Journey of My Portfolio: Rise of Frameworks

Journey of My Portfolio: Rise of Frameworks

No more FTP clients. No more phpMyAdmin. No more praying to the DNS gods.

This time, my portfolio wasn’t going to be “a website.” It was going to be a project.

By this point I’d left the shared-hosting days behind, and a new obsession was starting to take over my brain. That is “Frameworks”.

Falling for Angular

During my internship, I got thrown straight into Angular and .NET. And somewhere between the modules, the services, and the dependency injection, I became a full-on Angular fanboy.

Everything about it felt structured. Opinionated. Like the framework had already made all the hard decisions for you, and all you had to do was follow the pattern.

Coming from PHP files where anything could happen anywhere, that felt like magic.

React Was Catching Up

Meanwhile, React was quietly taking over every conversation on the internet. Every blog post, every conference talk, every “which framework should you learn” video eventually circled back to it.

Honestly, my first impression wasn’t love at first sight. Coming from Angular’s opinionated structure, React felt unstructured and cluttered. No clear pattern, no “one right way” to do things, just a library and a thousand different opinions on how to build around it.

So when I finally decided to rewrite my blog, I didn’t go looking for plain React. I went looking for something that gave React some of that Angular-style structure back.

Gatsby and Falling in Love with GraphQL

That’s how I found Gatsby.

And I kind of fell in love with it.

• File-based routing
• GraphQL powering the data layer
• Static site generation that felt genuinely futuristic at the time

It just clicked. I even started writing a whole series of blog posts documenting what I was learning as I built the new site with Gatsby.

I was maybe halfway through that series when the rug got pulled.

Then Next.js Happened

I got introduced to Next.js, and that was it. I scrapped what I had and started everything from scratch, again.

👉 You can still see the remains of that Next.js rewrite here

Looking back, this was probably the first time I truly understood what “framework fatigue” meant. Not from reading about it. From living it.

While rewriting on Next.js, my curious head decided it also wanted a single source of truth for my blog posts. I was already hooked on Medium, so naturally that became the default place to write.

Only problem: Medium didn’t have an API to pull posts from. The only thing they offered was a manual export, a zip file full of raw HTML versions of your posts, drafts, and everything else, dumped together.

So, obviously, I overengineered the heck out of it and built a Medium-zip-to-markdown converter called **Medmark**.

👉 Check out medmark here

The Remix Temptation

Right around this time, Kent C. Dodds joined the Remix team and started hyping it up everywhere he went. And honestly, he’s a pretty convincing guy.

I got close. Dangerously close, to rewriting the whole thing a third time.

But when I actually sat down and tried it, Remix felt half-baked to me at the time. Not bad, just not there yet. So I made a call.

“I’m sticking with Next.js. No more rewrites.”

Looking Back

This time, I did something I hadn’t bothered with in the Blogspot or WordPress eras, I actually added proper analytics.

And for the first time, I could see real numbers. People were actually finding my site. Not just me refreshing it obsessively to check if it still worked.

That was a strange, quietly rewarding moment. All those rewrites, all those half-finished blog series, all that framework-hopping, and somewhere along the way it had turned into something people actually landed on.

Angular taught me structure. Gatsby taught me curiosity for the modern web. Next.js taught me to finally stop rewriting and start finishing.

To be continued….