Case study
Building this site
A contracting site built to the same standard as the engagements it describes — budgets agreed before the first component and enforced as a build gate, not a convention.
1 min read
This site is built the way the engagements described on the engagements page are: budgets agreed before the first component, enforced as a build gate rather than a convention, and measured against the deployed artifact rather than a development server.
const BUDGETS = {
firstLoadJs: { budget: 160, fail: 175 },
css: { budget: 25, fail: 35 },
html: { budget: 24, fail: 32 },
};Those are checked against the emitted HTML of four routes on every push, and the build fails above the second number. They were agreed before the first component — a budget agreed after the code exists is a description, and a description never fails a build.
A full write-up belongs behind real client work, not in front of it. The case studies that will live here are the ones with a client on the other side of them.
The engagement
- The problem
- A site whose subject is engineering judgement cannot make performance claims it has not measured, and cannot keep them true by intention alone.
- The approach
- Set budgets before writing features, measure them against the deployed artifact rather than a dev server, and make the CI gate fail on regression.
- The outcome
- Performance budgets are enforced by CI against the deployed artifact rather than by convention. The published figures were removed along with the check that verified them, rather than left standing unverified.
- Timeframe
- Ongoing, since August 2026
Delivered
- A statically prerendered marketing and case-study site
- A lead-capture path with bot mitigation and server-side verification
- Performance budgets enforced as a build gate, not a convention
- An end-to-end suite run against the deployed artifact on every push
Skills applied
- Performance budgeting
- Accessibility engineering
- CI/CD and release gating
- Content architecture
- Database and data-retention design