Django Portfolio
This portfolio site — designed, built, and deployed solo on Django + Render
01The problem
Most data scientists either link a Squarespace site or push to a free GitHub Pages repo. Neither communicates 'I can ship and operate production systems' — which is exactly what hiring managers screen for.
02Approach & architecture
Designed and built this portfolio as its own production system: 7 Django apps, PostgreSQL on Render, WhiteNoise compressed manifests, Cloudflare R2 for media, allauth Google OAuth, Stripe ready, deploy-on-push CI/CD. Embedded the Spotify Explorer dashboard directly as a Django app (no external Render service) and built a CMS-grade admin so all content edits flow through Django migrations or admin, not template hacks.
03Results
Measured What the work shows
Live at nijiati-abulizi.com — every page, every chart, every API endpoint runs in this single Django process. The portfolio is itself the strongest case study in the portfolio.
04Lessons
A real backend pays for itself the moment you want to add a new content type — with this stack, adding a category bucket or a new project field is a 10-minute migration, not a frontend rewrite. The biggest unexpected lesson was how much of the work is in the deploy pipeline, not the application code: secrets, security headers, env-var hygiene, and CI/CD setup ate easily half the time.