Tools: The Accidental Portfolio: A Hobbyist’s Guide to Useful Things and AI Second Opinions

About Me ## Portfolio ## How I Built It ## What I'm Most Proud Of New Year, New You Portfolio Challenge Submission This is a submission for the New Year, New You Portfolio Challenge Presented by Google AI I am a highly motivated "hobby developer of useful things." To me, engineering is a playground, not a cubicle. I specialize in projects that start as a curious "what if?" at 2:00 AM and somehow survive long enough to be hosted on the internet. I build because I love the puzzle, and I keep it humble because I’ve seen enough "undefined is not a function" errors to know my place in the universe. My portfolio, "The Accidental Portfolio," is a curated set of these survivors. This site is a "Static-First" labor of love, built with Next.js 16 (using Turbopack) and TypeScript. I took a somewhat stubborn approach: I did all the heavy lifting manually (Content, JSON, Markdown) to ensure the foundation was solid. I then integrated the Gemini 3 Flash API to act as a "second opinion." The AI doesn't run the show here; it’s more like a technical co-pilot that looks at my work and offers "Hobbyist Insights"—essentially explaining what I was trying to do and spotting the logic I may have accidentally misplaced during a late-night coding session. I used Google AI Studio to fine-tune these prompts so the AI would sound less like a robot and more like a peer who’s seen my browser's search history. Honestly? I’m proud that it’s actually live. On a technical level, I’m most proud of the Dockerized Deployment. It was a humbling reminder of the "it works on my machine" curse. I spent quite a bit of time troubleshooting why the cloud version was empty, only to realize I hadn't explicitly told my Dockerfile to copy over my static data files. Solving that "missing cargo" puzzle and finally seeing my projects and AI insights render correctly in a live Linux container was my biggest "fist-pump" moment. It’s not just a site; it’s a survivor of my own deployment oversight. Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse