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Case / 03 — This site

The proof is the page you're on.

Every claim here is testable by scrolling it. No template, no page builder — a hand-built Astro site with five bespoke real-time scenes, two languages, and an ambience that ships as code instead of audio.

19production routes
02languages, zero routing hacks
05bespoke real-time scenes
00audio files — the ambience is synthesised
01 - What is actually running

Five scenes, none of them decoration.

01

The sculpture

The dark-glass form behind the type is raymarched in hand-written GLSL — refraction with per-channel dispersion, a brass fresnel rim, driven by scroll and an inertial cursor.

02

The warp

Going to the archive isn't a page load, it's a flight. A hyperspace tunnel accelerates into black, navigates, then decelerates out of it on the other side — so the trip reads as one continuous move.

03

The archive

Onyx-glass portal frames at increasing depth. Scroll flies the camera through them; each project is refracted through the glass until you fly into it and land inside its own world.

04

The case worlds

Opening Bridge Consult assembles a bridge — deck slabs, pylons and cables in sequence. Opening FIDIC unfolds a contract atlas and turns its pages. Neither one is a modal.

05

The ambience

The drone and the interface ticks are synthesised with the Web Audio API — three detuned oscillators under a filter that breathes once every twenty seconds. Zero audio files ship.

06

The language system

Two languages, one home. Copy swaps in place from a dictionary; only genuinely localized content earns its own URL. No locale roots, no redirect traps, no duplicate homepages.

02 - Engineering notes

The parts that were wrong first.

Anyone can show the finished surface. These are the failures underneath it — because knowing why something broke is the actual skill being sold.

01

Mobile pays a different price

The archive rendered every frame twice: the scene into a render target, then a fullscreen composite for grain and vignette. On a phone GPU that memory bandwidth is the entire budget. It now draws straight to the screen and only spins the composite up while a transition wipe is running.

02

Reduce Motion is not an off switch

The preloader froze its object with animation-play-state: paused. On any phone with Reduce Motion enabled that read as a broken page — a cube standing still. It now turns slowly instead of dying.

03

The locale trap

Localized clones of the homepage lived at /en/ and /de/, and the wordmark pointed at them. Switching language on a service page stranded you on a duplicate with no way back. The clones are gone, 301'd to the real home, and locale now applies only to real localized content.