My co-founder Melisa and I have spent years building products together: Tribu Yoga, La Candidieta, Capitall, and Content Seed.

Alongside those shared ventures, she also runs an independent design and brand strategy practice serving clients across both Spanish and English-speaking markets.

In 2023, she asked me to build her portfolio site. Compared to the SaaS platforms we'd already developed together, it was a relatively small project. But in a different sense, it carried a different kind of pressure: this time I was building against her standards as a designer, rather than collaborating on shared product decisions.

Melisa has an unusually high standard for visual detail, performance, and overall design quality. After years of working together, we had developed a shared understanding of what "finished" should feel like, which made it more natural to build the project internally than outsource it elsewhere.

We both knew the level of refinement the site needed before it could be considered complete.

One of our goals was to keep the project as self-contained and durable as possible.

The site was built without dependencies on third-party CMS platforms or services that could later introduce pricing pressure, technical limitations, or migration headaches. Content lives directly in markdown files inside the repository, and the site itself is statically generated. Hosting is effectively the only external dependency.

I also used the project as an opportunity to evaluate Next.js more seriously as part of my long-term stack. It was a low-risk environment where I could test architectural decisions without major operational consequences.

The site supports both Spanish and English because that reflects Melisa's actual client base.

The multilingual setup wasn't added as a technical exercise or portfolio feature. It was a practical requirement. Her work is viewed internationally, and the experience needed to feel consistent regardless of language without splitting the brand across multiple domains or disconnected experiences.

Most of my work revolves around SaaS platforms and operational systems. Melisa's portfolio highlights a different side of my work: static, content-driven websites with a strong emphasis on performance, typography, and visual execution.

It also demonstrates something equally important — the ability to build according to someone else's standards and creative direction, not only my own. Designing for users who never see the implementation details is one discipline. Building for a designer who notices every detail is another. Both have shaped the way I approach frontend engineering.