The Creation of THE PORTFOLIO!

Why a Portfolio Site

I’ve always wanted to have my own portfolio to showcase some of the work that I’ve been doing on/off for the past few years but never really got around to it. I’ve always enjoyed looking at specific GitHub repositories and learning that the developer who created them talked about the conception of the project. I find myself spending a significant amount of time reading about others pages such as Roberto or Sat!

Inspiration

The main inspiration behind creating my portfolio was to have a centralized place to display my projects, share my experiences, and document my learning journey. I’ve always been fascinated by well-crafted portfolio sites that not only showcase technical skills but also tell a story. Sites like Roberto Viola’s and Sat Naing’s have been particularly inspiring. They strike a perfect balance between aesthetics and functionality, which is something I aim to achieve with my own site.

Technical Decisions

When it came to building my portfolio, I wanted to ensure that it was both functional and aesthetically pleasing. Given I’ve tried doing something like this multiple times, here are some of the decisions that I made:

1. Framework and Libraries: There’s no need to re-invent the wheel. I’ve chosem to use a pre-existing Astro template to save myself time and give me a lightweight solution to post little blog updates. I’ve chosen Astro as a framework because it’s been something I’ve wanted to try and I’ve heard good things about it.
2. Styling: I’ve recently been using Tailwind CSS because it’s easier to incorporate a pre-existing design system than create my own. I’m an avid Visual Studio code user and have really enjoyed my time with the extensions that exist on the marketplace.
3. Hosting: For hosting I just went with Cloudflare Pages! It’s simple, has multiple protective layers, and handles SSL for me.
4. Content Management: I really didn’t want to use a CMS or database for this. The next best alternative I thought was storing all of my content on GitHub and use the version controlling and GitHub actions to help with deployment.

Future Plans

You think this article is going to be the last!? Here are some of the future plans I have for the site:

1. Blog Section: I plan to expand on this blog section. I have a pretty poor memory so being able to document my findings and experiences with things that I learn will give me a nice way to refer back to things.
2. Project Showcases: I’ve created some absolutely whacky and wavy and inflatable arm flailing tubeman projects. They either live only on my computer or in a mishapen state on GitHub. I’m hoping that having this portfolio site will help me keep on track!

So while I have more work to do, this will not be the last you shall here of Caleb Mabry! I’m hoping to at some point make the site a little more Lord of the Rings styled, so stay tuned.

Thanks for reading and come back soon!

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or suggestions. You can contact me here.