This is a submission for the New Year, New You Portfolio Challenge Presented by Google AI
About Me
I am a professional web engineer with over seventeen years of industry enterprise-exposure. I'm a detail-obsessed builder, leader, and Team player committed to best-practices. I write Javascript, Python, NodeJS, TypeScript, and I live-and-breathe DOMs and jQuery'ish idioms. I'm passionate about producing high-quality UX for humans, while I possess a deep understanding of TCP/IP and applied-crypto, stemming from the genesis of the World Wide Web, late-90's. I'm highly-adaptable, and get my main dopamine kicks from git pushes. I'm a resolute document author-maintainer, make open source contributions, and am endlessly-enthusiastic about the creative potentials for elegant synthesis in web engineering.
Portfolio
How I Built It
I built my Portfolio using Hexo, a blazing-fast NodeJS blog generator. Since all the site's deployable-assets are simple static HTML/CSS/JS (like in the old days of web), all the portfolio needed for deployment is a fast, "compute" instance for /public to be deployed to, such as those provided by Google Cloud Run. That said, I not only tested my portfolio site in a Docker image, using a Dockerfile authored by Google's Gemini 3 Flash (utilized from my GitHub CoPilot, from within Visual Studio Code), saving me the time taken to write a Dockerfile, but I also used Gemini to gracefully-upgrade all the NodeJS project's hexo dependencies in its NodeJS package.json (such as its SASS renderer), testing the hexo generation outputs from within my Docker image's run in localhost, then simply deploying said image to Cloud Run, all without missing a beat. Having now used CoPilot for coding via AIs such as Gemini, throughout much of last year 2025, I've learned AI not only makes you a stronger programmer since you really have to pay close attention to the Agent's outputs for it aligning with your tech-design decisions, but it allows me to do a lot less typing. And what dev likes to type a lot? Not me, that's for sure. Less is more!
What I'm Most Proud Of
I'm most proud of my single-line clean-and-generate-->re-Dockerize CLI Terminal interaction, suggested to me by Gemini Flash 3. This is the kind of thing that makes using AI as an already- highly-skilled coder with many years of experience, just absolutely such a boost to productivity. Whereas before I might have cleaned (npm run clean), regenerated (npm run build), rebuilt my Docker image (docker build -t portfolio .), stopped and rm'd the running image (docker stop portfolio-local && docker rm portfolio-local) and finally re-run the image (docker run -d -p 8080:8080 --name portfolio-local portfolio), take a look at what Gemini 3 Flash spit out "in a flash" (couldn't resist), without having done all of that as single commands, only realizing to piece it all together after an iteration or two: npm run clean && npm run build && docker build --no-cache -t portfolio . && docker stop portfolio-local && docker rm portfolio-local && docker run -d -p 8080:8080 --name portfolio-local portfolio. Beeaaautiful!! (Heck it even caught the --no-cache option, which amidst several changes in-flight made to the blog's contents, might have taken a second-look on my part, pre-AI days.) That seemingly-obsessive little detail of dev-workflow for testing out changes, simplified by the Agent "right off the bat", is what I'm most proud of about the most recent-rebirth of my Portfolio, using AI as a tooling. Of course I would have arrived at Gemini's much-longer aggregate-of-commands -as-a-single-command on my own, but how much time did the AI tooling-choice save me right there? That's the kind of thing that I know makes us much-more productive developers, as a result of using Agents, which also really would never have been obvious, unless I "made the leap", got a CoPilot subscription, and plugged it into my IDE. Thanks for the Portfolio dev-challenge opportunity, DEV! And thanks for suggesting Gemini, which I've now seen-to-believe, is indeed a very useful and powerful Agent (no flattery intended). :-)
Top comments (2)
This is so cool! Easy to read and follow. I love simple and clean designs
Thanks so much Simangaliso!