Case study - Personal portfolio
ciaraneddy.com
A personal portfolio for a software engineer, built around his work, background, and the kind of roles he wanted to reach.
The brief
A portfolio with a person behind it.
This is Ciaran's own site. He's Firefinch's lead developer, so the brief was unusually personal. The first job was practical. The site needed to help him show his projects clearly while applying for software roles.
Once the site was live, it became more than an application tool. It gave Ciaran one place for his work, his background, and the thinking behind both. It also left room for what comes next, including writing and a visual refresh.
The approach
Letting the story sit beside the code.
We started with portfolios Ciaran actually liked, then looked at the parts of his own story that mattered to the site. We were not trying to decorate a CV. We wanted to show how he thinks about systems, people, and making things better.
That thread goes back further than software. It's there in competitive swimming, in modding Minecraft as a kid, in teaching in East Africa. Those details help the site feel like a person, not a list of roles.
The aesthetic
Dark, focused, and still warm.
The dark interface came from Ciaran's world. Developer tools often live in dark mode, and the palette helped the project pages feel calm and focused without asking for attention everywhere.
The amber accent adds a small bit of warmth. It gives the site a recognisable note without pushing it into the familiar blue and purple tech portfolio look. We chose Syne and Plus Jakarta Sans for the same reason. They are clear, characterful, and easy to live with.
The details
Small decisions people can feel.
We kept coming back to one idea. A good site should reward attention, not with tricks, but with small details that make someone feel a real person made the thing.
On ciaraneddy.com, that shows up quietly in the motion, project cards, and moments of interaction. Some of that thinking came with us into the Firefinch site, where it became hand-drawn icons, light motion, and small moments that support the page instead of distracting from it.
Under the surface
A codebase ready for the next version.
The site has changed a lot beneath the surface. It moved from Firebase to Vercel so the workflow was cleaner and the pages felt quicker. The Next.js version has moved from 13 through to 16 as the project has grown.
SEO, performance checks, and a cleaner project structure were part of the build, because the site was never meant to stay still. The next additions, a blog and visual refresh, already have somewhere sensible to go.
Experience timeline - professional history laid out clearly, without making it feel like a Word document.
A portfolio should give someone room to show where they are now and keep changing with them. This one has that room.