Most portfolio sites are static brochures. Mine had one requirement I wouldn’t compromise on: it had to actually work as a sales channel, not just a resume with a nicer font.
Design and Layout
You can rightly argue most engineers are terrible when it comes to creative visual design, and I was no exception to the rule. To overcome this challenge, I saw a lot of portfolio design inspirations on Pinterest, then finally discovered the Figma free resources community. There I saw a few portfolio website designs, copied the parts I needed, and pasted them into my own portfolio design.
Code and Implementation.
I’m not going to take all the credit; Claude has made me superhuman at my work, and if you are still skeptical about using Artificial Intelligence, you might be refusing to evolve and adapt. My understanding of the fundamentals of programming made my prompts concise and helped preserve tokens for other important tasks.
Claude did not do all the work; I brainstormed to have a single source of truth for all the information on the website in a file where I map the data to the various pages or components I wanted.
While AI is great, it still generates ‘Slop’: badges, multiple colors, and inter fonts that erode any sense of uniqueness in modern-day applications. That’s where I summoned my frontend skills to iron out the slop to get the quality I needed. And I prompted each individual or component as opposed to making a prompt that affects everything.
Some of the prompts I used to boost the website were;
”We are building a website worth $10k, so your iterations must look expensive.”
”Add micro interactions to the X section while maintaining overall UI consistency.”
Remember I had a Figma design I was working with, so it was easier to direct and manually adjust where it was required.
The Technical Calls and Why;
Nuxt with SSR over a plain SPA. Project pages and blog posts resolve to real HTML, not a blank div waiting on JS, so the traffic that matters (someone Googling “full-stack developer Ghana” or “EHR platform engineer”) can actually find and index the site, not just people clicking a link I sent them.
Substack as a headless CMS via its Content API. I can publish a technical write-up without touching a deploy or a CMS admin panel that fights me.
Resend + a server-side contact endpoint, so inbound leads land in my inbox directly, no third-party form widget sitting between me and a prospective client.
Strict TypeScript throughout, GSAP + Lenis for scroll-linked motion tuned by hand rather than default easing curves, and a GitHub contributions calendar pulled live via GitHub’s GraphQL API, so “actively shipping” is provable, not asserted.
Underneath it, it’s the same stack I use for client work: TypeScript, Node, Vercel, CI/CD via GitHub Actions and Vercel Analytics to track engagements. The site isn’t a departure from what I build for clients; it’s a working demo of it