For most of my career, I’ve never needed a website for my portfolio. I spent a decade at TCS and I’ve worked on some pretty interesting projects.
TCS was service company and whenever a client wants to see our work, we usually send a case study of our recent work in a PPT or PDF and that was it. In late 2020, I decided to switch jobs and having a dedicated portfolio website felt exciting.
Going online.
I started with the website builder Wix, but it felt restrictive and more suited for marketing website templates. Webflow was expensive and plans were confusing. I landed on Framer. I was intuitive and was similar to Webflow in terms of functionalities.
Later, I ran into a frustrating problem with Framer. The free version doesn’t allow me to connect custom domains, Mini has no CMS and Framer Pro, which has all the options I need, was expensive.
Since none of the tools were working the way I wanted it to, I decide to pick up coding again. I was rusty and only familiar with HTML, CSS, Javascript. To get better, I started learning React.
Version 1 was a simple website. Basic. All static pages.
Becoming dynamic
The skeleton was live but I was still working on the content. Building case studies using HTML was cumbersome. So I decided to add an open source CMS and make my site dynamic.
I chose Strapi as my CMS, configured the connections and made my site dynamic. I added a blog with the hope of writing more. It didn’t work.
The portfolio was live and I slowly began searching for new opportunities. It had two problems.
- My case studies needed refinement and I found the Strapi UX tough to work.
- I was growing unhappy with overall visual aesthetic. It was too generic and lacked a personality.
It was at this time, I came across Brian Lovin on Twitter and learnt that he has open-sourced his personal website. His website was dynamic, structured, secure and very well designed . I downloaded his repo and started understanding the underlying the foundations.
His tech stack at the time was NextJS, Tailwind CSS and Ghost CMS. He also used GraphQL to query the CMS which made his site super efficient and his code super clean.
Using his repo as a reference, I rebuilt my site from scratch using his tech stack.
This time I opted for Graph CMS as it had good UX, secure and had a generous free tier for hobbyists. Around May 2021, Version 2 of my website was born. It was dynamic, secure and had a modern tech stack.
This portfolio helped me convert lot of interviews and got me the offer at Zalando. Once I moved to Berlin, life got super busy and I stopped updating my site.
What is the purpose of my website?
In late 2025, I decided to create a update my website again.
This time I did not want it to be just a portfolio showcase. I wanted my site to be more personal. A space for me to experiment. A playground. A place to share my thoughts.
This time AI made it easier and combined with my dev background it was much efficient and faster. I used a combination of Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex to build the site.
I moved all my content to Notion. I find notion much more comfortable and also their AI is pretty good. Even thought I moved away from Hygraph CMS, I’d still recommend it to everyone building a dynamic website. Couldn’t go wrong with it.
You can play around with the new site @ sriram.design
If you have any questions on the site or want to deep dive on how I built it, reach out.😊