taniarascia.com VS hugo-PaperModX

I want the blog to look somewhat like this! or this!. Any theme suggestions?

If you want the portfolio site to be a big part of how you market yourself, look at some other professional's successful portfolio sites as a jumping off point to model yours off of. Here are a couple I bookmarked when I started working on mine that I liked the style of (you should look yourself and find what fits with your personality): https://varun.ca/ https://joshwcomeau.com/ https://tom.preston-werner.com/ https://tholman.com/ https://www.taniarascia.com/

Also - Tania Rascia is a developer that provides free, simple tutorials and tons of great tips: https://www.taniarascia.com/

Some of the best examples for open-source portfolios on GitHub are by Tania Rascia, Britanny Chiang, Lee Robinson and Soumyajit Behera. Study these repos and learn how you can structure your portfolio and write clean code!

But you could also use https://github.com/reorx/hugo-PaperModX/blob/master/layouts/_default/list.html as a template and restrict the display with a condition so that only posts by author X are displayed. That wouldn't even be very complicated in that case. But since you don't want to learn Go Templating, the solution via tags and categories is probably the best solution.