prosamik.com
Personal site and product portfolio
Note: the project link is at the bottom of this page. Keep scrolling to reach it.
The Problem
I came from Android development and had a solid coding background, but I did not know web development. Next.js was popular, so learning it looked like a practical way to understand how modern web applications worked.
The usual beginner problem was deciding what to build. I did not want to follow a tutorial and copy someone else's project, so I chose something I genuinely needed: this portfolio website.
The Motivation
Every developer needs a portfolio. When I started my indie-hacking journey, I also wanted a record of the work behind it. If the journey did not succeed as a business, I would still have a place that showed what I had built and how hard I had worked.
I wanted a future employer, collaborator, or customer to look at prosamik.com and understand that I could follow through on what I said. At that point, building the portfolio as a Next.js application felt like the right first step.
Mistakes
My first mistake was choosing complexity because I wanted the project to feel technically challenging. I had heard a lot about Go concurrency, so I decided to build a microservices architecture with a Next.js frontend and a Go backend. A portfolio did not need that architecture.
I did not yet know how to connect a frontend and backend properly. I learned by asking ChatGPT questions, putting the answers into code, reading the errors, and trying again. I was not using Codex or Claude at the time. ChatGPT was less capable than today's tools, but the slower process forced me to see many of the bugs and decisions a developer normally handles.
Learning
Building prosamik.com taught me how a frontend and backend communicate. I learned how to deploy the frontend on Vercel and the backend on Railway, including how to Dockerize the backend and understand what the container was doing.
I also worked through OAuth and SMTP email sending for the first time. None of those pieces were extraordinary on their own, but doing them from scratch through conversation with ChatGPT gave me a working picture of how a complete web application fits together.
Achievements
The main achievement was learning how to code with AI without giving up the technical thinking. My previous coding experience helped me understand what was happening behind the generated code, which made my prompts more precise.
As I built more of the application, my knowledge improved and so did the questions I asked. prosamik.com became both a portfolio and the project that taught me how much better AI-assisted development works when the person prompting still understands the system.