Three portfolios later
The road from a plain portfolio, to a portfolio you talk to, to one that reshapes itself into the mediums I work in. How I kept rebuilding the same page until it finally argued for itself.
This is my third portfolio. I think the first two were necessary, in the way that bad first drafts are necessary, so this post is the short version of how I got here.
Take one: the normal portfolio#
The first one is a repository called flutter-portfolio,
which is my favourite kind of honest mistake, because it is not built in Flutter.
It is Next.js and MDX. I had planned to build it in Flutter, named the repo, then
changed my mind and never renamed it. I have left the name alone on purpose. It
is a fossil.
The site itself was fine. A clean page, a list of projects, the usual. It did the job and I do not regret it. But it made an argument by assertion: here are the things I can do, please believe me. Every portfolio makes that argument, and every reader has learned to discount it.
Take two: the portfolio you talk to#
So the second time I got contrary about it. I built Voxforge, a personal site you control with your voice. You do not click through it, you talk to it, and it listens through the browser and moves.
It was fun, and it was a gimmick, and I knew it was a gimmick. A novelty on top of the same old "list of work" underneath.
What actually changed my mind#
In between the portfolios I was building the actual work: a browser platformer with a hand-rolled physics engine, a multiplayer game where dead players become the level, a diary that renders as a 3D universe, a multi-modal AI app, mobile apps, small tools. Different mediums, same person.
And that was the thing a list could never show. The point was not any one project. The point was the range, and a bulleted list flattens range into sameness. Ten rows all look equally weighted, whether the row is a weekend script or a realtime system.
So the brief for this third one wrote itself: stop describing the range and demonstrate it. Let the site become the mediums I work in.
Take three: the shape-shifter#
This site is one content model rendered through four Forms. Editorial is what you are reading. There is a Terminal you can type into, an App with a bottom tab bar, and a Dashboard with live counts. The switch is the Dial in the header. And there is the Machine: describe a small tool, and it gets built overnight and lives here at its own link.
None of that is decoration. It is the argument, made by doing instead of saying. If you want the technical version of how it works, I wrote that up separately in This site morphs. Here is how..
Three portfolios to arrive at an obvious idea: the most convincing thing a builder's site can do is build.