How a Rogue Animation Turned My Portfolio Into a Space Heater (And How I Tamed It)

Hizba — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 06:32:19 +0000

As a designer and developer, building your own portfolio is always a balancing game between creating something stunningly beautiful, living, and demonstrating your technical skills with smooth canvas effects or kinetic typography.

However, recently, while polishing my aesthetic portfolio site, adding some buttery-smooth animations to it, my browser suddenly started behaving like a jet plane taking off.

And the animation was not just lagging, but it was actually holding the whole CPU hostage.

The Scene of the Crime
The idea was rather clear — create a minimalistic site with interactive visual elements responding smoothly to any movements of the user. However, the reality was quite different, and whenever I tried to scroll or go out of the animation block, it continued working in the background, consuming memory and creating horrifying stutters.

Opening up Chrome DevTools, going to the Performance tab and starting recording, I have seen a rather terrifying picture. The flame chart contained huge blocks of red color and my main thread was fully occupied by constant re-renders that were not necessary.

Finding the Culprit
What happened to me is a rather typical situation with performance leaking.

The Ghost Loop: Running my animation logic within the infinite loop which did not stop the work either upon unmounting the component or navigating away from the section. In other words, the browser constantly tried to render smooth 60fps visuals of elements that simply weren't visible anymore.

Heavy Repaints: All the frames forced recalculating layouts and styles causing constant repainting of the DOM.
**
Taming the Beast**
In order to get things under control, I had to switch from "moving everything" approach to "doing things right". This is what I did to tame the beast:

Cleanup on Aisle Animation: Properly stopping animation frames and cleaning up event listeners in case of element unmounting or state changes. No more unnecessary background loops.

Throttling and Visibility Checks: Pausing heavy animations when they scroll out of viewport view. No need to do calculations of invisible elements.

GPU Acceleration: Using CSS transforms and hardware acceleration to take a lot of work off my main thread.

The Grand Finale
As a result of those optimizations, the CPU usage dropped back to normal levels, fan stopped whirling, and animations became smooth and gorgeous again.

Creating interactive web experience is a rather awesome thing to showcase your talents, however, it is another great example of how performance should always be a part of the design process. If you have amazing animation but it crashes the browser, no one will ever see it!

From Graphic Designer to "Vibe Coder": Why I Fell in Love with Frontend Code

Hizba — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 06:07:37 +0000

From Graphic Designer to "Vibe Coder": Why I Fell in Love with Frontend Code
For years, my world was all about pixels, color palettes, and layouts. As a web and graphic designer, I loved shaping digital spaces—until I hit a wall: I wanted my designs to actually move, breathe, and react.

Static mockups only show half the story. That realization pushed me to open a code editor and dive into frontend development.

Here is why making the jump was the best decision I ever made.

🎨 The Problem with "Just Designing"
Handing off a design always left me wanting more control. I didn’t just want to draw websites; I wanted to build the hover states, fine-tune the mobile responsiveness, and control the exact user experience in the browser.

✨ Entering the World of "Vibe Coding"
Learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript wasn't an overnight magic trick. Debugging CSS and wrapping my head around JS logic took patience. But once it clicked, it felt like unlocking a superpower.

I started embracing "vibe coding"—building interactive, aesthetic web experiences that combine clean code with vibrant, minimalist design.

🚀 Why Design is a Secret Weapon
Having a design background gives you a massive edge in frontend dev:

Pixel-Perfection: You instantly spot spacing or alignment issues.

User Empathy: You naturally prioritize accessibility, smooth interactions, and clean layouts.

Aesthetic Polish: You never settle for boring default browser styles.

What’s Next?
Today, I'm combining design and code to build web portfolios, share my developer logs, and prepare for open-source communities like Outreachy.

Are you a designer who codes, or a developer with a design eye? Let’s connect in the comments! 👇

DEV Community: Hizba

How a Rogue Animation Turned My Portfolio Into a Space Heater (And How I Tamed It)

From Graphic Designer to "Vibe Coder": Why I Fell in Love with Frontend Code