Why I rebuilt my portfolio as a Laravel CMS

My portfolio used to be a single 800-line index.html. Hand-edited. Hosted on Namecheap. It looked great. It loaded in under a second. So why did I throw it away?

Three reasons — and they're the same reasons most senior devs eventually move their content out of code:

1. Editing was friction

Every change — a new project, a typo, a phone number update — meant: open the editor, find the right block in 800 lines of HTML, edit, commit, push, wait for deploy. Sometimes I'd see a typo on my phone and just leave it for a week. That's a bad signal in a profession where the website is your shop window.

2. The static version couldn't scale with my work

I ship apps for a living. Mysyva alone has 20+ live on Google Play. Adding a new project meant duplicating a card, fixing the layout, re-tagging filters. Add another six lines of HTML. Hope nothing broke. The static structure stopped fitting the reality of the work.

3. I want the same plumbing for client sites

If I'm going to recommend Laravel + Filament to clients for their dashboards, my own site should be living proof. "This site runs on the same stack I'd build for you" is a much better pitch than "trust me."

What I built

• Laravel 11 for the public site (Blade-rendered, server-side, no JS framework — keeps the original aesthetic intact)
• Filament v3 for the admin — every section editable, no code
• Same CSS — extracted verbatim from the static file. Pixel-identical front-end.
• MySQL on Namecheap shared hosting (the production tier supports it fine)

The whole thing took about a day of focused work — most of it was data modelling and writing the seeder so the database mirrored my old static content exactly. The deploy is just git pull + composer install + php artisan migrate.

Would I recommend it?

If you ship one or two projects a year: No. Stick with static. Less moving parts.

If you ship monthly, or you've ever caught yourself avoiding a portfolio update because of the friction: yes. The CMS pays for itself the third time you update a project from your phone in a hotel lobby.