Colophon

Like almost every piece of software, this site stands on the shoulders of other people’s work. Below are a few listings of notable dependencies. Please note, that this does not include any of the software or tools required to host this website or deliver it to your browser.

Web Technology

Hugo

Hugo has been chosen as the backend framework. While I am not exactly fond of how it does things, it gets the job done and has a relatively small footprint.

TailwindCSS

Yes, of course, I could have written the little CSS there is just using vanilla CSS. But since Tailwind has been a staple in my toolbox for quite some time now, it was the natural tooling of choice to speed up the layout process.

WebGL / Maths

The main background is driven by WebGL fragment shaders. Inspiration came from numerous visits to Shadertoy. The simplex noise implementation in GLSL has been taken from a Gist by Patricio Gonzales which provides an implementation by Ian McEwan from Ashima Arts. Ideas on domain warping and as an aside a refresher in function composition were obtained from Iñigo Quílez.

Typography

Most longform text content on this site uses your default system font as per the default configuration of Tailwind. While this introduces visual differences when viewing this site on different platforms, this choice was made deliberately to keep the reading experience as close as possible to just using the machine in any other application. Besides, modern system fonts have seen heavy optimizations in recent years to improve legibility and reduce eye strain.

However, to introduce some distinction between the different sections, a selection of other font families was brought in:

All of these fonts are available for download or direct inclusion from numerous places out there and have been published under either the SIL Open Font License (Fredericka the Great, IBM Plex) or the Apache license (Satisfy).