The week started with a quiet Monday, which is fine. I had one commit, and that was it. I uploaded a background image for UC-Authentik to the uc-cloud repo. The branding team needed it, so it went where it needed to be. There was no refactoring, no bug hunting, just a file landing in the right place. Thin days happen. Sometimes you push through a sprint of commits and sometimes you push one thing and call it done. Today was one thing.
Tuesday was about triage and presentation. I spent the morning untangling the magicunicorn.tech portfolio. The main event was building out a comprehensive showcase to display the websites I have worked on. It took several passes to get right. First, I added the section and the supporting components. Then I realized the file structure was a mess and renamed the assets directory to fix a 403 error on nginx. Finally, I pulled in real screenshots from the GitHub repositories to replace the placeholders. The images now load correctly and the layout actually reflects the work.
The blog was a different kind of problem. I had generated a massive amount of content, over 1.3 million lines of text across thousands of files. It was too much noise for the current phase of the site. So I hid it. I removed the blog section entirely from the navigation and the build. It is not gone forever, just paused. I needed the site to feel cleaner while I figure out what is actually worth publishing. The commit deleted 5,353 files to clear the clutter. It felt good to cut the dead weight.
The main event was building out a comprehensive showcase to display the websites I have worked on.
I also spent some time on the homepage. I implemented a cycling headline and tagline pair to keep the landing page dynamic. It is a small detail but it adds a bit of life to the static entry point. I also updated the README with a screenshot and detailed documentation.
On the shawns.services side, I pushed a standard update. I refreshed the Docker setup, updated the components, and tweaked the styling. It is the kind of maintenance work that keeps the lights on. I did the same for the shawns-services-repo, ensuring both instances stay in sync. It is boring but necessary. Also today, I added a file upload for the magicunicorn.tech logo. The day added up to a cleaner, more honest representation of what I do. The portfolio shows the real work, the blog is quiet until it has something worth saying, and the services site is running smooth. It is a good foundation to build on.
Wednesday, September 24, 2025, was a one-commit day, but the commit carried. The magicunicorn.tech site got a lightbox for portfolio screenshots. Six hundred lines added, seventy-nine removed, spread across ten files. The sort of change that feels small until you click a portfolio image on the live site and it opens full screen with a smooth overlay instead of just dropping into the page flow.
I built the Lightbox component, wired it into the Portfolio page, and added the styles to make the whole thing feel polished rather than bolted on. The old LazyImage component got renamed as part of the refactor, which always makes me wonder how many cached references to the old filename are floating around out there, but the build cleaned up without a hitch.
It is one of those changes that you only truly understand after it ships. The portfolio page already had images, but clicking them did not do much. Now you click and a dimmed overlay slides in with the image centered, close button in the corner, and the whole thing feels like the site just grew up a year or two. Only one commit today, so there was not much else on the plate. The lightbox was the headline and it was also the whole day.
I ended the week with 13 commits across 4 repos. The bulk of the work landed in magicunicorn.tech, with one commit each in uc-cloud, shawns-services-repo, and shawns.services. The week was not about volume. It was about focus. I cut the blog noise to make room for better content later. I fixed the portfolio structure so the work looks like work. I added a lightbox to make the images feel intentional. The week moved from a single file upload to a cleaner site that actually shows what I do. That is progress.
Real product captures — click any to enlarge.