Context (Balancing work and personal projects)

Often, when I visit another developer’s portfolio page I feel overwhelmed. I see devs who work full-time in companies and still have time to work on amazing personal stuff.

I consider myself a solid developer, but TBH, portfolio management hasn’t been my strength.

After four years of devoting most of my time to my job, I realized two things:

1. During that time, I created really cool stuff for those projects: component libraries, dashboards, plugins, data visualizations, whole marketing websites, etc.
2. None of it was mine to share or show to anyone.

Sure, a full-time job provides financial stability and many other benefits, but developers are creatives, and for creatives, a solid portfolio is a must, not a plus.

Unfortunately, my portfolio only showcased freelance projects from before I landed a full-time role in 2021. Suffice it to say, they were not at all a reflection of my current skills or were even based on the stacks I usually work with today.

So, I thought the best thing to do was to take it down and start from square one.

New goal and challenges

My goal for 2025 was simple: create a solid portfolio, trying to work on personal projects daily, even if there’re things from work I could be doing.

A big mistake I made during my first years working in enterprise applications is devoting personal time to work stuff.

I honestly believed that the extra effort would be appreciated and/or rewarded. Although, to a certain extent, in some cases it did, honestly, not to an extent that justified all the hours I took from my spare time which could have been used to work on personal projects.

Having realized the error of my ways, I decided to devote all my active spare time to personal projects that could be part of a portfolio. The only issue now was… where was I going to get projects from?

Even though I may squeeze a few hours here and there to work on these projects, I definitely don’t have the time for either of these alternatives:

a) Setup a freelance operation again;

b) Come up with all the ideas and designs myself.

As a designer, I plan to create a few custom projects to fully showcase my skills. However, I just don’t have time to handle the design for every portfolio piece.

I thought of strategies like cloning apps and websites, but I really don’t like the idea of having clones as part of my portfolio… I needed something else. Thanks to a recommendation made by Kevin Powell (who is great CSS instructor) in one of his tutorials, I found Frontend Mentor.

Enter Frontend Mentor

Frontend Mentor is an online platform that offers web development challenges based on real-world UI/UX designs. The challenges range from beginner-friendly projects like simple landing pages to advanced applications requiring API integration and state management. Each challenge provides Figma design files, assets, and a style guide, making it an excellent resource for developers who want to build realistic projects.

Beyond escaping the endless cycle of courses and tutorials, Frontend Mentor offers structured challenges that help in multiple ways:

1. Real-World Projects – The challenges simulate real client projects, where you have to translate professional designs into functional websites. This helps bridge the gap between theory and practice.
2. Well-Defined UI/UX Designs – Unlike self-initiated projects, where you create designs from scratch.
3. Professional Mockups – Frontend Mentor provides fully designed mockups. This allows you to focus on writing clean, efficient code.
4. Skill Development – Each challenge pushes me to refine foundational skills (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), but at the same time, depending on the project, I face the need to cherry-pick and leverage more advanced front-end technologies for specific areas, like Sass, React, TypeScript, Astro, Next, etc.
5. Community Feedback – One of the best parts is that you can submit your solutions and receive constructive feedback from other developers, as well as give it to them. This iterative improvement process mimics real-world peer code reviews.
6. Portfolio-Worthy Work – The projects I build from these challenges look professional and polished, making them great additions to my portfolio.

Conclusion

Though I will only base some of my portfolio projects on the challenges offered by Frontend Mentor, this platform will definitely play a key role in my journey. First of all, having already finished five projects, I can say it is an amazing way to get the mental juices flowing. The fact that I don’t have to worry about either the concept or the design of a project, really allows me to be laser-focused on the things I want. For example, smaller projects have allowed me to explore working with vanilla technologies (JS/CSS) but taking them much further than I previously had (experimenting with Web Components and applying vanilla JS design patterns for state management and side effects, newer CSS features like layers, container queries, etc. ). On the other hand, larger projects have allowed me to work with frameworks I don’t use at work such as Alpine, Astro and SvelteKit, which I really really like.