Building this portfolio site

I shipped a portfolio site over a weekend. Here’s the stack and why I made the choices I made — in case it’s useful for your own.

The stack

Why MDX in repo (not a CMS)

Three reasons:

1. Version-controlled. Drafts live on branches, history in git log. Same workflow as everything else I ship.
2. No CMS overhead. Nothing to host, nothing to pay for, no schema migration on a Sunday night.
3. React inside Markdown. When prose isn’t enough, I drop a component in. Useful for the kind of posts I want to write — embedded charts of Fabric capacity metrics, interactive DAX explainers, that sort of thing.

The trade-off is that publishing requires git push. For a personal site that’s a feature, not a bug.

GitHub repos, live

The /projects page calls https://api.github.com/users/<me>/repos from a Server Component with Next.js’s revalidate set to one hour. Fresh data without making the hot path slow:

const res = await fetch(
  `https://api.github.com/users/${username}/repos?sort=updated&per_page=100`,
  { next: { revalidate: 3600 } }
);

I filter out forks and archived repos, sort by stars, and render the top six. That’s the whole integration — no SDK, no auth (until I hit rate limits).

A small foot-gun: lucide-react brand icons

Lucide-react removed Github, Linkedin, and Twitter from its export surface. If you’re working from an older tutorial, you’ll get a 500 the first time you load the page. I inlined the SVG paths in a brand-icons.tsx file instead — two minutes of work, and they’ll never break again.

That’s the site. Boring choices, fast pages, easy to maintain. Exactly what I want a portfolio to be.