temwa.dev (this portfolio)

Problem

Portfolio sites often look templated and say little about how the person actually engineers. Mine had grown animation-heavy too: on a throttled phone the home page scored 38 on Lighthouse, with over two seconds of main-thread blocking.

Approach

Rebuilt it around four ideas: put the work up front, tease what's below, give people places to get lost, and show personality. The home page opens on real project screenshots; a filterable work page, an MDX blog, a journey timeline, /now, /uses and a lab sit behind it, and everything is reachable from ⌘K search or vim-style g-key shortcuts.

Tech highlights

Next.js 16 (App Router, Turbopack) on React 19 and Tailwind CSS 4. Pages are server-rendered with small client islands; scroll effects run on CSS scroll timelines instead of JavaScript; the command palette, mobile menu and toasts load on first use; fonts are self-hosted Latin subsets. Blog posts are MDX with rehype-pretty-code, the journey and /uses chart are derived from the same project data, and a strict Content Security Policy, RSS and structured data ship with it.

Results

Mobile Lighthouse performance went from 38 to 93–97 across pages, with total blocking time down from 2.2 s to under 100 ms and layout shift near zero.

Challenges

Keeping the personality without paying for it: the motion that made the old site feel alive was the same JavaScript that made it slow, so each effect had to be rebuilt in CSS or loaded only when someone actually reaches for it.