Overview
akkila.dev is a personal developer portfolio built to convert recruiters into contacts and demonstrate fullstack capability through the site itself. It ships project pages, a blog, an LLM powered chat panel, and a contact form, all serve side rendered for maximum SEO and Lighthouse scores. The portfolio is live at akkila.dev.
The Problem
Most developer portfolios are either static sites painful to update (requiring a redeploy for every edit) or bare bones templates that don't showcase engineering depth. The goal was a site impressive enough to send to a hiring manager, updatable from a phone in under 5 minutes, and itself the strongest demo in the portfolio.
What I Built
A fullstack monorepo (pnpm + Turborepo) with two deployable apps: a Next.js 15 frontend and a standalone Express 5 API. Public pages are statically generated with ISR so they serve instantly from cache, while the admin dashboard is a full SPA feel CRUD interface behind JWT auth. An LLM chat panel lets visitors ask questions about me directly on the landing page, with a graceful fallback when the model is offline.
Tech Stack
- Frontend: Next.js 15 (App Router), React 19, Tailwind CSS v4, shadcn/ui, Radix UI
- Backend: Express 5, TypeScript, Zod (shared schemas), Prisma ORM, PostgreSQL 16
- Infrastructure: Self hosted VPS, Docker Compose + Nginx, Cloudflare R2 (media), GitHub Actions CI
- Observability: GlitchTip (error tracking), Microsoft Clarity (analytics), pino (structured logging)
Key Features
- Project showcase - filterable by tech tag; each project has a full detail page with markdown content and embedded media
- LLM chat panel - visitors can ask questions about me on the landing page; falls back to the contact form when offline
- Blog - markdown rendered posts with syntax highlighting, table of contents, and an RSS feed
- Admin dashboard - auth gated CRUD for projects and posts, image uploads to Cloudflare R2, publish/unpublish controls
- Contact form - hCaptcha + honeypot + rate limiting; submissions stored in Postgres and forwarded via Resend email
- Recommendations - verified GitHub/LinkedIn users can leave a referral; approved entries appear on the public site
Results & Impact
Targeting Lighthouse ≥ 99 across Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO on the landing page. Total infrastructure cost is ≤ $10/month (VPS + Cloudflare free tier). The site itself is the primary demo piece. The codebase demonstrates the same fullstack engineering it is designed to advertise.