Motivation

I was inspired to start this portfolio website by my manager at UPS, Julian Bell, who convinced me to stumble through teaching myself HTML and CSS rather than build a simple drag-and-drop site off Squarespace or Wix.

Prior to this site, my only way of conveying project experience to potential employers was through a measley few bullet points on my resume. Now, my goal in maintaining this site is to teach myself the fundamentals of HTML and CSS web development as I build (hopefully) a useful tool that allows me to demonstrate some of the intangibles that a resume can only hint at.

I am hosting this site through Github Pages, a neat feature that allows users to host a static website for free from a repository. This is my first time developing anything web-related, so much of this process has consisted of a split-screen between quick Google searches and my code.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

One of the great features about Github Pages is the fact that there are numerous open-source themes and skeletons to pick from as a jumping off point with your code.

I skipped a few steps in this aspect of development by building upon the code Julian developed to get his own website up and running. I rather enjoyed the project grid of his website julianbell.io, and chose to use the skeleton layout of his site as the basis for my own. Credit to him!

You can access all of the code I used to build this site at my Github repository: here.

My Additions

I didn’t learn anything by simply repurposing Julian’s code, so I set out to customize my site in a way that I felt best displayed my experience to employers while also feeling cool and UX/UI inspired.

I wanted a way of showing each project’s title on the project grid page, and so I added title overlays to each tile. Now each project’s name will be displayed upon mouse hover. I messed around with other CSS features like flip-cards and captions, but eventually settled on the hover action.

I also added a resume page to display my current CV. I took on the challenge of coding my entire resume into HTML for this page, and included dynamic features like the dropdown accordions for each of the companies I have worked for. I also included a conventient PDF download button at the top to convert the page to PDF.