Personal Portfolio Website

A production-grade personal portfolio and CMS built on Next.js 15's App Router, designed to hold up to enterprise engineering standards rather than a typical single-page portfolio template. It includes a fully custom design system (Aurora Tech), a Prisma/PostgreSQL-backed CMS for every content type, and several product-grade interactive features built as isolated, reusable components.

A generic portfolio template doesn't differentiate a developer looking for full-stack/AI freelance work — most portfolio sites are static, content is hardcoded, and there's no way to demonstrate real engineering practice (a working CMS, real API integrations, real content-integrity discipline) within the site itself.

Resolved the dependency conflicts by pinning to specific patched major versions instead of latest-at-the-time, extracted every offending inline handler into isolated 'use client' components, whitelisted the required image host, and added a reusable SectionErrorBoundary so a single section's runtime failure (e.g. an external API being unreachable) can't take down an entire page again.

Hit a real dependency conflict early: Next.js 15.0.0 shipped expecting a React 19 release-candidate, not stable React 19 — required pinning to patched versions of both. Two libraries (next-themes, @react-three/fiber) still only supported React 18 in their published majors and needed bumping to their React-19-compatible releases. Separately, hit two Server/Client Component boundary bugs — an inline event handler placed directly in a Server Component (the footer newsletter form, and later a print button) — both had to be extracted into small dedicated Client Components, since React does not allow passing functions as props across that boundary at all. Also had a runtime crash from next/image loading a GitHub avatar from a host that wasn't whitelisted in next.config.mjs.

Confirmed real versions before pinning dependencies rather than trusting memory of 'latest' — ecosystems move fast enough that yesterday's stable pin is today's broken peer dependency. Also reinforced that any place a Server Component might pass a function prop needs a second look — the fix is always the same (extract a Client Component) but the bug is easy to reintroduce.

Next.js was chosen for server components and file-based routing, which fit a content-heavy, SEO-driven site well. Prisma over a raw query builder for type-safe schema evolution as new features (case studies, map locations, learning items) were added incrementally. Groq over other providers for the chat assistant specifically for inference speed in a chat-widget context, after starting with a different provider during initial build.

Projects detail template, Services and Blog pages, Contact form wiring, admin dashboard CRUD forms, generating the remaining PWA icon sizes, wiring up real Lighthouse CI for the Performance Dashboard, and a first production deployment.