Ship the Ugly Personal Site

One thing I regret from university is never putting up a personal website.

This is especially funny because I went to Waterloo, where students are famous for elaborate portfolios. That was partly the problem. The bar around me felt so high that I thought my site needed to compete with the intricate designs built by upper-years with design internships at Facebook.

So I waited until I could make something impressive.

Naturally, I made nothing.

That was the wrong comparison: my nonexistent first version against someone else’s tenth. An ugly site would have been better. Once something is public, you have a foundation to improve. When you keep building privately, you often lose interest, or you keep raising your own self-imposed quality bar until nothing sees daylight.

A personal site does not magically create an audience. You still need to meet people, publish work, and share the link. But it gives discovery somewhere to land: a durable corner of the internet you control.

A résumé and LinkedIn profile compress you into standardized fields. A site can show the projects behind the bullets, the decisions you made, what went wrong, what you learned, and what you are still learning.

That matters even more now. With AI, polish is free if you have good taste, so it stops being a signal. Specificity, working artifacts, and honest explanations carry more.

A post by Nate B. Jones about “owning your interface layer” drove this home for me. Instead of presenting another document for someone to filter, give them something they can investigate.

Building one for a student I mentor

Last December, I spoke with a younger engineering student I had been mentoring. Afterward, he sent me a thoughtful email and his résumé.

There was plenty of real material in it: high-voltage electronics for an electric race car, custom PCBs, a life-size Dune thumper, and a robot dog built during a hackathon. But, like most student résumés, years of work had been flattened into bullets that a recruiter might skim for a few seconds.

I reviewed and tightened the résumé, but I also wanted to give that work more room to breathe. So I built him a site and bought the domain for three years.

In a mildly embarrassing parallel to my university experience, my email explaining all of this sat in drafts for months. I eventually sent it. Better late than never applies to both mentorship emails and personal websites.

The site includes two AI-assisted features:

• A recruiter can ask detailed questions about his projects and experience.
• A recruiter can paste a job description and receive an honest fit assessment, including “not a fit.”

The second part is important. The goal is not to make AI praise the candidate regardless of the question. It should identify relevant evidence, acknowledge gaps, and help both sides avoid bad matches.

AI cannot manufacture experience that is not there. It can only provide a better interface to the work someone has actually done.

Turning it into a template

After building that site, I generalized it into an open-source AI Portfolio Template.

The template in action

You replace the example profile with your own projects and experience. The template provides the portfolio, recruiter chat, and job-fit assessment. An AI coding agent can walk you through personalization and deployment.

But you do not need this template, or AI, to begin.

Your first personal site can contain four things:

1. Who you are.
2. What you are learning or working on.
3. One or two projects with evidence.
4. A way to contact you.

Put it online. Share it. Add to it whenever you finish something. Record measurements and outcomes while projects are fresh, because six months later you will forget the details that make the work credible.

Your first version may be plain. Good.

The portfolio that competes with theirs can come later. First, create the address. Give your work somewhere to accumulate. Let the public version teach you what the next version needs.

Something imperfect can compound. Something permanently private cannot.