Netflix Inspired Portfolio

This was built during my first year of engineering as a frontend learning project, and I didn't want another portfolio that looked like every other single-page resume site.

Netflix's browsing experience (rows, hover previews, a familiar streaming-platform feel) is something almost everyone already knows how to navigate, so I used that familiarity as the interface for showing off projects, skills, and certifications instead of designing a layout from scratch.

Instead of a traditional hero-then-grid resume layout, projects, skills, achievements, and personal information are presented in rows styled after Netflix's browsing UI, a deliberate choice to use an interface pattern visitors already intuitively understand.

The biggest ongoing challenge is that this project never really "finished", it's the site I keep adding to, so every new project or certification has to slot into an existing Netflix-row structure without the layout starting to feel stretched or generic.

Keeping the site responsive while preserving the row-based browsing feel on mobile, where hover-driven previews don't really exist, took real rework rather than a simple breakpoint.

This was the project where component thinking actually clicked, instead of one long page of markup, rows, cards, and hover previews had to become reusable pieces that could be reused across the certifications, projects, and skills sections without copy-pasting the same structure three times.

It's also where I first ran into the gap between "looks right on my screen" and "actually responsive", a row-based, hover-driven interface doesn't translate to mobile by default, and getting that translation right without losing the identity of the design was a genuinely harder problem than building the desktop version in the first place.

The instinct to reach for a component-first structure, to sweat over how a layout degrades on a small screen, and to actually understand a bug instead of pattern-matching a fix for it, all of that traces back to building this project independently. It's less visible in the current portfolio-infra codebase than the newer sections, but it's the reason the newer work holds together as well as it does.

I built directly on top of an open-source Netflix portfolio concept (originally created by Sumanth Samala) rather than starting from zero, then customized and expanded it to reflect my own projects, brand, and content as it evolved.

The project moved from a one-off assignment to my primary personal website, so it's kept in TypeScript rather than plain JavaScript specifically so it stays maintainable as more sections and content get added over time.

Building a UI around a metaphor (a streaming platform) instead of a generic template forced a lot more intentional thinking about information hierarchy, what's a "row," what's "featured," and how much of that metaphor to keep versus break for content it wasn't designed for.

Turning a single learning-project assignment into a site I keep coming back to taught me more about incremental refactoring under real constraints than most from-scratch projects have; new sections had to fit an existing structure, not a blank canvas.

This was the first project I built completely on my own, without leaning on AI tools to write the code for me: every layout bug, every CSS quirk, every responsive breakpoint got debugged by actually reading the error and the rendered page, not by asking something else to fix it. That process is where most of my actual frontend fundamentals (box model, flex and grid behavior, component boundaries, state lifting) came from.