If you read any of my earlier posts, you know that 6 weeks ago CSS was “my Everest”. I’m proud to say that I conquered that mountain! Positioning is still a bitch, but I get it and am a much more effective problem-solver as a result. I’m a little less of a CSS hacker, and a little more of a CSS wrangler. That being said, I continue to force myself to do projects without frameworks like BootStrap or Skeleton, because I’m a strong believer that practice makes perfect. I especially wanted my portfolio site to be built from scratch, because who would want to hire me if I can’t build a simple HTML website and make it look awesome with hand-rolled CSS? Ruby and JavaScript are absolutely my specialties, but I believe that CSS is just as important for a sharp website.

I went back and forth a lot (a lot) on whether I wanted to have multiple views in my portfolio. I wanted to show off my Backbone.js chops, but also love the look of long scrolling sites that utilize deep-links within. I settled on the latter, mostly because I liked the idea of someone being able to scroll through and see everything there is to see about my career thus far in one go. I also was determined to use this adorable photo of my sister’s golden “coding”, and it looked kind of weird on a page by itself. Priorities!

I think the hardest part of designing my portfolio was simply that design, in my mind, is so subjective. What I think looks awesome may look ridiculous to someone else. (Is that div too high? Does that font look too girly? Does it look weird if I don’t have a footer?) As a developer, this is tough because I’m used to dealing with logic that either works, or it doesn’t. Ultimately I just have to trust that my portfolio will represent me the best it can, since I did build it, after all! If you’re curious about the final (for now) product, here it is.