A few weeks ago I opened up my personal portfolio page (which I honestly redo once a year at this point; the act of rebuilding it has become a project in and of itself) and decided it just didn't look right anymore. I could be doing so much more with it.
I originally built the site about a year and a half ago when I was deep into the idea of "personal brand." I wanted to grow my social presence, told myself I'd post on X more (about what, exactly, I still couldn't tell you), and used the portfolio as a hub to connect people to my LinkedIn, Instagram, and so on. But over the past year I realized that goal was somewhat of a lie I was telling myself. I flat out don't enjoy posting on social media, and I've come to see most of these platforms as optimized more for addiction than for genuine connection. So I decided to give the site a refresh, and what you're looking at now is the result.
Going into it, I knew I didn't want another social media aggregator (I don't even use Instagram or X anymore), but I also didn't want a purely professional portfolio or living resume. LinkedIn already does that well enough, so why replicate it? I wanted something personal yet motivating, something that actually reflected what I was doing with my life and where my head was at. That's when the idea clicked: what if I connected different parts of my life into a single view?
With AI tools, code is cheap, really cheap. Wiring up custom integrations to the accounts I actually use and care about has never been more accessible. After some back and forth with Claude, I discovered that connecting to Goodreads is surprisingly simple: if your account is public, it exposes a public RSS feed for your shelves. So this site consumes that feed and renders it in a custom format. That realization was the seed for everything else, a "digital pulse" if you will.
From there, I hooked up my Strava account via their API and started surfacing my runs for the month as a kind of digital check-in. I know what you might be thinking: what's the point? This data already exists and it's already publicly visible on those platforms. Honestly, I'm not sure I have the most airtight answer. Part of it is just that it's cool. But it's also genuinely motivating. Seeing these slices of my life aggregated somewhere I control, presented in a way that actually feels like me, creates a kind of accountability I didn't expect. It reframes the data in a new context, and that context makes it feel more real.
So here we are. If you're reading this, I hope I've continued to build it out well beyond Strava, Goodreads, and GitHub. Enjoy.