Last week I stumbled on Lando Norris’s portfolio site and had that very specific developer-brain reaction: “okay but how hard could it be to recreate it?” So in this video I try to clone the hero section—the face/helmet WebGL thing where everything moves with your cursor, patterns shift, and the background animates. I went in with the laziest plan possible (copy-paste HTML/CSS, mirror the site, run it locally)… and immediately got humbled by forbidden JS requests, missing assets, and a whole lot of “why is this not loading.” Eventually I got the full site running locally, but then hit the weirdest bug: it only worked when DevTools was open. After some sleep and a lot of debugging, it turned out to be a responsiveness issue—wider screens needed extra textures and I was missing a package. Once that was fixed, I stripped everything down to just the hero and started making it mine: generating a new portrait with AI, converting it to WEBP, and then realizing it wasn’t “just swap the image” because the effect relies on multiple texture layers (alpha/depth/roughness). I broke it a few times, used Canva to fake a better shadow, repainted the helmet to match my style, and ended up with something I’m genuinely proud of—plus a reminder that copying code teaches you… but also comes with weird shadows (literally).