Developer Portfolio Template

Overview

Most developer portfolio templates I've seen fall into one of two camps - either they're so opinionated you have to fight them to make them yours, or they're so generic they look identical to a hundred other sites. I wanted to build a template that gave a strong starting design while leaving the parts that matter to personality fully customizable.

What's included

Pages for hero, projects, writing, and contact. Dark mode that respects system preference. Responsive layouts that work from a small laptop down to a phone. SEO defaults including Open Graph tags, sitemap generation, and proper semantic markup. Animations that activate on viewport entry without being distracting.

Tech choices

Astro was the right base because portfolio content is mostly static and benefits from instant page loads. React handles the interactive parts. Tailwind CSS keeps the design system editable from a single config file. The whole stack is small enough that someone forking the template can read every line if they want to understand how it works.

What I learned

Building this taught me the difference between a template and a finished product. A finished product hides its decisions. A template has to expose them, with clear comments, sensible defaults, and consistent patterns so a future user knows where to make changes. That documentation work took as long as the implementation work, and it was the part that decided whether the template was actually useful to anyone but me.