Portfolio Redesign
Rebuilt my portfolio from a Bootstrap 3 / jQuery stack to a modern vanilla CSS and JS architecture- entirely through pair programming with Claude.
Details
I hadn’t touched my portfolio site in eight years. It was still running Bootstrap 3, jQuery, Font Awesome, and a bunch of plugins I barely remembered adding. I rebuilt it from scratch by pair programming with Claude- vanilla CSS and JS, no frameworks.
Where Claude shined
Large structural changes went fast. Ripping out Bootstrap, replacing Font Awesome with inline SVGs, converting modal overlays to dedicated project pages, setting up CSS custom properties for theming- Claude wrote the entire new stylesheet, JS, and layout system in one pass. SEO stuff (structured data, Open Graph, sitemap) was quick and correct.
Where I had to step in
Claude over-engineers when you let it. I asked it to take some screenshots and it built a multi-step CDP/websocket pipeline when a static image would’ve been fine. It also snuck in a letter-spacing property tied to a font size bump that got reverted the next pass. It did a clean job consolidating five font size tiers down to two, but only after I told it to.
Page load
The old site loaded Bootstrap CSS (122KB), Font Awesome (100KB+ of fonts and CSS), jQuery, jQuery Easing, Bootstrap JS, classie.js, and cbpAnimatedHeader.js- all sequentially. The new site loads two JS files, both deferred, and inlines the CSS. Just removing dependencies cut more page weight than any optimization could’ve added back.
Takeaway
The most productive pattern was: describe the goal concretely, let Claude implement, review, and course-correct. The least productive was giving it open-ended tasks and letting it figure out tooling on its own- that’s where it wandered.
Full source on GitHub.
Gallery
