necessary to make an interactive, sensible looking portfolio and there I was, I started created my portfolio again, finding inspirations, trying to restrain myself from being overwhelmed and procrastinated. It quite helped and I was pretty much ready with the design. Yet, i was always looking for something extra, which made me feel that I am missing out on something.
The break 2
I procrastinated on creating my portfolio again and every time Sasank asked me about my portfolio, I just said
Oh that, yeah that, ahhh.. I should create one brotherrrr (with a very heavy heart).
The final Spark
Well, I found the actual necessity of creating my portfolio when I faced this problem of showcasing my projects. of course, github is a great platform, but there were reasons why I thought github was not the right option to showcase them
- Github is an open-source platform where you collaborate with other developers to either contribute or let other developers collaborate with your work. I believe it is just not solely a place to showcase your complete achievements and work.
- People who are not technically sound, will never be able to take a look at my work since they would be quite confused with the github terminology of repositories, pull requests, branches, thus, they need a platform to be familiar with what I am doing.
- I cannot go to full extent if I want to add a certain functionality and thus I definitely need a portfolio to showcase my interests and my works either it be the non technical side of it .
And that’s when I finally, for the nth time in my life again, look back to inspirations again, but this time, it was not quite a task. All this while it was all about creating something way out of the league, thus in the quest of looking for something big, the minimalistic side became quite inconspicuous.
The initial design of my portfolio consisted of cards, where each card were section representing something, from beginning to the ending , I decided to keep it as that and since bento grids are trending I wanted to add that as well as a short about section .
But, this quite did not standout when I showed it to my pals. I got the feedback that said there was less interactive elements and it was quite plain. I used plain HTML,CSS and JavaScript to create this. I took the feedback very positively and planned on giving another shot. This time I had to change everything. Firstly, the codebase. In the era of modern development nobody uses plain HTML,CSS and JavaScript. That was the first mistake which I did while building my portfolio. I changed my codebase to Astro (A JavaScript web framework optimized for building fast, content-driven websites.) and tailwind CSS. I planned on keeping the UI and design the same but with a lot of extra interactions and taking all the sensible feedbacks into consideration I came up with this
I had these cool loader animation. Thanks to codegrid for his amazing GSAP skills that made this loader possible.
Since, some of the UI components were removed, you might find it a little distorted. Well, I felt, this was it. But then, I never had a plan figured out for the mobile view. The cards and the animation would be an epic fail and I could actually get famous on a youtube channel where it features most epic fails.
Nevermind, enscribe.dev, the savior. My love for bento grids was because of this man. His minimalistic bento UI felt top-notch and I felt that I need to create something similar to his bento design. That’s when I planned to re-design my portfolio again. The same codebase but this time with a better, minimalistic UI. I was planned, very well planned this time. I took all the factors into consideration this time and started building the portfolio what you see now.
The Summit
Well, the journey of creating my portfolio was a huge learning for me and I felt like this should be my first blog post since this was an absolute cinematic feel when I look back. I just felt very overwhelmed when I created my portfolio. I promised myself that I would finish my portfolio this time and gave everything I could for it. Sometimes it’s just a little push from your end and a tinge of passion to make things work out. Creating something of my own has always overwhelmed me and that feeling is truly immeasurable. I always believe that do something which overwhelms you, which drives you forward always, instead of working hard for it, because in the end, working for something that you love will never feel like hard work, you’d always feel lighter and more driven towards it. There were uncountable learnings that I had with just one portfolio and this journey will always be a favorite memory in my professional life since this made me push boundaries, learn and unlearn so many things, get rid of many beliefs and probably be a better designer and developer.
Signing off
Dumbprism