joshuafolkken.com is this portfolio site: a place to showcase projects and publish a technical blog, and equally a sandbox for exploring how far I can push modern web tooling on Cloudflare.
The Challenge
A portfolio has to load fast, read well and stay cheap to run, while still being interesting enough to justify experimenting on. I wanted a site that doubled as a laboratory for edge rendering, data storage and content tooling without becoming fragile.
The Approach
I built project showcases and a markdown-driven blog on top of SvelteKit, then layered in features like a generated sitemap, engagement buttons and adaptive ad visibility. The same codebase is where I try new patterns before they graduate into the shared kit, so the site is constantly evolving.
Tech Choices
SvelteKit and TypeScript drive the front end. Cloudflare Workers run the application at the edge, KV caches expensive lookups, D1 stores relational data through Drizzle, and TailwindCSS keeps the styling consistent. Everything is chosen to stay fast and inexpensive at the edge.
What I Learned
Running my own site on the edge stack taught me the real trade-offs between caching, cold starts and data access that no tutorial conveys. Treating the portfolio as a sandbox means every improvement here is battle-tested before I recommend it elsewhere.