Diogo Lemos

The stakes

A personal website is where an engineer is allowed to play it safest: a name, a list of skills, some links, done. That version was always available to me, more boring, but doable, and it never felt like the point. My site is the one place where nobody sets the brief but me, so it had to show the things a skills list cannot: creativity, curiosity, and proof that thinking differently is possible, running live in the browser rather than claimed in a paragraph.

Making that claim sets its own bar. A portfolio that lists capabilities proves nothing; anyone can type “WebGL”. This one had to demonstrate them: whole 3D worlds, rendered in real time, smooth on a phone, in five languages. And five languages is where small sites usually surrender, because per-word translation APIs quietly price a personal site out of being multilingual at all.

The move

The translation happens on a desk. A model running locally through Ollama translates all five languages, and a small SQLite pipeline keeps a ledger of what changed and needs re-translating, so the content never silently drifts out of date in one locale. No per-word bill, no vendor, no data sent anywhere.

The translation bill for five languages is the electricity the desk was already using.

What shipped

A Nuxt 4 site with real-time 3D powered by Three.js: compressed glTF models, orbit controls, and scroll-triggered motion. A seven-theme system gives each theme its own scene and palette, spring blossom to winter snow. The site is statically generated and served from Cloudflare’s edge, with linting and type checks on every push.

What it changed

• The portfolio is the demonstration: live 3D, smooth on desktop and mobile
• Five languages stay current automatically, at zero API cost
• Every page is static and edge-served, so the 3D rides on a site that is already fast
• The pipeline became the pattern later sold to clients as on-premise translation