Case study · Design & development
The personal portfolio.
My own portfolio: a real-time WebGL signature, scroll-driven storytelling and a secure PHP content studio — designed and engineered from scratch.
- Role
- Design & development
- Year
- 2026
- Built with
This site is both my portfolio and a working product. The front end pairs an editorial navy-and-lime design with a chrome “S” sculpture generated in code with Three.js, which travels through the opening story as you scroll. Behind it, a native PHP 8 and MySQL content studio manages every word, project, image and message — with no framework and a one-file installer that runs on ordinary shared hosting.
The challenge
Make a personal site that is genuinely memorable without becoming slow, inaccessible or hard to update. That meant real-time 3D that respects battery life and reduced-motion settings, and a private back office that one person can run safely.
The approach
The sculpture is a custom ribbon mesh built from Bézier curves, with physically based materials, pointer and keyboard dragging, and a static SVG fallback when WebGL is unavailable or the device has no capable GPU. Motion uses the browser’s native Web Animations API over normal scrolling, with a site-wide motion switch. The studio uses prepared SQL statements, versioned migrations, CSRF protection, rate limiting, validated uploads and AES-256-GCM encryption for stored SMTP credentials. Contact messages are saved before any email is attempted, so an enquiry is never lost.
The result
A portfolio I can update in minutes from any browser, backed by an automated suite of HTTP integration checks covering sign-in, content editing, uploads, the contact inbox and email delivery. Every future case study on this page is published through it.