Building an AI - Powered Portfolio: A Developer's Journey

Introduction Traditional portfolios have a fundamental problem: they assume visitors will actually read them. We craft paragraphs about our experience, build grids of project cards, and hope that recruiters or potential collaborators will take the time to scroll through everything we've written. Most don't. This project started with a different premise. What if a portfolio could actively engage with visitors? Instead of presenting information and hoping it gets consumed, what if it could have a conversation? This article documents the journey of building an AI-powered portfolio from scratch—the architectural decisions, the technical challenges, and the lessons learned along the way. Defining the Experience Before the Technology One principle guided the early development: design the experience first, then figure out how to build it. Before writing any backend code, the entire user interface was built. A chat window as the central element. A sidebar for structured navigation. A greeting