Building vitosenic.com — My Minimalist Personal Site

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Why I built this site

I didn’t want a generic portfolio page.
Most student or junior websites look the same: name, CV, GitHub links, maybe a couple of projects.
I wanted something different — a place where I could share projects, notes, and let people talk directly with an AI version of me.

Tech stack

I went with Next.js + Tailwind for the frontend.
For data, I use Supabase as both the database and the vector store (pgvector) to power my RAG pipeline.
The AI chat runs on OpenAI models (tested with GPT-4.1-mini for speed), and embeddings are updated automatically when I add new content (projects, notes, or CV data).

Minimalist design

I kept the design clean:

  • No clutter, no animations for the sake of animations.
  • One landing page with just my name, what I do, links to projects, notes, socials — and the chat.
  • I wanted visitors to feel they can immediately interact, not just scroll.

The AI chat

This is the part I’m most proud of.
The chat isn’t just a toy — it’s a personalized assistant trained on:

  • My CV data (experience, skills, roadmap, etc.)
  • My projects (from projects.json)
  • My notes/blog posts (chunked by headings for precision)

The goal was to make it feel like you’re talking to me, but grounded strictly in my own data.
No hallucinated nonsense, no fake projects.

If the context is missing, the bot falls back with:
“I haven’t shared that yet, but you can reach me directly at vito.senic@gmail.com.”

Lessons learned

  • Keeping data structured in JSON (CV, projects) makes embedding + RAG pipelines much cleaner.
  • Chunking matters. Each project, each section of my CV, and each blog heading is its own chunk for better retrieval.
  • Prompt engineering is 50% of the work. A bad system prompt = bad answers, no matter how good the data is.
  • Minimalistic design doesn’t mean boring. With the right focus (projects + chat), the site feels alive.

What’s next

  • Adding more case studies to my notes (so the AI can explain them directly).
  • Iterating on the chat UX (live typing effect, better UI).
  • Using the site as my public lab notebook — building in public, but also training my AI model of me.

👉 You can check the live site here: vitosenic.com.