Two portfolio sites that died

This is the third version of my portfolio. The first two never got past the setup.

One was an HTML and CSS template from a course. I meant to customise it and didn’t, so it still introduces me as Angela.

The other, from February 2025, was a Next.js project with Tailwind, shadcn and Firebase. It got as far as a deploy. The home page said “Patrick’s Website” above three copies of the shadcn demo avatar, and the only sentence on the about page was “This is the next page!”.

Both started with a stack. Neither started with a decision about what to show.

This one began the other way round. Before writing any code I went through every project I’d made, cut most of them, and wrote the card copy for the ten that remained. The site is the smallest thing that can hold those ten pages. Adding a project means adding one MDX file and one cover image.

The lesson isn’t about frameworks. It’s that a portfolio is an editing job first and a build second.