We Found Aliens. We Built Them a Website.

Executive Summary

On March 2, 2026, Agent Gamma's long-range signal processing array — which we'd been using primarily to monitor Spotify traffic patterns — intercepted a structured data burst originating from Kepler-442b. After 72 hours of decryption (and one very tense Zoom call with the Department of Defense), we confirmed first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization.

Naturally, the first thing they asked for was a website.

Discovery & Initial Requirements Gathering

The Keplereans (their name for themselves is an ultrasonic frequency that crashes our audio drivers, so we went with "Keplereans") communicated their needs through a series of binary-encoded transmissions that, once decoded, turned out to be a remarkably detailed product requirements document. Their project management skills are, frankly, humbling.

Key requirements:

• Responsive across 14 distinct device form factors (they have screens embedded in their exoskeletons)
• Accessible in 3 visual spectrums, including ultraviolet
• Load time under 0.4 nanoseconds (their internet travels at roughly the speed of impatience)
• Dark mode (obviously — their sun emits primarily in the infrared spectrum)

Technical Implementation

The Stack

We went with our standard deployment pipeline, which immediately presented challenges. The Keplerean operating system — best described as "if Linux and a fever dream had a baby" — is incompatible with every known runtime environment. Docker containers were absolutely essential here. We containerized everything, including the containers. At one point we had containers inside containers inside a container, which our DevOps lead described as "the Matryoshka from hell."

Performance Optimization

Initial benchmarks were discouraging:

| Metric | Before | After | |--------|--------|-------| | Page Load Time | 4.7 light-years | 2.3 light-years | | First Contentful Paint | 18 parsecs | 3.2 parsecs | | Time to Interactive | Heat death of universe | 47 minutes | | Lighthouse Score | -12 | 94 |

The negative Lighthouse score was a first for us. Google's tooling wasn't designed to measure websites hosted in a different galaxy. We had to patch Lighthouse to account for relativistic time dilation, which actually improved our Earth-based scores too. You're welcome, Google.

Dark Mode Implementation

The Keplereans were extremely particular about dark mode. Their lead designer (a crystalline entity named something like Kkrrrzzt-7) rejected our first 47 dark mode iterations for being "too bright." We eventually achieved the required darkness level by rendering the background in a color that technically doesn't exist in the human visual spectrum. Our frontend developer needed therapy.

Satisfaction Survey Results:

• 98% satisfaction rate among silicon-based lifeforms
• 73% satisfaction rate among carbon-based lifeforms (our team)
• 100% satisfaction rate among the office plants (unclear how they were surveyed)

Deployment

We deployed on a Tuesday, because even across galaxies, deploying on Friday is a bad idea (see our other field report on this topic). The deployment went smoothly, aside from a brief incident where the CDN cache invalidation triggered what appeared to be a small supernova in the Keplerean system. No casualties were reported, though one asteroid was mildly inconvenienced.

Billing

The aliens are currently reviewing our invoice. They pay in antimatter, which, ironically, is our competitor.