case study · meta · performance
davidmboya.com
You're using it right now. Zero frameworks, zero build step, a particle canvas and a self-writing terminal — under 100KB of it, hand-coded.
The brief
A developer's own site is the demo. If I tell clients their site should load fast and rank well, mine has to prove it — no frameworks hiding the seams.
So: hand-written HTML, CSS and vanilla JS. Self-hosted fonts. A canvas particle engine and a terminal that types my stack. A tiny PHP contact API with token-based spam protection. An admin panel I built to manage content and blog posts.
What I built
- Zero frameworks — every line hand-written; no Tailwind, no React, no build pipeline.
- Canvas particle constellation — a physics-y network animation that reacts to the pointer.
- Self-typing terminal — the hero terminal reveals my stack line by line.
- Scroll-reveal & counters — IntersectionObserver-driven, all disabled under prefers-reduced-motion.
- Custom contact API — PHP endpoint with anti-spam tokens, rate limiting and honeypots.
- Own admin panel — content editing, image management and blog publishing, built not installed.
- SEO plumbing — per-page JSON-LD, canonicals, OG images, sitemap.xml and llms.txt.
Under the hood
Static HTML served by Nginx means TTFB measured in milliseconds. Fonts are self-hosted woff2, images are WebP, CSS is one file. The only JavaScript is a single deferred vanilla file — the whole homepage ships under ~100KB.
Where it is now
A site that scores where WordPress sites struggle — and proves the performance claims I make to clients. The case study is the page you're reading.
initiate
Like what you see?
Every project here started as a conversation. Tell me what you're building — I'll show you how it ships.