Dev Log: May 18 Wrap-up

Overview

Spent today doing some much-needed housekeeping on my portfolio site. I focused on setting up proper dynamic SEO, cleaning up my professional experience timeline, and making the projects section a bit more interactive.

What I Worked On

Wrangling Dynamic SEO and Sitemaps

Next.js dynamic routes are great, but getting search engines to index them nicely with clean metadata is always a bit of a chore. I spent some time setting up dynamic metadata generators for both my blogs and projects.

Since my blog posts are written in markdown, putting raw post previews directly into the page metadata looks terrible—it gets filled with random asterisks, hash symbols, and backticks. To fix this, I wrote a quick regex utility to strip out markdown syntax on the fly, generating clean plain-text descriptions for search engines and social cards. I also wired up dynamic sitemap generation so search engines actually know these paths exist without me having to manually update an XML file every time I write a post.

Giving "Experience" Its Own Space

I realized my career history was getting lost, so I split my professional timeline out into a dedicated route. This highlights my day job building frontend portals and real-time clinical workflows for a digital healthcare platform, alongside my older open-source contributions compile testing recovery kernels.

Of course, it wouldn't be a normal release without a silly mistake: I realized right after deploying that I fat-fingered my start date for my current job as May instead of November. Got that fixed quickly before anyone noticed.

Triggering Demos Locally

I wanted to show off my smart lock concept project ("Home Alone"), but because it's more of an interactive concept, a standard external link didn't make sense. I refactored my project card components to accept custom click actions. Now, instead of blindly opening a new browser tab, the card can intercept the action and trigger an inline interactive demo directly on the page. It makes the portfolio feel much less like a static resume and more like a playground.

Wrapping Up

With the sitemaps updated and the SEO foundations in place, the site is feeling a lot more robust. Tomorrow, I think I'll dive deeper into polishing the actual interactions inside that smart lock demo.