No build step
A portfolio that needs an install to change a sentence is a portfolio nobody updates. The cost is real: no minification, no shared components beyond the injected chrome, and a stylesheet that grows by accretion.
§ 08 Colophon
How this is made
A short, honest account of the parts, the choices, and what the choices cost. The numbers below are measured from your browser as you read, not remembered.
§ 01
This page, as loaded
-requests
-KB transferred
-KB of JavaScript
-ms to interactive
Measured with the browser's Performance API, so it includes fonts and analytics and varies with your cache. Reload to see the cold number.
§ 02
The parts
- Markup
- Hand-written HTML. The header and footer are injected once by a small script, so a new nav tab is one line.
- Style
- The current design system is one stylesheet on CSS custom properties, layered over an older one that is being retired. Dark by default, light on request, no preprocessor.
- Type
- Space Grotesk for reading and shouting, Space Mono for everything that is metadata.
- Motion
- CSS transitions, cross-page view transitions where the browser supports them, and one canvas: the hero. All of it stops under reduced-motion.
- Language
- English and Hungarian from one dictionary. Nearly every visible string has both and the toggle swaps them without a reload; Anidle and some project-page body copy are still English only.
- Search
- Client-side. The index is built the first time you focus the box, so an ordinary page load fetches nothing extra. Press / to focus it, or Ctrl K for the menu.
- Hosting
- GitHub Pages on a custom domain. Deploying is pushing.
§ 03
Decisions, and what they cost
Two languages from day one
Hungarian is my first language, and the people who most deserve to read this site in it are not the ones who will ask. The cost: nearly every sentence is written twice, and the second one is where the drift hides.
The hero does real work
The graph on the home page is a brute-force nearest-neighbour search: distance from your cursor to each word, top five lit. It is the operation the recommender performs, at a size where brute force is the right answer.
One accent, used like a highlighter
Acid lime marks what you can act on and what matters most; when it floods a whole band, that band is the point of the page. Everything else is ink on paper. The cost: no colour-coding, so meaning has to come from layout.
§ 04
Still unfinished
- The oldest stylesheet still ships everything it ever had; only a fraction is used.
- Project pages describe products with words and diagrams. They want real screenshots.
- There is one article. Writing is slower than building.
- The Hungarian dictionary and the English one ship together, about 120 KB of script between them. They could load per page.