Case study · 2026 · v0.1 · in development

Folio Forge

A free, browser-only portfolio builder. 35 role-fluent templates, full palette editor (10 presets + 6 editable colors), 5 font pairs, mobile/desktop preview, single-file HTML export. Every project needs a verifiable proof URL or it ships marked [no proof]. Terminal Dossier exports today; the other 34 templates and additional outputs (PDF resume, LinkedIn snippet) are in flight.

React 19·TanStack Start·Tailwind v4·Browser-only·Deterministic

01 · Problem

Most portfolio sites are either marketing templates with no soul, or hand-coded one-offs that collapse the day a section needs to change. I wanted a deterministic composer: structured input in, real Astro project out — no LLM at runtime, no inference about what a portfolio should be.

02 · Approach

01
Locked the runtime to templates, section schemas, and theme tokens. AI lives in the dev tooling, never in the preview or export path.
02
Three locked-in templates (Operator, Editorial, Studio) with 15 typed section types — hero through CTA — and 28 curated Google Fonts.
03
Built a dependency-free ZIP exporter (hand-rolled CRC32 + ZIP headers). The same pure-fn renderer drives both the live preview iframe and the exported site, so what you see ships byte-equivalent.
04
Curated a 75-image Pexels material pack so background art direction is tasteful by default, not a stock-photo dump.

03 · Outcome

Builder runs locally today; persistence schema (multi-tenant Supabase + RLS) is defined and ready to wire. Next milestone is auth + sync + a 'Publish to Cloudflare Pages' button.