I thought building a portfolio would take a weekend.
The design did NOT come together as fast as I wanted it to. Dark background, stars, my name in a serif big enough to fill the screen. I did not have a clear picture of what I wanted before I wrote any code. What was even crazier is I pivoted the design and stack THREE whole times. My poor AI credits... all wasted. I underestimated how much work sits between a clear picture and a thing that actually behaves.
The scroll was the first surprise. I wanted clicking the nav to feel like flying between sections, but I also wanted the mouse wheel to just scroll normally. Two behaviors, one input surface, and they kept bleeding into each other. Getting them properly separated took longer than the entire visual design.
Then the small things. Text that wrapped to two lines when I wanted one. A tagline that looked fine in isolation and unbalanced in context. A bug where the old section stayed on screen for a fraction of a second during a transition — barely visible, impossible to unsee once I'd noticed it. I rewrote my own bio five times and still wasn't sure about it.
None of that is hard in the way a hard algorithm is hard. It's just that there's a lot of it, and none of it shows up in the plan. You find it by building.
The part I didn't expect to enjoy was the revising. Every version was worse than I wanted and better than the last one. That turns out to be a reasonable way to work.
This is the first the post and I'm writing this while the project is still 40% done lol. There's not much else here yet but that's the point of starting.