Advent

The rise of the local-first movement was no anomaly. For years, browsers were no match for native environments that offered superior performance and offline capabilities. The gap was painfully obvious, native apps could store gigabytes of data and had access to a whole file system while browsers barely scraped by with megabytes. Modern browsers have since caught up over the last few years and the divide between browser and native environments has significantly blurred. There were many developments that gave rise to this, chief among which are: larger browser storage capacity, and new storage APIs. Let’s examine these. ...

In my last post, I mentioned that what makes an app local-first is its ability to keep running even when a connection falters. At first glance, this might look a lot like the offline-first movement that arose alongside the progressive enhancement wave of the mid to late 2010s. But there’s a subtle distinction. Offline-first apps focused primarily on staying functional during network interruptions but the server remained the primary data source. Data in this context is stored locally until a connection is restored, after which the locally stored data is deleted in favor of the remote store. A restored network connection progressively enhanced the experience and syncing only happened when there was new data created during the interim offline period to upload. ...

I’m frequently amused by how often local-first software gets mistaken for community initiated software. The ethos is spot on, but the confusion is revealing: cloud first has become the de facto standard for building apps. Local-first challenges this notion and subverts the dynamic between cloud and device. It puts the device at the center of operations. In this way, local-first apps remain operational despite an unstable connection unlike cloud-first ones. This of course doesn’t disregard the cloud completely. In a local-first model, the cloud shifts to the role of facilitator, ensuring data is synchronized across devices and sessions. ...

Didn’t make a lot of progress today and decided to play around with shapes instead. Here’s a heart -> https://codepen.io/shortdiv/pen/zYxGQBm?editors=1010

Geometry is the basis for drawing any shape in ThreeJS. As I covered in earlier posts, geometry in ThreeJS consists of vertices and faces, which can be defined by hand in order to create custom geometry. Of course, this task of defining your own vertices and faces is ambitious and requires a firm understanding of how math works in ThreeJS—knowledge which I currently do not have. To keep things simple, ThreeJS offers default 3D shapes known as primitives so you don’t have to grok geometry to generate common shapes like spheres and cubes. ...

Most shapes in ThreeJS and WebGL can be created using primitives many of which, you can use to create composite geometries, like this really neat christmas tree. Creating complex and unique geometries however takes effort and can be difficult to achieve by simply compositing, mutating and ”extruding” existing primitives in ThreeJS. A better approach, as I highlighted in a previous post, is to utilize the methods like Geometry in ThreeJS that give you the flexibility of defining vertices and faces for custom polyhedrons. In addition to this, ThreeJS also offers support for working with curves and smooth surfaces. ParametricGeometry is example of such a method that gives you the ability to work with parametric surfaces, or surfaces which extend the idea of parametrized curves (fancy terms for bézier curves) to vector-valued functions of two variables—from my understanding this basically means a 3D non straight surface. ...

Walking at angles When drawing in 3D and even in 2D, we rely on shapes to make up a larger geometry, which then go on to form a more complex scene. This may seem rather straightforward but to a machine the task of drawing shapes could not be more complicated. This is largely because most machines only know how to render triangles. Take the humble square. Ordinarily, a square is drawn from point to point around the perimeter of the square, so in the figure below we’d draw a square from 1 → 2 → 3 → 4. From a computer’s perspective however, drawing a square would go 1 → 2 → 4 → 3. ...

Because we’re starting from the basics, this week we’ll focus largely on shapes and rendering shapes to the screen. This task may seem trivial but I assure you there’s a lot happening to occupy a week’s worth of content. To keep things simple, we’ll create our 3D images using ThreeJS, a JS library that abstracts a lot of the complexities of WebGL so you can write graphics with the power of JavaScript! ...

At the start of 2018, I got the opportunity to be part of the first mini batch at the Recurse Center. Recurse Center is a self-directed, community-driven programming retreat in NYC aimed at attracting programmers who want to grow their programming chops in a rigorous yet, supportive environment. Students who attend Recurse generally come in with a dedicated project focus. This helps with setting a course and creating a clear purpose through the course of the term, which lasts anywhere between 1 week and six months. During my time at Recurse, which lasted one week (hence mini), I focused on ramping up on WebGL. While 1 week was far too short to get anywhere near mastery, it did give me the space and time to navigate the vastness of core WebGL concepts and chart a semblance of a path to eventual mastery. If you’re curious about this and my learnings from my rather short stint there, check out my musings over on Github as well as my experiments with WebGL/GLSL—the furthest I got was rotating a triangle. ...

If you’ve been keeping up with the JavaScripts, chances are you’ve heard snatches of excitement about the latest and greatest in web technology, WebAssembly. WebAssembly is a binary executable for the web that promises near-native performance for web applications. This means that graphics heavy applications like Photoshop, and AutoCAD can now be run in the browser without the need for clunky third party plugins like Silverlight, Flash and Java Applets. Web Assembly effectively removes the notion that JavaScript is the de-facto assembly language of the Web and opens the door for other languages like C, and C++ to run on the web. ...