Web development has evolved at a breakneck pace in recent years, making it increasingly difficult to keep tabs on one’s own online footprint. Over the past 15 years, I’ve designed hundreds of websites and apps for clients across the globe—yet, ironically, my own personal website has remained frozen in time since 2008. Built on WordPress’s PHP/CSS templating system, it stands as a digital relic amid an industry that never stops moving forward.
The Wake-Up Call: Post-Pandemic Reflections
The quarantine period has made me unable to collaborate in person with people I’ve been working with for years. In a way, it gave me a chance to think about how I’ve neglected myself in terms of digital footprint. In today’s world, being anonymous is not a virtue; the whole point of being a web developer is creating connections and making things. So why shouldn’t I use all my skills and knowledge for my own site? After all, I’m supposed to practice what I preach to my clients.
Technical Evolution: From PHP to NextJS
My personal website has remained functional thanks to PHP and MySQL, which handle everything required behind the scenes, while plugins take care of security and spam protection. Still, whenever I browsed someone else’s WordPress setup, I couldn’t help but notice how neglected my own site felt by comparison. As a developer at heart, I could no longer be satisfied with WordPress’s aging WYSIWYG editor. I wanted to write actual code again, and that desire ultimately pushed me to overhaul the platform entirely. That search led me to Magic-Portfolio, the next-generation template built on Once-UI and Next.js. I fell for it almost immediately, and before long I was editing Markdown files in my IDE, watching with quiet satisfaction as plain text transformed into beautifully styled content. The migration took longer than expected, mostly because of my habit of upgrading dependencies first and untangling the resulting incompatibilities later. Even so, it was time well spent: staying current with modern tools and technologies is a discipline worth maintaining.
A New Digital Space
Moving from WordPress to Next.js has been more than a technical migration—it marks the beginning of something far more meaningful. It’s about reconnecting with the broader developer community and showing, through my own work, both what I can build and who I am as a developer.
I owe a huge thanks to the Magic Portfolio team for sparking this journey. Working through this rebuild reminded me that a personal site isn’t just an online resume—it’s a digital reflection of yourself, evolving as you do.
With this new site now live, I feel a real sense of excitement for what’s ahead. I finally have a space online that can grow and change alongside me, capturing my journey as both a developer and a person.
Welcome to my new digital home. It’s long overdue, but I’ve finally made it.