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Antoine Debes

Antoine Debes

Full-Stack Engineer

I architect and build fast, scalable web platforms for global brands — and prove it with numbers.

This page, as served107 kBJS170 kBimages0third-partiesDon't take my word for it — verify →

About

I'm a full-stack engineer — currently Principal Front-End Engineer at VML— where I lead the engineering of digital platforms for enterprise clients in banking, real estate, and national-scale programs: Saudi National Bank, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Aldar, New Murabba, and Expo 2030 Riyadh among them.

My specialty is web performance. I treat speed as an engineering discipline — designed in from the start, measured in production, and enforced automatically — because on the modern web, performance is product quality. This site is built to that standard, and its numbers are public.

Now: writing about performance engineering, with this site as the working case study — 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 architecture and performance strategy for enterprise platforms — setting engineering standards, directing motion and 3D work, and bringing AI-assisted workflows into delivery.

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

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

    Oct 2023 — Jan 2024

    Delivered full-stack features in TypeScript, Next.js, and Node; strengthened design systems, experimentation tooling, and release pipelines.

    • Next.js
    • TypeScript
    • Design Systems

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

    Oct 2022 — Sep 2023

    Built end-to-end product features — interfaces, CMS integrations, and APIs — and raised the bar on motion, tooling, and testing across the team.

    • 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 essays in the pipeline. All writing →