Less technology, not more
Terrarium Labs is a studio for evergreen frontend — built on web standards, made to be maintained for years, and owned outright by the teams who run it.
Hi, I'm Miguel Fondeur
I build reusable web components and design language systems on native browser technologies — clean, well-documented code meant to be read and maintained for years, not rewritten next quarter. My background is actually in music: I came up playing drums, taught myself to ship software in 2013, and have been at it across the industry ever since.
Over a decade of experience across companies of all sizes and many sectors.
Native-first my whole career — having struggled, like a lot of people, to keep pace with every new fad and trend.
Helped many teams cut codebase complexity and measurably improve their developer experience.
Terrarium Labs is intentionally lean — me, hands directly on your code, accountable end to end. When a project calls for dedicated design, I bring in a trusted collaborator I've worked with for years.
How this site is built
This site is built the way I'd build yours: prototyped quickly, then assembled by hand as a static site with as few moving parts as I can get away with. Here's the whole stack — there isn't much to it, and that's the point.
- Generator
Hugo
A static site generator. Every page renders once, at build time — there's nothing running in production to break.
- Styles
Vanilla CSS
Hand-written, with no framework and no preprocessor. Just the cascade, doing what it's good at.
- Scripts
Vanilla JS
Used sparingly — only for the handful of components that genuinely need to be dynamic, and reused wherever they appear.
- Graphics
Three.js
The one heavy dependency, deliberately fenced into a single place: the hero graphics. Nothing else on the site touches it.
- Hosting
Cloudflare
Static files served from the edge, with serverless functions for the few things that truly need a server.
- Services
Proton · Stripe
Email and payments are left to people who do those better than I would — standard, replaceable, and no lock-in.
- Design
Claude
Claude Design, on Opus 4.8, is excellent for rapidly prototyping ideas and testing whether they're worth pursuing. Its output is React, so none of that code ships here — everything was rebuilt by hand into the static site.
- Tooling
Design token generator Coming soon
My own pipeline for generating the design tokens behind the system — so the look stays consistent without a heavyweight tool to maintain it.
What Terrarium Labs is for
Encouraging evergreen tech — software that stays relevant on its own merits, instead of needing a rewrite every few years to keep up.
Using less technology, not more — fewer dependencies, fewer moving parts, less to break. The platform does more than most stacks give it credit for.
A place for experimenting, not dogma — opinions held loosely and tested in the open. A terrarium is somewhere to try things and watch what actually grows.
Freedom from lock-in — no vendor lock-in, no pay-to-play software you can't walk away from. You own what gets built, end to end.
Let's build something that lasts
Tell me what you're working on. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right fit.