Project Overview
This project is the site you're currently on — a modern portfolio and blog platform built from scratch to showcase my work, write technical articles, and manage everything through a custom admin dashboard rather than a third-party CMS.
🌐 Live Demo · 💻 Source on GitHub
Why Build a Custom Portfolio
Off-the-shelf portfolio templates are quick to set up but rarely fit exactly how I want to present projects, write long-form technical posts, or manage content day to day. Building it myself meant full control over the data model, the editing workflow, and the performance of the public-facing pages.
Features
- 📝 Blog system — write and publish posts with Markdown support
- 🎨 Project showcase — detailed case studies for each project, with tags, technologies, and image galleries
- 📬 Contact form — with email notifications on new submissions
- 📊 Admin dashboard — full CRUD for blog posts, projects, tags, and technologies
- 📱 Responsive design — usable across desktop, tablet, and mobile
- 🌙 Dark mode — light/dark theme toggle
- 📨 Newsletter system — email subscription capture
Technical Implementation
Backend
- Framework: Next.js 14 (App Router, API routes)
- Language: TypeScript
- Database: PostgreSQL with Drizzle ORM
- Authentication: Lucia Auth, session-based
- Email: Nodemailer for contact form and admin notifications
Frontend
- Styling: Tailwind CSS
- UI components: Shadcn UI
- Charts: Recharts (dashboard analytics)
- Markdown rendering: React Markdown
Architecture Highlights
- Server-rendered project and blog pages for SEO, with structured data (JSON-LD) for rich search results
- A relational schema (projects, blog posts, tags, technologies, images) with many-to-many join tables so content can be tagged and cross-referenced flexibly
- A dashboard that lets me manage every table without touching the database directly
Conclusion
The portfolio is a living project — it evolves alongside the rest of my work, and doubles as a testbed for patterns (auth, dashboards, content modeling) I reuse in client projects like Ruxaby and Lahagni.
