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Andrew Gordon Browne
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The Accidental Portfolio: A Hobbyist’s Guide to Useful Things and AI Second Opinions

New Year, New You Portfolio Challenge Submission

This is a submission for the New Year, New You Portfolio Challenge Presented by Google AI

About Me

I am a highly motivated "hobby developer of useful things." To me, engineering is a playground, not a cubicle. I specialize in projects that start as a curious "what if?" at 2:00 AM and somehow survive long enough to be hosted on the internet. I build because I love the puzzle, and I keep it humble because I’ve seen enough "undefined is not a function" errors to know my place in the universe. My portfolio, "The Accidental Portfolio," is a curated set of these survivors.

Portfolio

How I Built It

This site is a "Static-First" labor of love, built with Next.js 16 (using Turbopack) and TypeScript.

I took a somewhat stubborn approach: I did all the heavy lifting manually (Content, JSON, Markdown) to ensure the foundation was solid. I then integrated the Gemini 3 Flash API to act as a "second opinion."

The AI doesn't run the show here; it’s more like a technical co-pilot that looks at my work and offers "Hobbyist Insights"—essentially explaining what I was trying to do and spotting the logic I may have accidentally misplaced during a late-night coding session. I used Google AI Studio to fine-tune these prompts so the AI would sound less like a robot and more like a peer who’s seen my browser's search history.

What I'm Most Proud Of

Honestly? I’m proud that it’s actually live.

On a technical level, I’m most proud of the Dockerized Deployment. It was a humbling reminder of the "it works on my machine" curse. I spent quite a bit of time troubleshooting why the cloud version was empty, only to realize I hadn't explicitly told my Dockerfile to copy over my static data files. Solving that "missing cargo" puzzle and finally seeing my projects and AI insights render correctly in a live Linux container was my biggest "fist-pump" moment. It’s not just a site; it’s a survivor of my own deployment oversight.

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