Building a Netflix-Style Portfolio

Before this site, my portfolio was a Netflix "Who's Watching?" parody. You landed on a row of profile icons, picked one, and it took you into a personal site styled like the Netflix UI — browse rows instead of a nav bar, a "play" button instead of a resume link.

I didn't build it from scratch. I forked an open-source Netflix-portfolio template and made it mine: swapped in my own work history, my own writing, my own links. The template originally pulled its content from a headless CMS, wired to someone else's API keys and someone else's domain. The first real thing I did was rip that out and hardcode my own data — my profile summary, my project list, my LinkedIn articles — so the site was actually mine end to end, not a shell pointed at a stranger's account.

It's a React app under the hood, with client-side routing for each "row": work experience, projects, a reading list, a recommendations page, even a joke "work permit" page. Some of it is polished. Some of it is clearly a first pass — a recommendations page with a placeholder testimonial I never got around to replacing, a travel page that's just a stub.

It's a bit too cute, and I knew that even while I was building it. But it's kept alive here as an experiment, not deleted, because it's an honest snapshot of where I was: still finding my voice, still enjoying the idea that a portfolio didn't have to look like everyone else's. This site is calmer and more deliberate. That one is where I learned I wanted calmer and more deliberate.