Personal Portfolio Website

Problem

Building a professional portfolio website traditionally requires 40-60 hours of development time, covering layout design, responsive CSS, content management, SEO optimization, and accessibility compliance. For a multidisciplinary professional showcasing work across technology, creative writing, music, and science, the site needed to handle diverse content types while maintaining cohesive design.

Additional challenges:

• Development Time: Limited time to build while managing other projects
• Technical Depth: Needed to demonstrate software engineering expertise through site quality
• Content Variety: Blog posts, project case studies, books, research papers, songs, speaking engagements
• Performance: Target 95+ Lighthouse scores across all metrics
• Cost: $0/month budget (no server costs, no CMS subscriptions)

Solution

Developed complete portfolio using AI-first methodology with Claude Code as lead developer, achieving production-grade quality in significantly reduced time compared to traditional development.

Technical Architecture

Static Site Generation: Astro 5.x generates fully static HTML at build time, served from Cloudflare’s 270+ CDN locations with <20ms global latency.

Content Management: Astro Content Collections with Zod validation provide type-safe content queries without external CMS dependencies. All content in markdown with Git version control.

Atomic Task-Driven Development (ATDD): Project broken into atomic tasks (< 500 LOC each), implemented sequentially with validation gates after each task.

AI-First Development: Claude Code handles implementation details while human focuses on creative decisions, architectural choices, and content strategy.

Key Features

• Multi-Domain Content: Unified system for blog posts, project case studies, books, music, research papers, speaking engagements
• Temporal Blog Organization: Posts grouped by year to emphasize intellectual evolution
• Responsive Grid Layouts: CSS Grid adapts project showcase from 3 columns (desktop) to 1 column (mobile)
• Performance Optimization: WebP images, lazy loading, zero JavaScript by default, critical CSS inlining
• SEO Excellence: Complete meta tags, sitemap generation, structured data (Article, CreativeWork schemas)
• Accessibility: WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, semantic HTML, keyboard navigation, screen reader tested

Implementation Highlights

Design System Extraction: Forensic analysis of 20 UI inspiration screenshots using Claude’s ‘think harder’ mode extracted complete design system (colors, typography, spacing) efficiently.

Content Collections Pattern: Type-safe content queries eliminate runtime errors from malformed frontmatter. TypeScript autocomplete accelerates content iteration.

Validation Gates: Every atomic task includes explicit validation criteria with expected outputs, enabling screenshot-based error correction loops when validation fails.

Zero Hosting Cost: Cloudflare Pages free tier provides unlimited bandwidth, automatic HTTPS, preview deployments, and 270+ CDN locations.

Impact

Measurable Results

• Lighthouse Scores: Performance 100%, Accessibility 100%, Best Practices 100%, SEO 100%
• Core Web Vitals: LCP <1s, FID <10ms, CLS <0.01 (all green)
• Bundle Size: Minimal total (HTML + CSS), no JavaScript on most pages
• Build Time: Sub-minute for full site rebuild
• Hosting Cost: $0/month (Cloudflare Pages free tier, unlimited bandwidth)

Lessons Learned

AI Changes Development Economics: Features once considered “over-engineering” become baseline expectations when implementation time drops significantly.

Validation Gates Are Critical: Explicit success criteria with expected outputs after each atomic task prevent compounding errors.

Static Remains Superior: For content-driven sites, static generation beats SSR on performance, reliability, cost, and simplicity.

Design System First: Investing time to extract complete design system from inspiration screens pays off immediately through consistent styling and rapid iteration.