The brief
Build a portfolio that doesn't just show work — embodies it. The site should show how I actually build things — including, honestly, how AI fits into it: the kind of thing that's hard to fake, and the kind of thing a recruiter or future collaborator can't get from a resume.
Why v3 (and what was wrong with v2)
v1 was a 2021 React/CRA portfolio with particles and a typewriter. It aged.
v2 modernized the stack — React 19, Vite, Tailwind v4, shadcn — but it stopped at "default shadcn dashboard." Lots of clean cards, no personality. The site looked like every other engineer's portfolio that ran npx shadcn add and called it done.
v3 had to fix the positioning problem, not the stack problem.
The approach
Three guardrails framed every decision:
- Cohere with the rest of my digital surface. I'd already built a hand-tuned Hyprland desktop in the Andromeda palette — cyan accents, JetBrains Mono, brutalist edges. The site borrows that vocabulary directly.
- Make the AI use legible — and honest. Most portfolios either hide the AI or make it the whole brand. Mine does neither: the homepage's "How I work" section spells out what I delegate, what stays human, and how output earns trust. The deeper tooling story lives in the site's case study.
- Ship the experience, not just the page. The "Ask Raymond" chat is the differentiator — a clearly-labeled assistant that lets visitors interrogate my background in their own words, instead of clicking through bullet lists. It's also a live sample of the discipline: scoped to sourced facts, honest when it doesn't know.
Architecture notes
- Stack: React 19 + Vite + Tailwind v4 + a thin shadcn-style component layer
- Content: MDX for case studies and the
/nowpage, statically resolved through Vite - Animations: Motion (formerly Framer Motion) with
useReducedMotion()respected everywhere - Chat: edge function calling Claude with my resume + projects cached as system context
- Theme: Andromeda tokens promoted to shadcn's semantic names so the components stay portable
What I'd do differently
If the chat takes off, I'd add a feedback loop — let visitors thumbs-down answers and route those into a small eval set I can run before each deploy. Portfolio as product.
See also
raymondshiner/rshiner-website-v3— source for this siteraymondshiner/montressor— the Andromeda desktop dotfiles this site borrows its vocabulary from- The agent configs stay in a private repo. Email if you want a walkthrough.