How this site works.
A portfolio should be its own case study. Here's the engineering under this one — the same standards I bring to client systems, applied to a personal site.
Content is data, not markup
Everything this site says — projects, mission logs, services, FAQ, even the availability signal — lives in typed TypeScript modules. Components are presentation-only. Changing what the site says never touches how it looks, the compiler catches content mistakes, and ORBIT grounds its answers on the exact same source of truth the pages render. One fact, one place.
The 3D knows when to stand down
Every WebGL scene is code-split, lazy-loaded, and mounted only after a hook checks three things: the page has hydrated, you haven't asked the OS for reduced motion, and your device isn't in low-power mode. Fail any check and a pure-CSS fallback renders instead — same mood, zero GPU. Pixel ratios are capped inside the scenes, and animations pause when scrolled out of view. The starfield is a guest on your battery, and it behaves like one.
ORBIT: four engines, one guide
The assistant runs a progressive-enhancement chain — each tier falls through to the next, so an answer always arrives:
Browser cache
Repeat questions answer instantly and spend zero tokens
On-device LLM
Chrome's built-in Gemini Nano, when the model is already present — private and free
Cloud LLM
Gemini via a server route, grounded on a system prompt built from the site's own data
Local engine
A grounded intent-and-retrieval engine that always works — offline, ad-blocked, or broke
Every tier answers only from the site's typed data — the system prompt says “never invent facts,” and the local engine can't. Navigation chips and hire actions are always computed locally, so they work in every mode.
A contact form defended in seven layers
I work on banking systems; defense in depth is a habit. A message has to pass, in order:
- 01
Origin gate — Origin + referer + user-agent checks in the middleware, before the route even runs
- 02
Shape checks — Request size and content-type limits
- 03
Reputation — Suspicious-IP screening with security event logging
- 04
CSRF — HMAC-signed tokens fetched per session
- 05
reCAPTCHA v3 — Score-based bot verification, required in production
- 06
Rate limiting — Per-IP and per-fingerprint budgets with penalty windows
- 07
Sanitization — XSS stripping, spam scoring, and a honeypot field bots can't resist
Only then does an email send — followed by an automated acknowledgment to you, because silence after “submit” is a design failure.
Telemetry without tokens
The /now page shows live GitHub activity — fetched at build time and revalidated daily on the server. No API tokens in the browser, no rate limits to hit, nothing for an extension to block. If GitHub is down, the section simply isn't there. Graceful absence beats a broken widget.
The stack
Want this rigor on your product?
Everything above is the default standard, not the premium tier. One freelance mission per quarter.