This website

I wanted a site that does what I do for a living: open, lean and under my own control. No cookies, no analytics, nothing loaded from somebody else’s server.

It also had to work in English and French, because I work in both, and I had to be able to keep editing it myself.

I chose Astro because it builds plain HTML: the page is readable before any script runs. Tailwind and Untitled UI give me the design tokens, and the fonts are hosted on the site itself, so no request goes to a font provider.

It runs on OVHcloud, a French host, under a domain I own. Nothing ties the site there: the build is static and can move to any host. A strict content security policy blocks anything I didn’t plan, so the browser tells me when I get it wrong.

I wanted it to feel like a place and a tool at the same time. The background is warm, with sage pods and soft contour lines. The content sits in small instrument panels with thin borders, mono labels and LEDs. The spec panel on this page is one of them.

The home page is a live control panel: a clock, the real position of the sun over Montpellier, how long I have worked in digital projects, and the weight of the page itself. All of it is worked out in your browser from the clock. Nothing is fetched.

I wanted it alive without being tiring. Instruments move in small steps, background effects follow your scroll, and a switch in the header turns all of it off. It also follows your system’s reduced-motion setting by default.

I aim for WCAG 2.2 AA and I test for it, but I don’t claim the site is compliant: that takes real people and real assistive technology. I used native elements wherever I could, and colour never carries a meaning on its own.

I set budgets and made the build fail when I break them: about 135 KB for the home page against a limit of 230, no third-party request, no inline style. There are checks for accessibility and for French typography too, like the non-breaking space before a colon or a question mark.

They caught real mistakes. Inline styles passed on my development server and were blocked by the real policy once the site was live.

Two effects used scroll features that Firefox-based browsers don’t have, so the Scope pipeline and the Experience timeline did nothing there. I rewrote them in script so they work everywhere. On a phone the page also lagged while scrolling, so the heavy background shaders now stay off on touch screens.

The 3D business card is switched off while I update it.