AshiHQ: my portfolio, job hunt and freelance business in one app

The business problem

As a full-stack developer with a day job and freelance clients, my working life was spread across a dozen places:

• A portfolio that needed a code change and a redeploy for every new project, so it was always out of date.
• A job hunt in spreadsheets: which company, which role, which résumé I'd sent, and when to follow up, with no way to tell which résumé actually got responses.
• Freelance projects tracked in notes and chats: budgets, what was paid, paid add-ons (like "Android and iOS apps" after a website), and deadlines.
• Client credentials everywhere: Zoho mail, GoDaddy domains, AWS, Cloudflare R2… in notes and messages, which is risky for me and my clients.
• Job searching by hand across LinkedIn, Naukri and Indeed, with three different résumés for three kinds of roles.

I wanted one place that is my public face and my private command centre: secure, mobile-friendly, and quick enough to use every day.

Why existing solutions failed

• Portfolio builders look generic, and they don't support detailed case studies with diagrams or link to the work behind them.
• Job trackers (spreadsheets, Notion templates, Huntr-style apps) record applications but don't find jobs, score them against your résumés, or tell you which résumé works.
• Freelance tools handle invoicing, but not "this client also has GoDaddy, Zoho and AWS logins" plus project docs.
• Password managers are great, but they're separate from the client and project they belong to, and team plans cost money.
• Gluing five tools together means five logins, five subscriptions and nothing that connects.

The solution

AshiHQ is a single app with two sides:

1. The public portfolio at ashike.in: fast, animated, and fully editable from the admin, with a case-study CMS.
2. A private admin (just for me, with two-factor login) for the job hunt, freelance clients and projects, project docs and an encrypted credential vault.

A portfolio I can update in minutes

• Every section is editable from the admin: profile, stack, services, experience, projects, skills and education. No code changes.
• Multiple résumés, with one marked public as the portfolio's download.
• Motion design done carefully: text that reveals as you scroll, a statement that lights up word by word, marquees, tilt cards and magnetic buttons. All of it respects "reduce motion" settings.
• Brand icons on every tech chip, lightened automatically so they stay readable on the dark theme.

A case-study CMS that publishes itself

• A Markdown editor with live preview, image upload, Mermaid diagrams, and a template with an eight-part structure (problem → why existing solutions failed → solution → features → architecture → challenges → outcome → lessons).
• Case-study pages with a table of contents that follows your scroll, highlights, a technology list and related studies.
• Publishing triggers a site rebuild automatically. The site is a static export for speed, so each new case study gets its own pre-rendered page with proper link previews on WhatsApp and LinkedIn within about two minutes. Until then, a fallback page loads it live.

A job hunt that finds jobs for me

• Job tracker: status pipeline (wishlist → applied → screening → interview → offer), follow-up reminders, and response rate per résumé. I can see whether my Laravel, FDE or React résumé is getting replies.
• Role profiles: for each target role, the résumé to use, search phrases, the skills to score on, words to skip, cities (or Remote), applications per day and a minimum match score.
• Daily discovery from job APIs (Adzuna, Jooble). Each job is scored against every profile: points for the skills it mentions and for its title matching the role. It goes to the profile it fits best, up to that day's limit.
• Indeed, through Claude: a scheduled Claude task searches Indeed through the official connector every morning and writes a file that I import with one click. Jobs are de-duplicated by title, company and city, because Indeed's ids change between searches.
• A review queue: each match shows its score, the matched skills, salary and the résumé to use. Open job → apply → Mark applied logs it in the tracker automatically.
• LinkedIn and Naukri get one-click saved searches (last 24 hours, per role and city). Those platforms don't allow automated applying, so AshiHQ never submits applications for me; it only finds, ranks and records them.

Freelance projects with real numbers

• Clients and projects with budgets, payments, deadlines, live URLs (website, API, admin) and Git clone URLs.
• Paid add-ons (quoted → approved → delivered), counted in what's due only once the client has agreed.
• Lifetime earnings and money still to collect on the dashboard.
• Project docs: upload a project's own planning folder (architecture.md, task.md, issues.md…). AshiHQ reads it into a visual overview: tasks done, the current phase, open issues by severity, test runs and Mermaid diagrams. The screenshot is AshiHQ's own build plan, documented inside AshiHQ.

A vault where the server never sees a password

Client logins are stored zero-knowledge:

• Encrypted in the browser with a key derived from a master password (PBKDF2-SHA256, 600,000 iterations → AES-256-GCM). The server only ever stores ciphertext.
• Templates per service (Zoho Mail, GoDaddy, Cloudflare R2, AWS…) so every field lands in the right place.
• Linked to the client and project it belongs to, or kept as personal, with filters for each.
• The master password can be changed by re-encrypting everything in the browser; there's no server-side reset, by design.

Key features

• Editable portfolio with motion design and multiple résumés
• Case-study CMS: Markdown, images, Mermaid, table of contents, automatic site rebuild on publish
• Job tracker with follow-ups and response rate per résumé
• Job discovery: role profiles, match scoring, daily limits, review queue
• Multiple sources: Adzuna and Jooble APIs, daily Indeed import through Claude, LinkedIn and Naukri saved searches
• Clients and projects with links, Git URLs, paid add-ons and lifetime earnings
• Project docs overview built from Markdown planning files
• Zero-knowledge credential vault with service templates
• Two-factor login, mobile-friendly admin

Technical architecture

• Front end: Next.js 16 (App Router) as a static export on Vercel, with React 19, Tailwind CSS v4 and lucide icons. The admin is the same app, so the whole site is fast and served from Vercel's network.
• API: Laravel 12 with Sanctum tokens and TOTP two-factor authentication, on Hostinger with MySQL. Rate-limited public endpoints serve the portfolio and case studies.
• Fresh content on a static site: pages are pre-built; anything newer is served by a fallback page (Vercel rewrites); publishing calls a Vercel deploy hook so the next build includes it.
• Job discovery: a scheduled Laravel command; sources behind a common interface; per-source call budgets so free API tiers (e.g. Adzuna's 25-call trial) can't be spent in one run; one country-wide search per profile, filtered to my cities (Bangalore/Bengaluru, Kochi/Cochin…).
• Quality: feature tests for every module (37 at the time of writing). Tests block all outside requests, so they can never touch real API keys.

Challenges

• A static site that still feels live. Static export makes the portfolio fast, but new case studies 404'd until the next deploy, and link previews were generic. A fallback page, Vercel rewrites and an automatic deploy hook on publish fixed both.
• Encryption you can actually live with. Zero-knowledge means no "forgot password". The vault makes that explicit at setup, derives keys with 600k PBKDF2 iterations, and supports changing the master password by re-encrypting in the browser.
• Free API tiers. My first discovery design used 36 Adzuna calls per run, more than the entire 25-call trial. Switching to one broad search per profile plus server-side call budgets brought it to 3 calls a day.
• Messy job data. Indeed's ids and short links change between searches, so de-duplication uses title + company + city. Jooble keys only work for the country site that issued them, so a jooble.org key returns US jobs.
• Small bugs with big effects: a query alias that clashed with a model accessor showed "0 active projects", and add-ons on lead-stage projects weren't counted. Each fix got a regression test.

The outcome

• One app for my professional life: portfolio, case studies, job hunt, clients, projects, docs and credentials.
• Publishing is a two-minute job: write in the admin, press publish, and the site rebuilds with proper link previews. Six case studies so far, including this one.
• A focused job search: three tailored résumés, matches scored and queued each morning, and every application recorded with the résumé that was sent.
• Client credentials out of chats and notes, encrypted so that even a server breach wouldn't reveal them.
• A living example of how I work: typed, tested, documented, and secured. AshiHQ even holds its own build plan and issue list.

What this means for other businesses

The same building blocks fit many small businesses and freelancers:

• A CMS shaped around your content (case studies, menus, listings) rather than a generic template.
• Automation that does the boring part: finding leads, scoring them and lining them up for a human decision, without breaking any platform's rules.
• Zero-knowledge storage for anything sensitive your team shares: logins, keys, client data.
• One tool instead of five subscriptions, built around how you actually work.

Juggling too many tools to run your work? I can build you one that fits.