标签：#portfolio

Spent the week balancing deep p2p networking work in Python with some much-needed UI polish on my personal site. 11 commits and 6 PRs later, I hit a perfect 7-day streak and made the codebase a bit more secure. TL;DR This week was all about the "invisible" work that makes software feel solid. I spent a good chunk of time in the weeds of p2p networking, specifically hardening WebRTC implementations, while also carving out time to refine the typography and feel of my personal portfolio. With 11 commits across 5 repos and 6 PRs in flight, I managed to keep the momentum going every single day of the week. WHAT I BUILT Most of my direct commit activity this week was split between keeping my dev environment sharp and making my portfolio feel a bit more "me." Portfolio & Personal Branding I spent some quality time in yashksaini-coder/portfolio . If you're like me, you can't leave your personal site alone for more than a month. I pushed a few updates to the blog content, but the real fun was in the UI/UX tweaks. I swapped out the primary typography for JetBrains Mono —there’s just something about a good monospace font that makes a dev portfolio feel right. I also went through a "make-interfaces-feel-better" phase. I refactored the selectedwork section, specifically dropping a cursor-follow preview tile that felt a bit too "heavy" and replaced it with something more streamlined. I also polished the index rows to make the transitions feel snappier. It’s about +452/-279 lines of code, which is a healthy amount of churn for a week that was supposed to be about "minor" updates. The Maintenance Grind My nvim config is basically a living organism at this point. I have CI set up to automatically track plugin updates, and this week was particularly noisy with 6 commits just keeping the toolchain current. It’s [skip ci] territory, but it ensures that when I sit down to actually write code, my editor isn't lagging behind the latest Lua API changes. I also did a quick version bump for

Your portfolio is often the first impression a recruiter, client, or fellow developer gets of you. If it loads slowly, ranks nowhere on Google, or is a pain to update, it's working against you instead of for you. Here's how I approached optimizing mine — covering performance, SEO, and everyday usability. 1. Start With a Lightweight Foundation The biggest performance wins come before you write a single line of custom code. Pick a lean stack. Static site generators (Astro, Next.js with static export, Hugo, or even plain HTML/CSS/JS) ship far less JavaScript than a full SPA framework for a mostly-static portfolio. Avoid unnecessary UI libraries. A heavy component library for a five-page site adds kilobytes you don't need. Hand-roll simple components instead. Use system fonts or self-host web fonts. Pulling fonts from a third-party CDN adds an extra DNS lookup and render-blocking request. Self-hosting with font-display: swap avoids layout shift and speeds up first paint. 2. Optimize Images (This Is Usually the Biggest Win) Images are almost always the heaviest assets on a portfolio site. Convert images to WebP or AVIF — typically 30–50% smaller than JPEG/PNG at the same visual quality. Resize before upload. Don't serve a 4000px-wide photo in a 600px container. Use loading="lazy" on below-the-fold images so the browser doesn't fetch them until needed. Add explicit width and height attributes to prevent layout shift (this also helps your Cumulative Layout Shift score). <img src= "/project-thumb.webp" alt= "Project screenshot" width= "600" height= "400" loading= "lazy" /> 3. Minimize and Defer JavaScript Ship only the JS a page actually needs — code-split per route if your framework supports it. Defer non-critical scripts (analytics, chat widgets) with defer or load them after the page is interactive. Audit your bundle with a tool like source-map-explorer or your framework's built-in bundle analyzer to catch unexpectedly large dependencies. 4. Nail the SEO Basics Good perf

Why AI programs at PE portfolio companies stall at the same organizational seam, and what to do about it. Blake Aber · Predicate Ventures · 2026 There's a failure mode I've watched play out at enough portfolio companies that I've given it a name: the ownership dyad. It goes like this. The AI program is running. The product manager owns the roadmap (what the AI should do). Engineering owns the deployment (how it does it). Both parties are competent. Both are aligned on the goal. And the AI initiative quietly stalls anyway, usually somewhere between the promising pilot and the production system that was supposed to follow. The mechanism is diffuse accountability at the decision layer. What the dyad looks like in practice In the average portco planning meeting, the PM and the engineering lead sit across from each other. The PM has a change request: "The model is producing summaries that miss the key clause in contracts above a certain length. We should fix this." Engineering hears this and wants to know: is this a prompt change or a model change? Either requires scoping, and scoping requires the PM's input on acceptable behavior. So engineering asks the PM. The PM says "whatever's best technically." Engineering ships a prompt change. The next month, the same issue appears in a different context. The PM brings it back. Neither person is wrong. Neither person is slacking. The problem is structural: there's no single person who can describe (precisely and completely) what the AI should produce, evaluate whether it's producing it correctly, and approve a change to the system without requiring the other party's sign-off. The dyad looks like shared ownership. It functions as diffuse accountability. No one is in charge of the model's behavior. The failure mode at month nine Most portco AI programs that make it through a successful pilot still die quietly around month nine of production. The most common reason is not that the model got worse. It's that the harness around the m

This article was originally published on hawksley.dev . I've owned the domain name hawksley.dev for a while now, but I've never done much with it aside from sending email. Over the weekend, I thought I might as well make good use of it and decided to create a blog. In the beginning, this site had a humble home page with some links to GitHub projects. A blog requires much more infrastructure for me to use it effectively. For one, it'd be great if I could just write my posts in Markdown and have them formatted by my project automatically. Having a look at the options available, the first that stood out was GitHub's Jekyll . It looked nice and had great integration with GitHub Pages, which I'm hosting with at the time of writing. However, it just felt too rigid. I needed something modern that I felt I could get my hands dirty with. Enter Astro. Why Astro In the grand scheme of things, the Astro framework is pretty new at just 5 years old. That hasn't prevented it from gaining popularity rapidly. It holds performance as a key design principle, anything that can be static will render statically. By default, it ships absolutely no JS to the browser, which felt perfect for my use case. I have no need for advertising or heavy tracking scripts weighing down my site. All I need is a place to write. Learning how to work with Astro was completely painless. I created a new GitHub repository and followed along with their very high-quality documentation to create a blog of my own. At the very end of it, I’d created a nice neat blog that loaded instantly and was easy to write for. I wasn't satisfied by using the tutorial's blog for my site, though, as it felt too cookie-cutter, and so I started again, now with confidence in the framework. The Design Decisions There were some definite design decisions I knew I wanted from the get-go. First-class light mode and dark mode support were a must. Plenty of blogs offered just one or the other, and after a bit of digging, it didn't seem tec

I applied for a role at a mid-sized SaaS company about two years into my career. Strong company, interesting problem, good pay. I sent my application, got a recruiter callback, and then nothing for two weeks. When the feedback finally came: "We went with candidates with a stronger portfolio presence." I had 23 GitHub repositories. I had a portfolio site. I had projects. What I didn't have — and what I didn't understand for another six months — was a portfolio that told a story. I had code. Not evidence of thinking, decision-making, or the ability to ship something real. I've since built, rebuilt, and advised on a lot of developer portfolios. I've seen what gets people calls and what gets them ghosted. This isn't a guide about which framework to use or how to pick colors. It's about what actually moves the needle — the things I wish someone had told me in year one. Lesson 1: Two Great Projects Beat Twenty Mediocre Ones The instinct is to fill the portfolio. More projects = more evidence of experience. This is wrong. A hiring manager or engineering lead looking at your portfolio has about three minutes. They're going to look at your two or three most prominent projects, click one or two live demo links, and form an opinion. If they see twenty repositories and most of them are "Todo App v2," "Weather App," "Netflix Clone," "Portfolio v1 through v6" — they've already categorized you as someone who builds tutorials, not someone who builds things. The better approach: three to five projects, each with: A real problem it solves (not "I wanted to learn React") A live deployment that actually works A README that explains why you made the decisions you made Enough complexity to have generated at least one interesting engineering problem Projects that tend to work: tools you built because you were frustrated with an existing tool, apps solving problems you personally had, projects where you integrated with a real API or real data source, anything with a live user base (even 10