Decision 1: replace the photo with a composition
A portfolio template can't ship someone's face, so I built the hero from code instead. A lime slab, an ink arch holding your initial, an orbit line that passes behind the arch and in front of it, and floating stickers: a code window, a "hello!" bubble, a spinning "open for work" badge. They sit on separate depth layers and shift with the cursor. If you drop a transparent PNG into public/, the hero swaps your photo in automatically.