In summer 2026 I joined Alpine Valley as CTO of Lockup. As part of this, me and the rest of the Lockup team lived at Schloss Drosendorf, a 12th-century castle in the Austrian countryside. While we were there, the Lockup team offered to redesign the Alpine Valley website.
The concept was to represent the two phases of the castle's history with a transition between themes. I featured a real portrait from the castle that actually hung right behind our desk in the workspace. I built the main scaffolding in React and Tailwind CSS, hosted on Vercel. Carlos added the glitch effects for the transition and Cillian built the Lottie animation that accompanies it.
It was my first really ambitious web design project, and I think it came together well.
Alpine Valley itself was worth the six weeks. I met founders building companies across Europe, several of whom I am still in touch with. I would recommend it to anyone with an early-stage startup who wants concentrated time to build alongside other teams doing the same.
