chraebsli Portfolio
It the night from the 17th to the 18th Oct 2026, I published this new portfolio website of mine I was working on for some time.
Hi, I am chraebsli (or Nicholas) and created this portfolio website and blog.
The old site
As of writing this post, I still host a small React website/app on a free Vercel plan, which I call my personal website or portfolio. It includes some details about me, and it really is a simple and boring website I created when I started with React. Since then, time has run, and I moved through different JS territories and started on developing a CMS for my clients.
Additionally, I also host a Jekyll blog site on another domain where I write posts (or so I did some time ago). This is a static site generator like here, but it was an existing theme where I tried to destroy as little design as possible while trying to learn something new. I’ve written some blogs there, and most of them in German & English at the same time (or at least publish them like that).
Why the change
As said, I had to maintain two entirely different tools, which wasn’t very thoughtful from my side from the beginning. With that comes less time for such things, and at some point, it just gets forgotten because it is a ‘pain in the ass.’
The new site
This new site was created using an empty astro.js starter. As I already knew React and static site generators like Jekyll and Next.js for server-side rendering.
But React is slow, Jekyll uses Ruby, and Next.js is overkill for a simple blog. I thought, Why not try something new I don’t know yet? Like astro.
As I started creating that site, I knew I had to do something not as stupid as other times. Something reliable that works, isn’t very challenging to learn and maintain, and also is just as simple as possible. But I also knew that I would require one or two features here and there, which could cost me a few brain cells. And of course it did.
As much as I was inspired by nivinvysakh/astro-tui-portfolio, I didn’t like the bloat of it at all. Themes looked nice, the terminal was beautiful, and the GUI was clean. UX on another level, but just too much of it with the minigames (for me). Get your own opinion here: https://astro-tui-portfolio.netlify.app/.
With that inspiration, I build my own portfolio in a style that resembles me: simple but elegant, a bit nerdy, efficient, and with some Easter eggs. This first publish contains a complete dark & light theme, the terminal with plenty of fun commands, and the CV with all its details.
< 150kb
After some optimizing, I was able to bring the total size of a single page load down to ~130kb. Fonts took almost 2/3 of each page load. That is hella optimized for such a cool website, I would say? I try to keep it as low as possible, but since there will be additional features, it has to grow at least a bit.
Coming Soon
In the future, I will (or at least want) to implement those features:
- Full English/German Site with a language switcher
- Sitemap for indexing, etc.
- Feed for blog posts
- Contact form for direct communication
- and here and there some minor changes or funny surprises
References:
Of course I didn’t build every small feature from scratch, but was able to use existing solutions and adapt them to my needs: