Journey of My Portfolio: Where It All Started
Before React.
Before open source.
Before identity, SDKs, design systems, and developer platforms.
There was a Blogspot website.
This series is about my journey through the different eras of building on the web, from editing Blogspot widgets during my school days to modern-day “vibe coding” my portfolio with trending tools and AI-assisted workflows.
Each episode represents a different phase:
- Discovering the internet
- Learning to build things
- Breaking things repeatedly
- Experimenting with design and code
- Slowly growing from curiosity into engineering
- and of-cause over-engineering the heck out of everything 😉
This is Episode 1, the very beginning.
The Blogspot Era
Back in 2012, while I was doing my A/Ls, I created my very first website using Blogspot.
For those of you new-age kids, Blogspot was basically one of the easiest ways to create a website before modern website builders, AI tools, and one-click portfolio platforms existed everywhere.
The site was called “Dimension Studio”. Looking back now, the name was incredibly dramatic. But there was a reason for it. I’ll explain later…
Wanting to Become a Software Engineer at 11
I wanted to become a software engineer when I was around Grade 6, inspired by one of my cousins who worked in tech.
At that age, software engineering felt almost magical to me.
I remember seeing him stare at what looked like a completely blank white screen, typing random symbols and words that made absolutely no sense to me at the time.
Later, I found out it was just Notepad.
Apparently, during the first year, they weren’t even allowed to use fully fledged IDEs. Ironically, when I eventually started learning programming myself years later, we didn’t get to use IDEs at first either.
People wrote code… and somehow computers listened.
That idea completely fascinated me.
Then in 2007, I watched Transformers. That movie changed my interests completely. I became obsessed with VFX. Not casually interested, but genuinely obsessed.
I used to go to cyber cafés and spend hours downloading VFX breakdown videos of the film, trying to understand how giant robots, explosions, and CGI environments were created. This probably reveals my age too 😉.
According to reports about the film’s visual effects production, some frames took around 38 hours to render because of how insanely detailed the robots and reflections were. Movies run at roughly 24 frames per second. As a kid, that completely blew my mind.
You’re telling me every second of a movie is made up of dozens of individually rendered images… and each one could take an insane amount of time to generate?
That made VFX feel even more magical to me. I was so into it that I somehow convinced my father to let me do a diploma in 3D animation.
Which honestly sounds hilarious now.
Creating My “VFX Company”
The Blogspot site was built around that dream.
“Dimension Studio” was supposed to be my imaginary VFX company.
Very ambitious.
Very cinematic.
Very cringe.
Most of the content on the blog revolved around, 3D artwork, VFX-related posts, Animation experiments and Canon camera gear reviews (Mind you i didn’t own a camera 😂).
The site itself was peak early-2010s internet of ustom Blogspot themes, flashy widgets, inconsistent over the top typography and lots of experimentation.
Every small customization felt exciting.
Learning the Internet Without Realizing It
What’s funny is that at the time, I didn’t think I was “learning software engineering.”
I was just having fun.
But looking back now, that Blogspot site quietly introduced me to:
- HTML
- CSS
- Layouts
- Customization
- Browser debugging
- Hosting concepts
- UI experimentation
- and the idea that you could build things for the internet
That was the important part. For the first time, the web stopped feeling like something I only consumed. It became something I could create for. And once that happens, it changes how you look at technology forever.
Looking Back
If I revisit that blog today, it’s honestly a time capsule of my teenage interests.
A mixture of dreams, early experiments, internet culture from the 2010s and a kid trying to build something cool online
Everyone starts somewhere.
Mine started with a Blogspot site called Dimension Studio during my A/L days, pretending I owned a VFX company after watching Transformers.
To be continued….