Why I built this site

Almost nobody has one

I've sat in on a fair few interviews now, and I could count on one hand the candidates who had their own website. So whenever a link did appear on a CV, I clicked it. Every single one. Some were genuinely impressive. A couple had dead links and a half-finished project page that clearly hadn't been touched in two years. But that's not really the point. The point is they all got looked at. In a stack of near-identical CVs (same frameworks, same bullet points) having something of your own to show is rare enough that it stands out before you've said a word. A broken site still beat no site, because at least I remembered it.

The job market has teeth now

I'm not looking for work. But Covertime is being built to sell, so in a few years I might be, and the market I'd be walking back into has changed. AI is now used to filter applications, and increasingly to run the first interview too. When a machine is the first thing between you and a job, anything genuinely human and specific helps your odds. A site I've designed, built and written myself is about as specific as it gets. It's harder to reduce to keywords and easier to remember than another PDF. I'd rather hand someone a thing I made than a list of things I claim I can make. I've got 10+ years behind me, which helps. But experience only counts if it survives the filter, and a portfolio is my way of not being flattened into a match score.

It costs me nothing to run

Same trick as the client sites: a static export, free hosting, content I can edit myself. I'm a bit cheap, and honestly I'd rather that than a monthly bill for a page I update a handful of times a year. If the tools are free and good, use them. That was half of what tipped me into finally doing it.

And I wanted to have some fun

A portfolio doesn't have to be a CV in HTML with the personality drained out. So there are a few things hidden in here: easter eggs for anyone who reads the source or opens DevTools. Nobody asked for them. They won't get me hired. I built them anyway, because a personal site is one of the few bits of engineering where I answer to no one but myself, and that's worth enjoying.

Whether it works, I'll find out later

So that's the honest reasoning: it's a shop window, a hedge against a harder market, cheap to keep online, and a bit of fun to build. I don't know yet whether it'll ever actually land me anything.

But of all the developer sites I clicked on across those interviews, I remembered every single one: good, bad and broken. Given the choice between being remembered and being filtered, I know which I'd pick. So I built the thing.