Why I built my portfolio at alaa.racing

When I registered alaa.racing, people asked me if I was starting a motorsport blog.

I wasn't. But the domain says everything about how I work.

Speed as a philosophy

In Formula 1, a tenth of a second separates the podium from the pack. Every decision - tyre choice, pit timing, aero setup - is made quickly, with the data available, and committed to fully. There's no room for endless deliberation.

I try to bring that same mindset to software.

The web should be fast too

I care deeply about web performance, not as a metric to game, but because slow websites cost people time and sometimes even money. Every unnecessary kilobyte, every render-blocking resource, every layout shift is friction between a user and what they came to do.

This site is built with plain HTML, CSS, and Eleventy. No JavaScript framework, no build pipeline heavier than it needs to be. It loads fast because it was built to load fast, not as an afterthought.

A domain that means something

Most developer portfolios live at firstname.dev or firstname.io. Nothing wrong with that. But I wanted something that felt like me: Someone who thinks about milliseconds in the browser the same way a racing engineer thinks about milliseconds on track.

alaa.racing is a small reminder to myself: Keep moving, keep iterating, and never stop chasing the next improvement.

Whether that's a faster lap time or a faster Time to First Byte.