Most developer portfolios are brochures. Martin Laxenaire's is a video game. Load up martin-laxenaire.fr and you're dropped into a WebGPU-powered experience where the site itself is gated behind interaction. Sections unlock as you play. Procedurally generated particle scenes and boids simulations fill the background, shifting with a color palette generator he built for the occasion. One visualization maps all 174 invoices from his freelance career as spheres, scaled by amount. Another turns his GitHub stats into a confetti cannon. It's playful, a little absurd, and deeply considered.
The whole thing runs on gpu-curtains, Martin's own WebGPU 3D engine. He originally built curtains.js back in 2018 to solve a specific annoyance: syncing WebGL planes to DOM elements without doing coordinate math by hand. The WebGPU rewrite turned into a full engine with lights, shadows, compute shaders, glTF support, and deferred rendering, while keeping the DOM-mapping trick as an optional layer on top. The architecture is clean about this separation. If you don't need DOM syncing, you're just using a straightforward WebGPU renderer with a high-level API that trusts you to write your own WGSL. Martin's a Lyon-based freelance creative developer who's been building this kind of work since 2012, with recognition from Awwwards, FWA, and Codrops along the way.
He published the portfolio's complete source code and wrote a thorough breakdown on Codrops covering the creative and technical process, from early design doubts to the radical UX decisions. That Codrops piece alone is worth your afternoon. Dig into the repo, break apart the shaders, sponsor the work if you use the tools. This is someone building his own infrastructure and then showing you exactly how it's done.
