I created a portfolio website inline with the guidelines provided by SDF08. This is my favourite project thus far in the course. I had too much fun. We were tasked with creating an MVP portfolio, something presentable and custom, unique to us.
We were supposed to follow along with the wonderful Kevin Powell on scrimba, coding along with him locally to achieve a base design. Mostly HTML and CSS, the point was to create a portfolio that looked clean, professional, and that was responsive across different resolutions.
This was a more straightforward challenge for me personally. I decided I was really going to send it on this one and try and make it as personal as I could and give it my all. I have completed quite a lot of smaller projects, mainly in python, and as such I decided to use this portfolio project as an oppurtunity to walk through 12 of my chosen projects and showcase them, talking about why they were interesting, what made them difficult, what challenges I overcame building them, and what lessons I have learnt coming out of it.
Some of the challenges I faced were formatting each portfolio page how I wanted, for example the children images in the portfolio-items-individual class were not displaying properly and breaking the layout, but I found that settin them to be display block and adding a margin of 1em and auto fixed that. I added some captions and embedded videos in my html for the first time, so that was fun, and making sure I added in controls so the videos can be paused, rewound, and such.
My most time consuming task in all honesty was generating content to describe and talk about my 12 projects. I chose to go with 12 projects because 1. It looked nice in a grid. and 2. 12 just works so well in a grid, it can be 6 rows of 2, 3 rows of 4, 2 rows of 6, there are so many versatile ways to make it look good while being responsive. So aesthetics had a lot to do with that decision.
I spent quite a while taking screenshots of relevant code of UI's, taking videos to display functionality, and then typing out paragraphs to talk about each project in detail. I quite like the accent colour so I have decided to stick with it, however I flipped the light and dark colours so I could have the dark mode look which is by far my personal favourite. I know I kept the default colours but I really like them, and I tried my best to make this website my own in other ways, and I am feeling incredibly proud coming out of this.
Overall I found this entire experience deeply rewarding, and I feel this was a lesson in putting myself out there. I feel again that I have learnt a lot, not just about coding and programming, but about the importantance in showing what we can do, in being your own advocate, and I feel that I am taking a lot away from this exercise.
I am proud of what I am presenting today and I am ready to deploy this on a website, and I have never truly felt that way about anything I have created before. So needless to say, this has been a breakthrough moment for me. I cannot wait to keep this momentum going.