Sripad

what did you make?

my personal portfolio site. cloned the structure from a really well-built next.js template (dennis snellenberg’s, if you’ve seen it) and gutted it down to nothing, then rebuilt it as mine — real projects, real photos, real copy, my own animations tuned in. 8 case studies, a working contact form that actually emails me, custom 404/error pages, the whole thing.

what was challenging?

the contact form was the big one. wanted people to be able to email me straight from the site, no mailto popup, so i had to wire up a real backend api route with an email service, plus rate limiting so it can’t get spammed (3 messages a day per person, checked both client and server side so it can’t be bypassed).

also spent way too long getting social share previews right — turns out next.js doesn’t just inherit your image/card settings across pages the way you’d expect, so half my pages were silently missing the preview image until i caught it. and i almost shipped the site running a next.js version with 18 known security vulnerabilities because i never thought to check. did a full audit and fixed it.

what are you proud of?

that every stat on the site is real. first draft i let ai guess at achievements based on vague skill tags and it was embarrassing — generic buzzword soup. went back and rewrote every single project with actual numbers: socle’s real waitlist count, equity intel’s real alert volume, the actual story behind why i built each thing. nothing on there is made up.

also proud i pushed back on making it “perfect” and just made it real instead. still have 3 projects running placeholder graphics instead of real screenshots and i’m not stressed about it.

what should people know to test it?

click into a project card, not just the homepage — the case studies are where the actual work is
try the contact form, it really sends to my inbox
hover the name on the homepage, small easter egg there
if you spam the contact form more than 3x it’ll tell you to stop, that’s intentional not a bug