Relaunching my site with Next.js 16

My old homepage was a single German CV page I built with Nuxt a few years ago. It did its job, but it no longer showed what I actually spend my time on: building my own products. So I rebuilt it from scratch.

What I wanted

• A portfolio for my products, like MiniRemote and CupertinoUI.
• A blog where I can write about front-end engineering.
• English and German, with proper hreflang tags.
• A perfect Lighthouse score, because performance is part of my craft, not an afterthought.

The stack

I went with Next.js 16 and the App Router, Tailwind CSS 4 and shadcn/ui on top of Base UI. Every page is a Server Component by default and is fully prerendered at build time. I enforce that with a single line in the root layout:

/** Every route must be fully prerendered at build time. */
export const ensureStatic = "navigation";

If I ever accidentally read a cookie or a header somewhere, the build fails instead of quietly making the page dynamic.

Internationalisation without a library

Next.js 16 can read the locale from the root segment anywhere on the server with next/root-params. That means I don't need an i18n library at all. My dictionaries are plain JSON files that never reach the browser:

import { locale as localeParam } from "next/root-params";
 
export async function getLocale() {
  const value = await localeParam();
  if (!hasLocale(value)) notFound();
  return value;
}

Content as MDX

Blog posts and case studies live as MDX files in the repository. I validate their frontmatter with Zod, so a typo breaks the build instead of the page. Syntax highlighting runs at build time with Shiki, so this code block costs zero client-side JavaScript.

Shipping less JavaScript

The only interactive pieces are the theme toggle, the mobile menu and the language links. Everything else is HTML and CSS. That's the whole secret behind the score.