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Antoine Debes

Antoine Debes

Full-Stack Engineer

I build fast web platforms end to end — Next.js, React and Node, measured in Core Web Vitals.

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About

I'm a full-stack engineer, currently Principal Front-End Engineer at VML, where I lead front-end work on Sitecore headless platforms and experimentation stacks for banks and giga-projects across the Gulf — Saudi National Bank, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Aldar, New Murabba, and the Expo 2030 Riyadh bid among them.

I work across the stack — React and Next.js on the front, Node and headless CMS platforms behind them — and my specialty is web performance: making those applications fast, and keeping them that way with budgets that fail the build instead of guidelines that die in a wiki. I care about the parts of engineering you can measure — Core Web Vitals, bundle bytes, main-thread time — and about the craft you can feel in the details.

Now: rebuilding this site in public as its own performance case study, and writing about what that surfaces — starting here.

Experience

One agency, three names — Mirum became Wunderman Thompson became VML through successive mergers. Same team, growing scope.

  1. Principal Front-End Engineer · VML

    Feb 2024 — Present

    Leading front-end strategy across Sitecore Headless and experimentation stacks — architecture, performance, 3D/GSAP animation direction, and AI-assisted development workflows for enterprise clients across the Gulf.

    • Next.js
    • TypeScript
    • Sitecore JSS
    • Web Performance

  2. Senior Full-Stack Engineer · Wunderman Thompson (became VML)

    Oct 2023 — Jan 2024

    Delivered features across the stack in TypeScript/Next.js and Node, optimized build and release flows, and contributed to design systems and experimentation tooling.

    • Next.js
    • TypeScript
    • Design Systems

  3. Mid-Senior Full-Stack Engineer · Mirum Agency (became Wunderman Thompson)

    Oct 2022 — Sep 2023

    Built full-stack features — responsive interfaces backed by CMS and API work — introduced animation best practices with GSAP and Three.js, and streamlined team workflows with tooling and testing improvements.

    • React
    • GSAP
    • Three.js

Selected Work

Stack

Frontend

  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Tailwind CSS
  • SASS

Backend & Data

  • Node.js
  • C# / .NET
  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • GraphQL

Platforms & CMS

  • Sitecore Headless
  • Payload CMS
  • WordPress
  • Optimizely

Motion & 3D

  • GSAP
  • Three.js

Tooling & Infra

  • Docker
  • AWS
  • CI/CD
  • Git
  • Figma

Writing

How This Site Loads in Under One Second (and How You Can Verify It Right Now)

4 min

An annotated walkthrough of this exact page's load — the budget it was built to, the requests it makes, the things it deliberately refuses to ship, and how to check every claim yourself in DevTools.

INP Is a React Problem (and React Has the Tools to Fix It)

4 min

Interaction to Next Paint punishes exactly the thing React does by design: large synchronous renders on the main thread. Where the milliseconds go, how to see them in a trace, and the fix ladder from memoization to useTransition to leaving React out of it.

Your Next.js Bundle Is Lying to You: A Field Guide to Finding the Real Bloat

4 min

How to read Next.js build output correctly, catch barrel-file explosions and 'use client' contagion, and set up CI guardrails — illustrated with the real numbers from cutting this site from 173 kB to 105 kB of first-load JavaScript.

More on the way — LCP case studies, Next.js bundle forensics, and INP deep dives. All writing →