How I Built My Developer Portfolio (React + Netlify) and What I Improved

Recently I spent some time refining my developer portfolio. Instead of treating it like just another “portfolio page”, I tried to approach it the same way I would approach a real product — thinking about performance, structure, and maintainability. The result was a series of small improvements that made the site much cleaner and more production-ready. The Stack I Used The portfolio itself is built using a pretty simple stack: React for the UI Netlify for deployment Vanilla CSS for styling JavaScript for interactions I intentionally kept the stack lightweight so the site remains fast and easy to maintain. Performance Improvements One of the first things I noticed was the size of some assets. For example, my profile image was originally 4.7MB, which is way too heavy for a simple landing page. After optimizing it, I reduced it to 95KB without noticeable quality loss. That alone improved the loading experience quite a bit. I also cleaned up unused assets and simplified the HTML structure t