I built a retro hacker-style terminal portfolio using just pure HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS—literally zero frameworks or libraries. Standard portfolios felt kind of boring, so I wanted to make something actually cool with a working terminal, Matrix digital rain in the background, CRT scanlines, and retro keyclick sounds.
The trickiest part was getting the audio to work without just downloading a bunch of MP3s. I coded it from scratch using the browser’s native Web Audio API to generate the click and error tones live in JavaScript. I also fought with mobile layout bugs for a bit because the terminal input kept stretching past the screen on phones, but I fixed that using min-width: 0 and flexbox.
Honestly pretty hyped that I built the whole thing from scratch with zero dependencies and got it running super fast on mobile too.
To test it out, turn your sound on, click anywhere on the page, and start typing commands in the terminal. Try running help, about, skills, matrix, date, clear, or sudo if you want to hear the access denied sound.
Live site: https://kartikeynegi25.github.io/personal-site/
GitHub repo: https://github.com/kartikeynegi25/personal-site
