Structure First, Then AI: Lessons From This Week's Notion AI Office Hour
A recap of this week's Notion AI Office Hour — the four levels of AI usage, why Notion is your memory layer, how MCP really works, and when a worker beats an agent.
For the last year I've spoken at twelve Notion events around Singapore and the region : media mixers, developer nights, founder workshops, product launches. But until last week, if you'd asked me for my "portfolio", I'd have sent you a tidy list. Accurate. Forgettable.
So I rebuilt it. Not as a list, but as the thing I actually enjoy opening on a Friday night: Netflix. I called it Nasriflix.
This is the story of how it came together — and why the most interesting part isn't the website at all.
Why a list wasn't enough
A list tells you what I did. It doesn't carry any of the feeling — the packed room at OpenClaw, the 40 founders who shipped their first Custom Agent in under two hours at AI Labs, the media folks leaning in as an agent triaged a newsroom inbox live.
I wanted something you could browse. Something where each talk had a cover, a story, and a way in. The browsing experience people already understand is Netflix — so I borrowed it shamelessly.
The idea: browse my talks like a watchlist
A dark hero with a featured talk. Rows you scroll sideways — "Featured Talks & Events", "Latest on Stage", "Topics I Care About", "Work With Me". Click any card and a modal slides up with the cover, the role I played, the date and place, and a short, simple intro. If you want the full story, you hit View details and it expands — what I covered, the key takeaways, the outcome.
That last detail mattered to me. Calm by default, depth on demand. The same principle I bring to every Notion build.
Notion is the source of truth
Here's the part I care about most: the website doesn't actually hold any content.
Every talk lives as a page in a Notion database — the role, the date, the location, the link, the photo, and the write-up of what happened. The site is just a view on top of that data. When I want to add a talk or fix a detail, I don't touch code. I edit a Notion page, the same way I'd update any other part of my operating system.
That's the whole philosophy in one move: structure first, in a place you already live, then let everything else render from it.
Building it (mostly by describing it)
I built the site itself with AI on a sandbox computer. I described what I wanted — the Netflix feel, the colours, the rows, the modal behaviour — and iterated until it felt right. It pulled the talk details and photos straight from my Notion database, dropped them into a single self-contained page, and resized the images so it loads fast.
No framework, no build step I had to babysit. Just a clean static site that does one job well.
Shipping it: GitHub to Netlify
The site lives in a GitHub repository and deploys automatically to Netlify. Push a change, and a minute later it's live. The first version went up, then I went back in to enrich every event with its full story and tidy up the modals — each time, a single push, an automatic redeploy.
You can see the result here: nasriflix.netlify.app
The real lesson: a portfolio should be a living system
The website is the fun bit. The system underneath is the point.
My talks already lived in Notion. By treating that database as the source of truth and the site as a renderer, the portfolio stops being a thing I have to maintain and becomes a thing that simply reflects what's already true. Add a talk in Notion; the site catches up. No copy-paste, no second place to keep in sync.
This is how I think about almost everything I build — CRMs, dashboards, content pipelines. Put the truth in one calm place. Let the surfaces render themselves.
If you've been meaning to give your own portfolio some life, you don't need to start with the website. Start with the database. The Netflix part is just dessert. 🍿
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