What is this? Notes are monthly posts of curated content, featuring articles, websites, exhibitions, projects, and personal experiences that I find worth sharing. Think of it as a blend of a newsletter, bookmarks, and a public journal.
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The making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner
I’ve been wanted to read it for years and I finally bought it at the beginning of summer. I had a blast reading it, the book is full of insights about animations and coding in the 80s and is an amazing dive into the mind of a creative developer. It was also inspiring to read about the ups and downs of building what would be a tremendous success. Prince of Persia was one of the first game I got on my Gameboy Color (Purple Clear edition 😎). I can’t recommend it enough!
Design with materials, not features by Linus
While I spent most of 2022 working on Fragment , I’ve started to follow a lot of people rethinking and prototyping softwares, operating systems and revisiting some patterns we take for granted in the computer world. This type of work has been really inspiring and it lead me to think differently when working on Fragment features. The work of Linus is a rabbit hole of creative thinking tools, programming languages, frameworks… This post is a deep dive into how we can think about software interfaces.
Design with materials, not features https://thesephist.com/posts/materials/The rest of his website is also a goldmine of content.
An app can be a home-cooked meal by Robin Sloan
Robin takes us into the making of a messaging for his family. The post reflects greatly about programming, especially this part:
“Learn to code” is suggested as a way up, a way out. […] But let’s substitute a different phrase: “learn to cook.” People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But many more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably. Because they want to carry on a tradition. Sometimes they learn because they’re bored! Or even because—get this—they love spending time with the person who’s teaching them.
Anyway, you should read it!
An app can be a home-cooked meal https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/A simple texture atlas packing algorithm by Nikita Lisitsa
Nikita takes us into the maths of implementing a packing algorithm to be used for shadow mapping. The post also goes deep into how to optimize algorithm complexity. The code is written in C++ but can be understood pretty easily.
A simple texture atlas packing algorithm https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/graphics/2022/08/06/texture-packing.htmlvia lisyarus
Holograms, light-leaks and how to build CSS-only shaders by Robb Owen
I tend to avoid to use CSS filters as they ended up being a performance bottleneck every time I try to use them but this article by Robb offers an interesting approach by blending layers of CSS filters to modify an image. I would very much like to use them but I found that it affects the scrolling performance too much for now. Yet they are very powerful and I hope to be able to use them in the future!
Holograms, light-leaks and how to build CSS-only shaders https://robbowen.digital/wrote-about/css-blend-mode-shaders/Drawings
I kept on working on some explorations for this website, but switched from a WebGL implementation with sign distance fields to Canvas 2D. I also implemented a hatching pattern to fill the square. Results looks way better than in WebGL and seems to be more performant. #madewithfragment of course.
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