Etienne Tot

Posted on May 18 • Edited on May 21

🚀 Just launched my personal portfolio!

#portfolio #webdev #react #typescript

Hey Dev.to community! 👋

I’m excited to finally share my personal developer portfolio – something I’ve been designing and building from scratch over the past weeks.

🔗 etienne-dev.de

What’s inside:

🎨 Custom layout & design – tailored to reflect my style as a developer

🌗 Light/Dark mode toggle – with persistent theme handling

🌍 Language switch (EN/DE) – including downloadable CVs in both languages

💬 Terminal-style intro section – because developers deserve fun intros too

📨 Contact form – with email confirmation built using Express and Nodemailer

📱 Fully responsive – optimized for mobile, tablet, and desktop

This portfolio is a reflection of how I work as a fullstack developer who cares about UX, design consistency, and code quality.

Would love your feedback or just a quick visit! 🙌

Thanks for reading –
Etienne

Top comments (12)

Wassim Soltani • May 19

It's pretty sweet! Very creative, loved the terminal, and the design is pretty slick!
Would be cool if you could implement auto-theme detection based on system preference.
That's my opinion as a dev.

However, as someone who has screened over 200 applicants, and based on my experience with recruiters and hiring managers, here's what I know:

The simpler your portfolio website, the better. I would tone down the animations to make them as subtle and quick as possible. The cursor might also throw users off a bit.
Recruiters and hiring managers usually don't have enough time to pay attention to all the details. Although what you've done is a nice display of your skills, I would focus on a more traditional layout with the important sections taking the center of the screen, to minimize the sense of "clutter" and make things easier on the eyes.
Try to make it easier to spot specific keywords and technologies. Use bolding, colors and positioning to your advantage. Your terminal is a nice touch, but a search feature would be more useful.

Resumes and portfolio websites are less about flare and more about practicality.

Check out my portfolio as a point of reference if you like and let me know your thoughts!

Etienne Tot • May 19

Hey Wassim, appreciate the detailed feedback.

Glad you liked the terminal and overall design!

Your points from the recruiter side are super valuable. Makes total sense that simplicity and quick access to key info matter more in that context. The portfolio was intentionally more expressive – kind of a creative first draft. Might explore a lighter version later, especially for applications

Also checked out your site – really clean and focused. Definitely gets the point across on what hiring managers look out for

Thanks again for the input :)

Nevo David • May 22

pretty cool putting it all together by yourself - feels good to finally share stuff you build for yourself imo. you think making your own projects changes how you see your work or skills?

Etienne Tot • May 22

Yes, absolutely. Creating my own projects made me own absolutely everything – no one else to debug, tweak UI, or make choices for me. It helped me see where I'm strong, where I've just been "getting by", and what I really like building. It's definitely shifted the way I perceive my work professionally as well — it feels more intentional now.

橙某人 • May 22

This is Cool!

Shubham Bhilare • May 19

Why is the website lagging?
Animations are very slow and your image isn't loading.....

Comment deleted

Shubham Bhilare • May 19

im using brave and found that the animations are little late!!!

Dotallio • May 22

Really like how you mixed UX polish with that terminal intro, it makes it stand out.
How did you approach building the light/dark and language switches together?

Etienne Tot • May 22

Thanks! Glad you caught on to it – I was attempting to achieve a good balance of clean UX with a bit of personality :)

For the language and theme switch, I'm using a combination of state, localStorage and some utility logic to make it consistent and persisted

Translations are handled via i18n, and theme colors are dynamically swapped depending on the currently used mode – nothing too heavy-duty, just a light-weight configuration that does the trick