Developer portfolio · Houston
aladd1n.com
- Web design
- Custom animation
- Contact form + spam protection
Results
- 1.4s
- Largest Contentful Paint on desktop (Lighthouse, Jul 2026)
- 0.01
- Cumulative Layout Shift — effectively zero, despite heavy animation
- 96
- Lighthouse accessibility score
- 92
- Lighthouse SEO score
Full disclosure: this one is our founder’s own developer portfolio. It’s here because it shows what we build when nobody is watching the budget — and because you can click through and check every claim yourself at aladd1n.com.
The brief
A personal site for a full-stack developer with 11+ years shipping .NET, React and Flutter products. It had to feel alive — animated aurora background, cursor effects, even a playable mini-game in the header — without turning into the usual heavy, slow portfolio that contradicts the “I build fast software” pitch on the page.
What was built
A static Astro site with zero client-side frameworks: every animation is hand-rolled CSS and vanilla JavaScript. The contact form posts to a small PHP endpoint that sends through the Mailgun API with reCAPTCHA v3 and rate limiting — the same lead-form architecture we now ship on Graphcast client sites. Deployment is one command over rsync.
The result
The measured numbers are in the panel above, from a public Lighthouse run you can reproduce. The takeaway for your project: motion and personality don’t have to cost you layout stability or accessibility — the layout shift score is 0.01 with all effects running.