Chris Wray, a full-stack engineer, shares his experience of building a personal portfolio website after being rejected from a job, with the goal of enhancing his professional image. Despite having run his own company, Soltech, for three years, he had not created a personal portfolio to showcase his skills and projects. Determined to keep hosting costs below $10 per month, Chris successfully hosted his website for free by building a static Nuxt application, using Heroku for the Strapi CMS backend, and Cloudinary for image hosting. He highlights the challenges and solutions encountered, such as the necessity of configuring a database in Heroku and using MongoDB instead of SQLite due to Heroku's limitations. Additionally, Chris praises the ease of deployment with Netlify, which allowed for seamless integration and zero-downtime deployments through Heroku pipelines. His use of build hooks in Netlify ensures the automatic rebuilding of the site with any content updates in Strapi. Throughout the process, he relied heavily on Strapi's documentation and encourages others to consult it for guidance. Chris concludes by inviting potential employers to view his portfolio, expressing his passion for contributing positively to the world through his work.