For the other individuals whose local web development setup includes an instance that runs on port 8080:

The Sketch Mirror server runs in the background on port 8080, regardless of whether mirroring is in use.

Hey Jake,

First off; really strong portfolio - it's a well designed site with oodles of personality that showcases your talents well.

However, from a user experience perspective I think it's somewhat lacking. I presume your 'loading' status refers to halting the page displaying until images are loaded? Why is that?

I'm sat on an above average internet connection in London, England, but often found myself waiting so long that I almost bailed out. The first thing I'd look at is heeding Google Page Speed Insights advice.

The problem lies mainly in the size of your images. The treehouse project in-particular could do with some image resizing (let alone compression) to trim the fat. On that post you're displaying monstrous images that are being dynamically scaled down in browser.

This is just from a desktop perspective, I haven't explored it on a mobile device.

I think this really detracts from the experience which is otherwise delightful!

Almost all modern frameworks and static site generators should support HTML compression that removes whitespace from between tags on compiling templates. Allowing you to format your templates in whatever way you like without affecting your display: inline-block layouts. I know this doesn't cover all of the examples given by the author, but it solves the issue in most cases.

The hands remind me a lot of Karlie McCulloch's work. Really nice kinetic type , transitions, and colours; though I'm not so keen on the hover effect on the project images.

With display: none; you wouldn't get the click event (or any events for that matter) required to change the state of the input.

Such a great little project, Sam. I think Waterloo & City or Victoria have to be my favourites.

Note: One thing I would say is that it would be nice to be able to view them in the browser prior to 'downloading'. I prefer the right-click, save-as route, but perhaps that's just me.