I spent 6 months planning a portfolio and shipped nothing

For 6 months I sat and designed a portfolio "system" on the site you’re reading this on today. It taught me one of the best lessons a developer could ever learn, but before we get to that, let me just recap what brought me to this conclusion.

My whole project came to life again when I was interviewing for my internship at Volvo VGCS. I had the opportunity to show off some of my work but also my portfolio website.

A fairly simple thing, a server side rendered Next.js project that focused on speed and lighthouse performance.

But during that meeting, I started doubting myself. Even though my interviewer was impressed, I could notice the flaws in both design and execution. The perfectionist inside me was not impressed by what I had accomplished.

I even caught myself during the interview sweeping stuff under a rug saying “Yeah, hehe this was just a quick site I made to have something to show”.

And after that meeting it got me thinking: "What If I could do it all again". How much more amazing stuff could I put in there to show all of my different sides. And could I include all the new stuff I have been practicing during my education?

I started right away when I got home from the interview, I fired up a new figma document and started designing. I started designing as I usually do, over complicating things right at the get go. The document needed figma variables, a color theme system, a dynamic layout with shifting elements, I even kept all the classnames as they were supposed to be in the final scss modules.

The whole thing took days of work, and even as early as this stage I started second guessing my design choices and thinking about which components should be SSR and which could remain client components. And how I would render X or Y or how Z could animate.

Opening the IDE only made things worse, ideas quickly spun out of control and I imagined the site to be some kind of a 3D amalgamation with content sections that had parameters to shift the layout and helper functions for every single fetch. Sanity would work as a page builder, whereas I could just drop blocks into place.

And I would have 3D models that dynamically shifted over the course of the page, morph shape for each content section.

Needless to say I started writing code.....only to give up a day or two later.

I scrapped the project, I had other things to worry about. The internship was starting soon and I had other projects in the meanwhile for school that needed to be finished.

Usually I can handle 2-3 projects at the same time, and almost unwind while writing, creating.

But this wasn't fun, it was abstracted to hell and slowly resulted in me starting to get burned out by coding.

It was only when I started my internship when I realized how wrong my approach has been before. And I think it's a trap many juniors fall into.

Trying to show off every muscle at once like a bodybuilding competition.

During my internship I got to see real production level code, and sure. Much of it was advanced and abstracted to hell, because well Volvo is a big company, many puzzle pieces needed to fit in order to make a massive product.

But the mantra amongst the team was nothing like that, I read pages apon pages in the documentation about best practices, I read [Link]Bulletproof React[/Link] and the mantra that was repeated back to me was, “Make it work, make it beautiful later”.

Somewhere inside me that clicked. And when I got back from my internship I tried my hands at making a small project for a school assignment, and that's where the thoughts really solidified.

I'm not striving for complexity, no one cares if this was super hard to write, or uses some obscure tech that makes it really performant. Unless it exists there is nothing to show for.

So I got inspired.

Like really inspired, I started working on Portfolio 2.0 a while after my first round of internship was completed.

The first steps were simple: decide on a tech-stack.

My thought process immediately turned from "How many cool technologies can I fit in here" to "What's the bare minimum I need for this to function?", and “What am I comfortable DELIVERING with?”

So I went with the old usual, Next.js (not even the latest 16 i stuck with 15 because its battle tested now), Sanity (because after I'm finished I don't want to write code again, just update blog posts like this one.), and MUI for my UI Framework.

I then proceeded with the layout. Something that bothers many junior devs is "How am I going to stand out" not me. I have a style that I like, I just have to convince potential recruiters visiting my site that they like me for **MY** style. And that it isn't as divisive as some of the more extreme stuff out there.

I don't need to show off all my skills at once. Some skills are fine just to talk about.

My core skills probably aren't that I'm this amazing godlike 10x developer that does leetcode problems in my spare time.

But I'm a team-player, with soft skills. I can hold a presentation and make my ideas heard in a meeting. I can communicate complex ideas by references and demonstrations and simplifying ideas by breaking them down. THAT'S where I shine.

The whole project took me roughly 1.5 weeks. And I worked on it during school assignments.

It all just went smooth, the only hiccup I had was having a nice picture of myself.

Designing with MUI was so quick, the only thing I really had to program was the fetching logic on the server that got passed down to client components. Almost no hooks, almost no useState.

So what I realized is that anything shipped is worth more than everything I had planned. I don't even have any code snippets left of the old development because it's completely gone now.

But that's not relevant, I can write in my blog right now, rather than talk about the blog I'm going to make.

So that’s it, six months of planning got me nothing. 1.5 weeks of building got me to this site. That’s essentially the entire lesson.