Designing and Building an Engineering Portfolio Website
Thursday, January 1, 2026
Overview:
- SvelteKit – page slices
- Prismic – page-builder
- Tailwind – formatting & select animations
- GSAP – animations
- ThreeJS – homepage graphics
- Resend – contact block
- Vercel – hosting
- HTML, Typescript, CSS, etc. – misc.
This project is primarily built in SvelteKit through the “slice” system – meaning selections of slices are compiled in the page-builder, Prismic, to create the different pages the user interfaces with. For example, this blog post is a combination of the blogpost container page, and select rich text, image, and video blocks. Tailwind is used to manage all text and icon formatting, as well as simplistic animation of the aforementioned components. GSAP, on the other hand, is used for more complex animations – such as the page initialization, unique slices (like the skill list on the about page), and more. There were also some more niche technologies used: ThreeJS, a 3D object renderer, is used solely for the homepage center-piece; Resend is used for the contact block on the contact page, handling email interactions. Finally, the site is hosted on Vercel, managing webhooks, subdomains, and everything else to do with hosting and the domain. Of course, HTML, Typescript, and CSS is used throughout the project to bring together different components, routes, and styles, but these are part of almost every stack, so I will not go into too much detail on their uses. If you would like to delve into the code yourself, there is a public fork of the website on my Github, featuring all the code, minus a few sensitive API keys and similar.
Reflection & Future Plans:
During my time at Cal Poly, I have decided to undertake a different project each quarter – this quarter, I focused on personal brand development. Ultimately, this quarter turned out to be a successful one; though this is a less engineering-focused project, I believe it was a vital first step. Moving forward, I intend to focus on the more technical hardware-centric end of the spectrum, though there will still be in depth software. Here is my current plan for this year:
Year 1 Plans as of January 2026
The embedded-system chess board will be fully custom built, printed, and designed, and perhaps even feature a website interface. The intent is to allow a user to play against chess bots on the physical board, similar to ChessUp boards on the market right now. I’ll see you in March with an update!