Case Study · 2025
This Website
The site you're reading. A self-hosted Next.js portfolio, containerised and served from my own infrastructure rather than a managed platform.
Overview
This project is a Next.js personal portfolio built on the App Router, styled with Tailwind CSS and a hand-rolled editorial design system. It is designed to be deployed using Docker containers managed by Docker Compose, with Nginx acting as a reverse proxy and handling SSL via Certbot.
Why self-host
Deploying to a managed platform would have been faster, but running the site myself — containers behind an Nginx reverse proxy, automatic certificate renewal with Certbot — keeps me close to the parts of the stack I otherwise only touch through an abstraction. It’s a small site, but it doubles as a place to keep those muscles warm.
The redesign
The current look is an “engineering broadsheet” — warm paper and ink, Fraunces for display, Newsreader for reading and JetBrains Mono for the technical annotation, with a single vermillion accent. The goal was something that reads like a designed publication rather than a template.