At the start of this year, I set out to actually learn how to write shaders. I had tried this before. I had tried to read The Book of Shaders—multiple times. Each time, I got discouraged and dropped off.

This time, I tried to learn by building. I ended up with a little library and want to share it.

I've been leaning hard into the View Transitions API at work. This isn't, like, perfect, but I'm pretty impressed by what you can pull off with it.

Ben Day Spotlight

'lil WAAPI-powered infinite card flip animation
codepen.io/andystewartd...

I've always been annoyed that, with the Web Animations API, there's no built-in way to know when an infinitely looping animation is finishing/starting an iteration. Turns out it's pretty easy to fake it using the `finished` promise that you get when you play an animation. codepen.io/andystewartd...

This is first time that I’ve written a shader and know, at a line-by-line basis, what the hell is happening. It's not even particularly complex, as shaders go, but it feels like progress.

I started this on a plane 6 months ago, forgot about it, and finished it on a plane last week.

There's a lot more that I could do with it, and I may bang around on it occasionally going forward. I've found it useful on some recent projects, though, and wanted to publish it.

www.colorpalett.es

Bought a little macro pad to use as a controller for my coding experiments. It actually is meaningfully more fun than just using my keyboard 😅

New Year’s Rave

Finally getting around to writing a post about one of my favorite details from the eBay Playbook homepage. Anything you're curious about?

Going into the weekend like 🎉

Finally figuring out the logic for this lil infinite grid class was very satisfying.

Pretty happy with my little podcast search engine. One day, it will be a real podcast app.