I didn’t learn
to code. I ran
a project.

I’ve been a program manager in tech for more than ten years. Cybersecurity, streaming, logistics, defense, retail. The job has never been one thing. You wear whatever hat the week requires and you get your hands dirty, because the alternative is standing next to a problem and describing it.

So when I started looking for my next role, the obvious move was to polish the LinkedIn profile and start applying. I did that. It’s fine. It works.

But everyone has a LinkedIn profile, and now everyone has AI too. The tools that used to separate people are sitting on every desk. Which means the thing that stands out isn’t having access to them. It’s what you actually do with them.

I thought: I can describe how I work, or I can build something and let it speak.

So I built this.

I wrote the spec before I wrote anything else

The instinct in a project like this is to open a tool and start making things. I’ve watched that go wrong for a decade.

Instead I spent the first hours on the questions I’d ask any team. What is this actually for? Who is the audience? What does success look like? What is explicitly out of scope?

The answers narrowed things fast. The audience is hiring managers and recruiters at large tech companies. Success is one real conversation, not a thousand visitors. Out of scope is every feature that makes a portfolio site feel like a portfolio site.

I wrote all of it down before any code existed — data model, page inventory, security requirements, build order, the things I was deliberately not doing. Then I handed that document to the AI as the source of truth.

That last part mattered more than I expected. Every decision after that got measured against a written standard instead of against whatever I felt like that hour. It’s the same reason I make teams write things down.

I decided what the site had to prove

A portfolio tells you someone is competent. I wanted something that demonstrated it instead.

So this isn’t a document about my work. It’s a system: a gate, a session, an event trail, an analytics dashboard. If you request access and get a code in your inbox, that’s a thing I specified, sequenced, and shipped — which is a stronger claim than any bullet point I could write about being detail-oriented.

That one decision drove everything else. It’s why there’s an access gate instead of an open page. Not to be precious about the content. To have something real to build.

I picked boring infrastructure on purpose

Domain, hosting, database, transactional email, source control. Five decisions, each with tradeoffs, each made once and documented.

I wanted to try the boring, correct version of every one: managed hosting, managed Postgres, a real email provider with proper domain authentication. No clever choices. Clever choices are how side projects die three weeks in, and I had a weekend.

Total cost was $11 for the domain. Everything else runs on free tiers that will hold at the traffic this site will ever see. I checked that before I committed to any of it, because “what happens when this scales” is a question I’d ask a vendor and I wasn’t going to skip it on my own project.

I built the gate myself instead of buying one

There are services that do email-code authentication for a few dollars a month. I read their docs and then decided against them.

The reasoning: the gate is the part of this site that most directly demonstrates the skill. Buying it would have saved a few hours and removed the entire point. So I specified it — one-time codes, short expiry, single use, attempt limits, rate limiting per email and per IP, a session that expires on its own.

Then I thought about the failure modes before building any of it. What happens when someone requests five codes? What happens when a code is used twice? What happens when someone’s session expires mid-page? Writing those down first is why the build went quickly. Most of what slows a project down is discovering requirements late.

I designed by subtraction

Two design directions came back. One was safe, one was ambitious. I took the ambitious one and then spent most of my effort removing things from it.

The accent color appears exactly twice on the homepage. That was a rule I set early and then had to defend three separate times, including once against myself when I wanted a fourth use. A constraint is only real if you enforce it when it’s inconvenient.

I shipped in order and verified every step

Public page first. Then the gate. Then the content behind it. Then tracking. Then the dashboard.

Each step got checked before the next one started — certificates, metadata, the mobile layout at 375px, whether every link actually resolved. I wanted the site live and correct at every stage rather than perfect and theoretical at the end.

I found real problems this way. A certificate that covered one hostname but not the other. An image reference that would have broken every time the link was shared. Small things, all of them cheap to fix at the time and expensive to fix later. That’s the entire argument for verifying as you go.

About the AI

I didn’t write the code. I want to be direct about that, because the interesting part isn’t whether I can type TypeScript.

I directed it. I wrote the specification, made the architecture calls, reviewed what came back, caught what was wrong, and decided what shipped. When it put content on the wrong page, I moved it. When it added a fourth use of the accent color, I cut it. When it told me I’d exposed a database credential, I rotated it — which is worth including, because a build story with no friction in it isn’t believable.

That’s the same job I’ve done for ten years. Scope the thing, sequence the work, hold the standard, own the outcome. The team is just different.

What I’m building next

The site isn’t finished, and I’d rather say so than imply otherwise.

Still to come: the analytics dashboard that shows me who requested access and what they actually read, personalized invite links so I can send a specific person straight through, and a proper write-up of each role behind the gate.

I’m building them in that order because that’s the order they’re worth in. The dashboard tells me whether any of this is working, and everything else is a guess until it exists.

Built in public, on purpose.

See the portfolio →