Welcome to thomasnewman.ca! My name is Thomas and at the time of writing this, I am a third year student at the Lassonde School of Engineering studying Computer Engineering.
During the summer following my first year, I was inspired by some of the other students at my summer job to make my own portfolio, so I got to work making my portfolio from scratch using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I was extremely proud of it in the end, and it really helped me test my limits for the time.
Being in third year, I wanted to see what I’ve learned. I’ve made many websites since my portfolio, and I wanted to apply what I’ve learned in the meantime to make a website that can impress even more. That was when I decided that I wanted to recreate my portfolio in Next.JS, starting from scratch and building up to something that resembles my original portfolio, but gives the user a better experience, and shows my skills even better.
So, what’s different?
Well, first things first, my original website did not feature a blog! I decided I wanted to add something like this to have a log of all of my projects throughout the years, and all of the personal life updates throughout my career.
The blog is actually implemented using Notion API, and the website is constantly calling an online database I have set up on Notion asking if there are any new entries in the table. As you can see, my website converts the Notion text into Markdown, and then displays it on the website, so I can even add images and they will show up on the website as I see them!
Additionally, I added a custom landing page that makes use of 3D particle library called Three. I wanted to add something interactive and interesting that flowed nicely into my projects, biography and contact me pages, which were all previously featured in some way in my previous website.
What’s next?
There are still a lot of things I’d like to add going forward, including an interactive coding widget that lets you see all of the directories, images, code and other files inside of my website directly. I have a similar module inside of my original website, but its crude, and involves reading from the raw user data in my GitHub repositories. Part of my intuition is improving and simplifying my previous work to make it more user-friendly and convenient.
Additionally, I want to continue improving the overall website, including transitions, performance, and appearance. All of these things are important aspects of engineering, and I want to apply all of these new skills I’m learning towards my work.
Signing off
This was a short and sweet introductory post to my blog and my new website. I hope you can see the improvements I’ve made over these past two years, and appreciate the time and consideration into each design decision.
Thank you for taking the time to read this short article, and feel free to contact me through the “Contact Me” page, if you have any feedback or suggestions for me and my work!
Last edited on September 26, 2026 at 1:50 AM EST