What I learned by building MY PORTFOLIO without frameworks.

Muhtadi Ridwan — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:12:16 +0000

𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗜 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 npx create-react-app. 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗱𝗻’𝘁.

Most of the projects I built over the past few years started like this:
npx create-react-app
npm create vite@latest
npx create-next-app

Spin up a project. Start building.
The UI worked.
The features worked.

But if I’m being honest, there were moments where the browser felt like a black box.

So this time I did something slightly uncomfortable.
Instead of starting with a framework, I started with this:
✅ index.html
❌ No build tools
❌ No npm installs
❌ No abstraction layers
Just HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript.

That meant rebuilding things frameworks usually hide:
• Responsive layouts across multiple breakpoints
• Smooth page transitions
• A dark/light theme using CSS variables
• Aurora-style animations that took more keyframe experiments than I’d like to admit
It was slower.

The result is a portfolio that’s intentionally simple:
• A clean Bento-style layout
• A small real-time clock widget
• Six projects I genuinely enjoyed building
Nothing fancy.

Just a reminder to myself that the foundations still matter.

If you're curious what the web looks like without the layers on top, feel free to take a look 👇
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DEV Community: Muhtadi Ridwan

What I learned by building MY PORTFOLIO without frameworks.