Writing Four essays on shipping, design and code. Pick a note to read it here.

Most portfolios live in a graveyard called Drafts. I had three of them in there. A 2022 attempt that died at the hero section. A 2024 attempt with a completed home page and zero project pages. And whatever this is now, except this one is at a real domain, with real projects on it, and you're reading the post that proves it.

The reason the first two failed was the same reason every designer's portfolio fails: I kept treating the site as a moving target. Every time I sat down to ship a page I'd find six things I wanted to redo first. New font pairing. Tighter spacing scale. A "better" colour palette. The work expanded to fill the available perfectionism, and the perfectionism was infinite.

So this time I made three rules and stuck to them. Rule one: ship one tile a day, even if it's ugly. A bad tile on the canvas beats a perfect tile in my head. The yellow "I'm Syauqi" hero went up first, looking nothing like the eventual version, and that one ugly tile was the difference between a real codebase and a Figma file.

Rule two: every section gets exactly one idiom. No card on this site borrows another card's treatment. The home page is sixteen tiles and sixteen distinct visual ideas. Boarding-pass academic tickets, sticker company badges, a heatmap ledger, a polaroid carousel, a magazine pull-quote. The constraint is brutal: invent or steal. The reward is that no two cards bore me, so no two cards bore the visitor.

Rule three: deadlines beat reviewers. I gave myself a public commit window. The repo went open the moment the home page rendered. Pushing to a private branch and "polishing it first" is the same trap, just with different paint. Once it was public I had to keep going, because if you abandon a public repo you have to explain it.