← 02 MAKEWhat was actually built?
This site itself
A site that moves one person's thinking and life onto a screen, and shows at the same time that they can build it.
This is the entry retold in plain words. The sentences the author wrote are on the other side of the switch. Nobody wrote the sentences on this page by hand.
This is the site you are looking at.
The limit I set first
There is a limit set in advance on how much the browser has to download to open a page. I set it while the page was still nearly empty. Set it later and the already-heavy state becomes the yardstick.
When I measured, 93% of the limit was already used with nothing built — just the basic tools used to make a site.
That left me 12 KB to build features in.
What I gave up
That number decided the direction of the next stage.
The bundle of tools for drawing in 3D is about 150 KB on its own. It cannot come down with the first load.
So 3D now works differently: the browser is asked whether it can draw it, and only then is it downloaded separately.
My plan already said "handle the case where 3D does not work." Only after measuring did I see that this was not optional but unavoidable.
What is left
The whole menu — the colours flipping, showing which part you are looking at, knowing the address — costs 5.1 KB of code. Everything else is screens built ahead of time on the server.
I also checked with JavaScript turned off in the browser. The menu bar, the four links to each section, the four links going deeper, the jump-to-content link, and the heading were all still there.