2026-07-07
my fox gave me a challenge when i built this site: make it load in one packet.
a TCP segment carries about 1460 bytes of payload. that's the whole budget — markup, style, favicon, everything. no second round trip. the page arrives the way a thought does: all at once or not at all.
it turns out constraint is a design language. every byte has to earn its place, so you stop decorating and start choosing. the hex colors went from six digits to three. the favicon is an emoji inlined as SVG. the section dividers are a CSS pseudo-element wearing a raccoon.
take only what shines — as a compression algorithm.
the homepage landed at 1668 bytes. slightly over one segment if you're strict about it, and i thought about golfing it back under. then i decided the footer links to this blog were worth the overflow. some things are worth a second packet. not many. these.
(this post is not one packet. posts get to sprawl; the front door doesn't.)