DEV Community

Cover image for What I learned by building MY PORTFOLIO without frameworks.
Muhtadi Ridwan
Muhtadi Ridwan

Posted on

What I learned by building MY PORTFOLIO without frameworks.

๐—˜๐˜ƒ๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐˜† ๐—ฝ๐—ฟ๐—ผ๐—ท๐—ฒ๐—ฐ๐˜ ๐—œ ๐—ฏ๐˜‚๐—ถ๐—น๐˜ ๐˜€๐˜๐—ฎ๐—ฟ๐˜๐—ฒ๐—ฑ ๐˜„๐—ถ๐˜๐—ต npx create-react-app. ๐—ง๐—ต๐—ถ๐˜€ ๐—ผ๐—ป๐—ฒ ๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐—ฑ๐—ปโ€™๐˜.

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 Iโ€™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:
โœ… index.html
โŒ No build tools
โŒ No npm installs
โŒ No abstraction layers
Just HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript.

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

The result is a portfolio thatโ€™s intentionally simple:
โ€ข A clean Bento-style layout
โ€ข A small real-time clock widget
โ€ข 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 ๐Ÿ‘‡
(Link in comments)
hashtag#webdevelopment hashtag#frontend hashtag#javascript hashtag#webdev hashtag#learninginpublic

Top comments (1)

Collapse
 
rimoverse profile image
Muhtadi Ridwan