cbirddev.com
This site — a portfolio and playground built to the same standard I hold production work to.
https://cbirddev.comMost portfolio sites are built to look good in a screenshot. This one is built to be a working example of how I approach a greenfield Laravel project.
Design
The visual style is loosely inspired by engineering schematics — fine grid backgrounds, crosshair corner marks, connector dividers, and monospace type for anything "technical." The goal was something that felt deliberate and unconventional without being a gimmick. Blueprint patterns are everywhere in engineering; applying them to a software portfolio felt honest.
The design system lives in a set of Blade components (blueprint-card, blueprint-connector, blueprint-timeline, etc.) and is intentionally minimal — a handful of primitives that compose well rather than a large library of one-off components.
Stack
- Laravel 13 for routing, controllers, and content management
- Tailwind CSS v4 for styling
- Spatie Response Cache for full-page HTTP caching
- Sushi — Eloquent models backed by config files, no database required
Content management
Everything on the site is config-driven. Projects, employment history, and site settings live in PHP config files (config/projects.php, config/employment.php, config/site.php). No database, no admin panel — just files.
Why bother
I could have thrown up a static site in an afternoon. But the most honest thing I can show a potential client or employer is a real application — one with proper architecture, test coverage, and the kind of detail work that doesn't show up in a screenshot.