Sonora — a sound-wellness app, free and ad-free.

Four things about this project decided most of the engineering before anyone opened an editor. They are worth stating because they explain the choices that follow — a build like this is mostly the consequence of its constraints.

Three choices, and what they cost

No front-end framework. The site is server-rendered with progressive enhancement, and the JavaScript that ships is the small amount that genuinely needs to run in the browser. The measured figure below — a couple of kilobytes — is not a target we set and then celebrated; it is what is left when you decline to send a framework to a phone. The cost is real: interactions that a framework gives you free were written by hand, and a team used to component state would find the codebase unfamiliar. On a marketing site with a handful of interactive moments, that trade came out clearly in favour of the visitor.

Performance designed in, not tuned afterwards. Image formats, font strategy, bundling and markup were decided at the start rather than retrofitted once a score came back red. The honest caveat is on the page: our own measurement puts modern image formats at four fifths of the images rather than all of them, and that remaining fifth is a known gap rather than a rounding error.

An application backend for a site that could have been static. The site sits on Laravel because the press kit, the content and the forms all need somewhere to live and someone non-technical needs to change them without a deploy. A static generator would have been faster to stand up and worse to live with a year later. We do not sell a house stack — this was the right answer here and would not be on every project.