The year was 2018, I was… well… 18 years old. Even though I had learned to program about 2 or 3 years earlier, I was just having my first steps into the professional world, doing some freelance jobs and banging my head against the wall trying to learn some new languages, frameworks, techniques…

Studying all of this was scary, but exciting at the same time. There were so many possibilities: “What am I gonna choose?” I thought. I didn’t know if I should learn to build APIs with Python, “or maybe .NET?”, “I know! Why not start with mobile apps?”, “do I want to learn Java? Absolutely not!”, “React or Vue?”… (insert a million more random thoughts here).

At the end of the day, I ended up falling in love with front-end development, animations and microinteractions. Actually, it makes perfect sense, since I come from a family with a strong artistic background. Visual, aesthetic, creative and interactive things have always drawn me in way more than just writing code.

Well, I wasn’t happy at all.

From time to time, some pretty peculiar projects would pop up: demanding, indecisive and unpredictable clients (pure terror). I also faced my first “official” jobs as a programmer, but the tech scene in the city where I lived was, let’s say… kinda boring. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the opportunities I had back then, but they were far from what I really wanted. The scene was basically made up of either very traditional or very small companies, still clinging to methodologies and technologies from the Cold War era, deprecated frameworks and legacy projects so ancient they probably needed a PhD in lost civilizations just to understand the code.

I dreamed of electric sheep…

I wanted the big city, adventure, challenge, that healthy kind of discomfort, and, in the middle of all of that, to meet new people, mentors, inspirations, motivations.

But before going on this odyssey, I needed to create something to call my own, so I could say: “Look at the mess I made!!!”.

And that’s how I started my first portfolio.

I don’t remember every little detail of how I built it, but I sure remember what I wanted. My “requirements” were:

• It couldn’t look like some generic portfolio or a cookie-cutter template. It needed at least a bit of authenticity.
• It shouldn’t be too complex or rely on alien technologies (I didn’t want to spend that much time on it).
• It had to have a few simple animations, just to show off my creative side and what I could do with CSS.

And so it was…

As I’m writing this, I went digging around for the project’s design…

Found it!!

was in Figma, last edited 7 years ago. Funny, I could’ve sworn I did it in Adobe XD.

https://www.figma.com/design/YnN5juWZCxQ0y6oMgKmARJ5t/portfolio?node-id=0-1&t=hldLenEnTWvT7diH-1

Yes, my given name is Ítalo. Even though I’ve always been called Tim, back then I didn’t feel very confident. I was even a bit embarrassed to use that name outside my family circle, since “Tim” isn’t exactly a common name here in Brazil. But over time, I came to embrace Tim as my true name.

I’ve always been a fan of adding a dose of nostalgia to my creations, and this website was no different. I went with a kind of pre-computer aesthetic: the page elements looked like diaries, with typewriter fonts, analog cameras photos and cream colors that evoked old layers of papers.

About the development, I feel that I got really close the design I had imagined, adding a layer of animations that brought life to the project.

Back then, even though I had worked with tools like React, Webpack and Wordpress, I decided to build this landing page with the good old “vanilla” stack: HTML, CSS and Javascript. Some build steps were added with Gulp, mainly to compile the SASS code into CSS. (Today, looking back, I think even that wasn’t really necessary for this particular project, but it was essential for me to learn how to deal with asset processing, something that, by the way, I ended up doing a lot in later on).

Reviewing the code now, seven years later, I think it has aged pretty well. Many of my quirks have changed, especially in JavaScript, but in terms of HTML and CSS, it’s still pretty similar to what I do today.

A fun fact: only two projects made it into this portfolio. The website I built for my dad (which I plan to talk about in another entry here on my new site) and a layout experiment called Interzone, which I created just for myself. Not long after putting together this portfolio, I landed my first “big” job, and it kind of got forgotten. I’ve glanced at it a few times over the years, but only now did I really stop to look at it closely…

And you know what? I’m proud of it. Even though it’s something simple, it feels good to look back on the journey so far. A lot has happened..