Rebuilding my portfolio from scratch

My last two portfolios were a static HTML site and a Flask app. Both did their job, but updating them was a chore. The static site needed code changes for everything, and while the Flask version could publish blog posts, its projects still lived in a seed file. So I rebuilt the whole thing from scratch, planning for an admin panel that manages everything.

The stack#

• Next.js 16 with the App Router, rendering pages on the server
• Tailwind CSS 4 for styling
• Postgres for content, through Drizzle ORM: in Docker on my machine, and on Neon in production
• Coming with the admin panel: Better Auth for the login and Vercel Blob for images

Why Postgres, and why Neon#

The content is small and connected. Posts and projects share tags, and there's a single About page. That's a natural fit for a relational database.

I compared Neon and Supabase, and one detail decided it. Supabase's free projects pause after a week without activity and have to be restored by hand, which a quiet portfolio would keep running into. Neon's free tier also goes to sleep when it's idle, but it wakes up on its own when the next request arrives.

Pages that stay fast while the database sleeps#

Neon's wake-up can take a second or two, and I didn't want visitors waiting on it. Next.js 16's Cache Components solve that. Data functions are marked with use cache, so their results are saved and reused, and each one is tagged with the content it depends on:

export async function getPublishedProjects(): Promise<ProjectSummary[]> {
  "use cache";
  cacheLife("max");
  cacheTag(CACHE_TAGS.projects);

  // ...query the database
}

Pages are prerendered from those cached results, so most visits never touch the database. Once the admin panel is in place, saving a project will revalidate the projects tag, and only the pages that show projects will be rebuilt.

Building the admin instead of adding a CMS#

A headless CMS like Payload would have given me a polished admin panel on day one. But this site has exactly three kinds of content: posts, projects, and one About page. A small admin built for just those keeps the app lean, and building it myself is a better showcase than configuring someone else's.

The look#

I wanted the site to feel like an observatory instrument: a deep-space background, hairline rules, catalog numbers, and a single warm accent color. Headings use Martian Mono, a wide monospace font, and the body text uses Instrument Sans. Even the code highlighting uses the same palette.

There's also a small nod to my last name. Vega is one of the brightest stars in the night sky, cataloged as α Lyrae, so the home page carries its catalog name and sky coordinates.

What's next#

For now, the hero on the home page is a CSS-only orrery whose planets follow Kepler's third law. Eventually it will become a real 3D scene built with Three.js and WebGPU. First, though: the admin panel.