🚀 Building a Portfolio Page with Vercel, Next.js & Tailwind CSS

A portfolio page is an awesome way to show your skills and passion for design, development, and problem-solving while giving potential clients or employers a glimpse into your creative process and technical expertise.

Building a developer portfolio is not only a creative endeavor — it’s also a great opportunity to apply and showcase modern cloud and DevOps practices. Here’s how I approached mine, and how each step reflects established IT methodologies.

Let's jump straight in!

1. Project Planning & Domain Setup — Classic Project Initialization

I started with a clear goal: to create a modern, scalable, and cost-efficient portfolio website that represents me as a developer.

🧩 IT Parallel:
This aligns with the initialization phase in traditional IT project models like Waterfall or the requirements phase in V-Model XT.

Tools/Services:

Domain purchased via Checkdomain
Architecture planning

2. Structure & Design — Component-Based Architecture

Instead of designing from scratch, I chose a template based on Next.js and Tailwind CSS. These technologies follow the idea of modular components, making development faster and more maintainable.

🧩 IT Parallel:
This reflects modular software architecture, as seen in microservices or component-driven frontend design.

Tools/Services:

GitHub for version control
Tailwind CSS for UI styling
Next.js as the framework

3. Blog Content with MDX — Content-as-Code, No Database Needed

Instead of using a CMS or a database, I manage my blog posts through MDX files directly in the repository. This makes the site database-free, lightweight, and fully serverless.

🧩 IT Parallel:
This is a great example of Content-as-Code, similar to Infrastructure-as-Code. It also follows the Jamstack architecture — where content is static, fast, and versioned in Git.

Advantages:

No CMS required
No recurring database costs
Full version control via Git

4. Hosting via Vercel — Deploy within minutes

For deployment, I chose Vercel — a serverless service. It lets me run my application without managing any infrastructure, with a certain freemium.

🧩 IT Parallel:
This is the essence of serverless architecture.

Benefits:

No server management
Automatic scaling
Tight integration with Github

6. CI/CD with GitHub Actions — Automating the DevOps Way

I created a CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions to automatically build, test, and deploy changes to AWS.

🧩 IT Parallel:
This represents Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) — core principles of DevOps. Automation leads to better consistency, faster delivery, and fewer errors.

Best Practices:

Store secrets credentials securely in Vercel
Push builds automatically to Vercel

🔁 Summary: Agile, Modular, and Cloud-Native

Git-based Content ➡️ MDX in version control
Serverless Deployment ➡️ Vercel orchestration
CI/CD ➡️ Automated via GitHub Actions