Starting this site
Why I am building a portfolio in public, and the stack I picked to keep it free.
I’m finishing an AI engineering course, and I want to move towards solutions architecture. A portfolio is the obvious place to show that work, but I don’t want it to be a static list of finished projects. I want to publish the thinking while it’s still in progress.
What I set up today
- A new public repository for the site, separate from the one that currently serves the domain, so the live site stays up while I build.
- Astro for the site itself. New writing is a Markdown file in one of three folders: case studies, decision records and the build log.
- A GitHub Actions workflow that builds the site and publishes it to GitHub Pages.
- A diagram on the home page that shows how the site works, with the parts I haven’t built yet drawn as dashed boxes.
I used Claude Code to scaffold the project. The reasoning behind the main choice is in the first decision record.
What’s next
- Move the domain over to the new repository.
- Write the first real case study.
- Turn on comments and add cookie-free analytics.