Why are you doing this

I’ve asked myself that question many times. 8 years ago when I was in the early stages of my career I said to myself “I want a portfolio website where I can play around with cool things and show them to people”.

I want a portfolio website where I can play around with cool things and show them to people

  • Brooks, ~2015-2016

Just like that ^. And I did it, kinda. I had been hearing about Meteor.js and wanted to see what the hype was about. At the time I was a .NET developer writing C# and SQL all day and felt like I was missing out on a lot of exciting features that were being built into browsers. So I started reading Meteor’s docs and set up an app for myself. I also wanted to use this opportunity to be creative, so I decided that I would give my site a space-y theme and design it to showcase some SVGs that I created.

This is where I toot my own horn a bit. I was really proud of those SVGs. For the top of the landing page, I found a font that was a little hand-drawn in a way that kinda resembled a constellation. I had my name and a little 1 sentence blurb about myself. The eye-catching part was that the background was stars. But it wasn’t just stars - it was 3 layers of SVGs stacked on top of each other with different z-indexes to create a parallax effect. So, as you scrolled down the page you would feel like some stars were further away than others. And these weren’t your simple nursery-rhyme, 5-pointed stars over and over again. Each one was slightly unique due to some algorithmic distortion I applied using Inkscape, and I believe they had 4 points to resemble that classic sparkle/twinkle effect.

As you scrolled further down the page I had a few paragraphs of copy going into more detail about who I was and what I was passionate about. On one side of the screen was a rocket (the kind you’d see in a 1950s sci-fi cartoon) shooting up past you. Finally, you reached the bottom of the page to see what I was most proud of. There was a slice of a circle meant to resemble the earth with some oversized structures on top of it - a small rural home with a tree, a radio tower, and a cluster of skyscrapers and low-rise buildings. Just above this was a contact form designed using skeuomorphism to resemble a postcard (Don’t hate me - I thought the Apple Notes app that resembled a legal pad was just cool).

I spent ages tweaking that CSS. I wanted the margins to be perfect. I wanted the font to be perfect. I wanted the text to line up perfectly with the lines on the postcard. I also spent ages on the stamp which also served as the submit button, and it even had a little animation to it. I was getting to a point where I felt pretty good about it - maybe even good enough to host it on a server somewhere for people to see. But then disaster struck.

I decided to install Linux. Don’t worry - Linux isn’t my scapegoat here. The disaster had begun long before and was just finally catching up to me. I wasn’t quite ready to go full Linux so I decided to set up my laptop as a dual boot system. I had a first-generation HP Spectre x360 and I had done enough research to know that Linux generally worked well on that hardware. I also tested it out on my bootable USB drive to see how things worked. I had some minor audio issues but nothing a driver couldn’t fix. I proceeded with the installation, partitioned my drive, etc., and then booted into my new system.

I’m not quite sure what the timeframe was for what came next. I don’t think it was immediate, but I also don’t think it took weeks. Eventually, I wanted to go back to my Windows partition so I shut down and rebooted and when I looked for it it wasn’t there. I was confused. Surely this wasn’t possible - in my files app on Linux, I could see that there was another partition - why couldn’t I boot into it? I tried lots of different things but had no success. I still have that laptop tucked away in a box under my bed but I haven’t been able to boot into Windows once after the dual boot partition.

You may be thinking to yourself “Ok, so what’s the big deal? Just clone the git repo on your Linux partition and keep working”. And that is the true disaster. I, being a young naive developer who assumed nothing bad would happen and I didn’t need that fancy git thing, did not use version control. Or external backups. So now that website that I spent countless hours on just exists as bits on a drive, never to be seen again.

Fast-forward to 2023. I’ve learned my lesson and I fully embrace the power of git and remote backups. Perhaps surprisingly, I’m also still running Linux (and every install since has been a complete wipe - no more dual boots for this guy). From time to time over the years that thought has popped up in my head - “Maybe I should build a portfolio site again”. But I never felt motivated enough to do it. Even now I don’t know that there was a single “spark” of motivation that made it happen. It’s that same desire that I had all those years ago:

I want a portfolio website where I can play around with cool things and show them to people

  • Brooks, 2023

So here we are. I do have some goals that are a bit more specific this time around, however. In no particular order (hence the unordered list), I want:

Let’s see how far I make it this time.