My First Portfolio Had 3 Mistakes. All 3 Were Mine, and None Was the Design.

My first portfolio looked fine. That was the problem.

I built it in one weekend during a semester break, followed a tutorial for the layout, and felt quietly professional for about six days.

Then I re-read it the way a stranger would — a busy stranger, with thirty seconds and no reason to be kind. Here are the 3 mistakes I found. Not one of them was the design.

Mistake 1: two projects I could not explain

My portfolio listed three projects. I had built all three by following tutorials, which is a fine way to learn and a terrible way to fill a portfolio, because a portfolio is a promise: ask me about these.

Two of the three, I could not keep that promise for. If anyone had asked "why did you structure it like this?" or "what was the hardest bug?", my honest answers were "the man in the video did it like this" and "the bug was also his."

Nobody ever asked, which sounds lucky until you realise what it means: the page was not failing loudly. It was failing silently, in the direction of every opportunity it was supposed to create. A portfolio nobody questions is not a success story. It is an unread one.

Mistake 2: the skills bar said "90% Python"

There it was in cheerful animated bars, filling up as you scrolled: HTML 95%, CSS 85%, Python 90%.

Ninety percent of Python. I had been writing Python for about two months. I could not have passed a friendly quiz on my own code. What would 100% have been — the people who wrote the language?

The bars were not measured against anything. I had chosen the numbers the way you choose a profile photo: the ones that made me look best while still being technically a picture of me. HTML at 95 felt modest because 100 felt arrogant, and that was the entire methodology.

Of the three mistakes, this is the one I judge past-me for most, because the projects were borrowed skill but the bar was a borrowed number — a claim with a percentage sign on it, invented at my desk, in my hostel, on a computer that knew better.

Mistake 3: a contact form that sent messages to nowhere

The contact form was beautiful. Name, email, message, a button with a hover effect I was proud of.

It was connected to nothing.

No backend, no service, no working action — the form politely accepted messages and filed them directly into the void. I found out by accident, weeks later, when a friend said "I messaged you through your site, did you get it?" and I had to say no, and then I had to find out why, and the why was that the form was a drawing of a form.

That one still stings, because of the three mistakes it is the only one that could have cost a real person. Someone could have written to offer work or help, watched the "message sent" animation I had proudly added, and concluded I ignored them. My portfolio was not just exaggerating. It was accidentally rude.

The catch: the design was copied too, and that part was fine

I want to separate two things people usually glue together.

Copying the design from a tutorial was fine. That is how everyone starts; layout is a skill you absorb by imitation, like handwriting. Nobody sensible cares.

What was not fine lived one layer deeper, in the claims. The projects claimed experience I hadn't had. The bar claimed a measurement that never happened. The form claimed a door existed where there was a painting of a door. A portfolio's job is to make claims a stranger can trust, and mine had quietly failed at exactly its only job — while looking, if I may say so, quite nice.

And yes, I left it online for weeks after noticing, because taking it down felt like going backwards. Vanity is a powerful hosting service.

The 3 fixes (short, because they were)

Fix 1 — projects: I removed one project entirely and kept only the ones I could talk about for five minutes. Under each, I wrote three honest lines: what it does, what broke while I built it, and what I would change now. The page got shorter and much harder to argue with.

Fix 2 — skills: The bars are deleted. In their place, a plain list called "Things I can actually do," written in verbs a stranger can test: write small Python programs, build a simple web page, use Git without panic. If a claim cannot survive one follow-up question, it does not go on the page.

Fix 3 — the form: I replaced the fake machinery with my plain email address and one sentence saying I reply within a day or two. Then I sent myself a test message and waited until it arrived before calling it fixed. It arrived. Revolutionary technology, the working inbox.

Your turn

I've shown you mine: an invented 90%, two borrowed projects, and a form that emailed the void.

What's the one lie still sitting on your portfolio?