How this site is built, and what it costs to load.

Most of the work here went into what does not load.

reveals

native CSSScroll reveals use animation-timeline: view(). They run on the compositor and ship zero JavaScript.

gsap

deferredOnly the pinned request trace needs scrubbing and per-section state. GSAP is imported inside an effect, so it is never in the initial bundle.

three.js

removedThere was a WebGL cluster here. It cost 883KB, only ran above 1024px, and the fallback everyone else saw explained nothing. A legible diagram that works on a phone was worth more than a 3D one that most people never loaded.

fonts

Inter, self-hostedSubset and preloaded through next/font, with font-display: swap. No request to a third-party font host.

client components

fourSmooth scroll, request trace, cluster board, reading progress. Everything else is a server component and arrives as HTML.

analytics

noneNo trackers, no cookie banner, nothing to consent to.

type

InterThree weights. 400 for body, 600 for headings, 700 for display.

colour

six tints, one accentEach layer of the request path owns a colour and keeps it everywhere it appears, so the same green always means the machine. Four greys carry the rest.

mode

oneNo theme toggle. The dark bands are a contrast device, and a second theme would have taken that away from them.

cascade

@layer base / componentsBase styles are layered so Tailwind utilities still win. Unlayered CSS beats layered CSS regardless of specificity, which silently breaks every utility if you get it wrong.

motion

opt-out honouredEvery animation sits behind prefers-reduced-motion. Turn it off in the OS and the site still reads.

Push to main, build, prerender, done. The whole site is static, so a deploy is a file copy and a rollback is the previous immutable build.

I could run this on EKS. It would be a silly thing to do. The rest of this site argues that most teams climb before they need to, so putting a personal site on a cluster to show off would make the point badly. This is rung one. Rung one is right here.

All of it is public, including the commits where I got it wrong. If you want to see how a section is wired rather than take my word for it, the file is in there.