Craft · 05 July 2026 · 6 min read
Rebuilding my own portfolio, finally
The version of this site that existed before this one had fabricated metrics, a placeholder résumé, and no real photo of me on it. Here's why that took so long to fix.
For longer than I'd like to admit, my own portfolio was the least honest piece of software I'd shipped. It had metrics that were never measured, a résumé PDF that was still a placeholder, and copy that read like it was generated rather than written. I knew all of this and kept shipping client work instead of fixing it.
The rebuild forced a rule I don't always get to enforce on client projects: nothing goes on the page unless it's true and I can stand behind it. That meant cutting case-study numbers I couldn't verify, reconciling the site against my actual résumé, and replacing stock-feeling copy with plainer, more specific writing.
The part I underestimated was how much a portfolio's credibility rides on small consistency checks — the company name matching across the résumé and the site, the dates lining up, a photo that's actually you instead of a placeholder graphic. None of it is technically hard. All of it is the difference between a site that reads as real and one that reads as a template.
It's live now, closer to something I'd hand to a client and say 'this is how I actually work' than the version it replaced. That's a low bar in hindsight, and it took longer than it should have to clear it.