My Portfolio is Live!
July 30, 2025
I'm excited to finally release my portfolio website to the public! The purpose of this portfolio site is to act as a centralized hub I can point people to that houses everything about me: experience, contact info, projects, etc. I've used this opportunity to include some extra fancy features, namely this blog where I'll talk about my experiences and projects, and an AI-powered chatbot that can answer anything about me or this website!
Built Not From Scratch
The design and code for this site are based on an open-source template from tedawf.com. You'll notice both websites are very similar, and that's intentional. Ted did a really great job with his site, so why reinvent the wheel? I'm a fan of how career and education experience are handled on the home page; having clickable tabs is a much better UX than scrolling between different sections. I like having a few preview project and blog post cards on the home page as well.
I wanted to host a blog on my site even before deciding on this template, mainly to talk more about my projects outside of the documentation. I prefer hosting the blog myself, as opposed to a 3rd-party site such as Medium. An aspect of how this template handles the blog posts I like is the use of MDX. Yes, MDX is to MD as JSX is to JS. This format allows, among many other things, the embedding of React components directly into markdown files. I'm sure this will be a very cool feature come future blog posts.
The last element of this template I want to talk about is the AI chatbot. I wish I could take credit as this is a very cool concept. Having experience working with LLMs already, This immediately stood out as an opportunity to present my portfolio content in a way that's directly relevant to my work.
Features
Simplistic, Responsive UI
I really enjoy designing the UI/UX elements of applications. I have a lot of experience being a user, so I know what UI elements make for a good experience. The homepage is designed to have the most import information, contact info and experience, immediately available and within close proximity of each other. I elected to keep the preview cards for projects and blog posts, this allows the user to get a glimpse into what the website offers without needing to click through the nav bar.
Blog
The main drive for creating a blog was to have a place to talk more about my personal projects. But this will also be a place where I can share general experiences and thoughts relating to my software career. Expect infrequent updates!
Contact Form
A personal website isn't complete without an email contact form. The original website template used Resend for this. However, Resend requires a custom domain to send emails from. I decided that for a simple contact form that's not meaningfully different from linking my email, spending money on a custom domain is overkill. I opted to use Web3Forms, which achieves what I need with minimal setup.
AI-Powered Chatbot
The coolest feature of my website is I-AM, a chatbot trained on my portfolio. Ask it anything about me or the site! Why is the chatbot named I-AM? Because my name is Sam of course! Or you can ask it about green eggs and ham :)
The Technical Details
The programming for this website was done using Next.js + TypeScript and Tailwind CSS. At the time of making this website
I already had experience with React, Node, and Express. Given the large amount of overlap with my existing skills, this
was a clear opportunity to learn a new framework. Using Next.js allows for easy deployment on Vercel. The UI elements are
from Shadcn. They come as React components already written in .tsx files, which makes integrating with Next.js easy as well.
For the Chatbot I chose to use Gemini. I tend to prefer Gemini for smaller, everyday tasks, the responses are fairly concise, as opposed to ChatGPT which can smother the user in flattery. The embedding vectors are calculated using Langchain and stored in a specialized vector database on AstraDB. I also used a redis from Upstash for caching chats.
Thanks for checking out my portfolio! I’m excited to keep learning and improving. Feel free to explore and reach out if you have any questions.