HTML & Wabi-Sabi

I’d been steadily working on this website, when I got to a point where I was aware of the many unsolved issues that lay before me, but could not focus on a way forward. Competing for attention were bugs, my impatient self wanting to do more creative things, and an itching desire to learn more about the back end of the stack and distributed systems. A demanding wishlist on top of an already demanding schedule.

What to do ?

A break

Probably the best medicine when my brain overloads. As soon as I got to a reasonably acceptable plateau, I stopped development on this site for a while. A Work In Progress banner is a reasonable plateau in my book.

A little help from my HTML friends

On my way back from this break, I landed on this presentation by Manuel Matuzović: Lost in Translation. In a joking comment (not a joke), Manuel suggested submitting one’s work to the W3C’s Markup Validation Service.

And so I did. This produced a lengthy list of issues. Many were errors stemming from a single area of code, some were warnings, and many others were “Info” issues that I allowed myself to ignore, as long as I maintain a consistent coding style (for that, linters are my friends).

This renewed my enthusiasm with this website’s coding thanks to a belated HTML spring cleaning.

Wabi-Sabi

Next, I needed to tackle a pressing issue: my creative coding had stalled!

For context, I have a long running project that involves learning WebGL and coding Wings . If you look at the creature in the home page, you’ll get an inkling of what motivates this. My first goal is to translate a messily coded P5js sketch into a WebGL sketch that I can understand and manipulate, while learning a thing or two in the process.

I’d managed to get the wing’s bone structure going.

However, translating the position of the feathers was giving me un-anatomical wings.

And yet, their brokenness was oddly satisfying: in my head I was somehow flying.

So, after my HTML, I decided to give these wings some loving too (read: translation, rotation, and scale), and have published the Wabi-Sabi collection! ❤️‍🩹

Enjoy!