How this site was built: The Thread, a performance budget, and Next.js 15

Every service I sell is, underneath, about building pipelines: automation pipelines, ad funnels, crawl-to-index pipelines, deploy pipelines. So the site's one bold idea is a single continuous line — The Thread — that travels the page and morphs into a different structure for each service.

The rule that made it shippable: the Thread animates on stroke and transform only, driven by scroll progress, and collapses to a fully drawn static SVG the moment a visitor prefers reduced motion. Decoration that costs layout work doesn't ship.

Everything else on the page is deliberately quiet. One display face used with restraint, a mono face for anything that is data, and a background dot grid at 4% opacity — engineering paper for the pen stroke.

The performance budget isn't an aspiration, it's a gate: if the homepage ships more than 130KB of JavaScript, the build should fail. A portfolio that sells web performance has exactly one unforgivable bug.