Justin Schwaitzberg

The whole codebase, with no escape hatches.

No `any` anywhere — `unknown` and narrow instead. Every measurement in the 3D scene is a typed constant in one file, because the camera-to-screen ratio decides how many real pixels each virtual scanline gets, and that decides whether any of this is readable.

The component tree, including the 3D one.

React Compiler lint is enforced, and two of its rules shape most of the scene code: a `useMemo` value may not be mutated, and `ref.current` may not be read during render. Shader uniforms are therefore created once and written through a material ref inside the frame loop.

Routing, bundling, and one canvas that never unmounts.

Chosen over Astro because a single WebGL canvas surviving navigation is a layout-level component here and an awkward one across islands. `dynamic(ssr: false)` keeps three.js out of the first bundle; the largest chunk is 199 KB gzipped.

Only the page around the canvas.

The skip link, the accessibility mirror, the view toggle — the parts that have to be real DOM. Everything inside the monitor is drawn rather than styled, so Tailwind never touches it.

The bundler, in development and in the build.

Next 16's default. A cold production build of this project compiles in about half a second, which is most of why the edit-check-capture loop this site was built with is usable at all.

No application server, and nothing to run per request.

Fifty-eight files: 3.2 MB of site, plus video that is only fetched if you open it. The scene is client-rendered and every word of content is compile-time data, so there is nothing for a server to do — no Node process, no systemd unit, no proxy hop.

One small Linux instance, configured by hand.

The virtual-host files live in `deploy/` and are deliberately split in two, port 80 and TLS. One file deadlocks first-time setup: Apache will not start while a config names a certificate certbot has not issued, and certbot needs a running server to answer its challenge.

Serves the files, and nothing else.

Immutable caching on the hashed assets, and a `default-src 'self'` content security policy with no third-party exceptions at all. There is no analytics, and the fonts are self-hosted, so nothing on the page reaches for another origin.

The cubicle, the desk and the monitor.

Built entirely from primitives — no purchased models, no HDRI, no texture packs. The bezel is a single extruded shape with a hole in it rather than four rails, because rails z-fight where they overlap at the corners and read as four slabs instead of one moulding.

three.js expressed as a React tree.

Taken over vanilla three.js for lifecycle management on a scene with this many interacting parts; a raw `THREE` object still drops into the tree unchanged. The pointer rig runs at frame priority -1, so everything derived from the pointer is current before anything reads it.

The rendering context, and a deliberate one.

WebGPU was considered and deferred: `pmndrs/postprocessing` is not fully ported and several effects need TSL rewrites, and bloom and halation are load-bearing here. Adaptive resolution is floored per quality tier, because resolution is the last thing this scene should trade.

The glass: one program, run per pixel per frame.

Barrel distortion, 240 scanline bands, an aperture-grille mask, halation, vignette, grain and a slow flicker. No derivative functions: three r185 is WebGL2-only and dropped the mechanism that emitted the pragma, so the anti-aliasing guard is computed on the CPU and passed in.

The desktop is a texture, not a DOM overlay.

The entire OS is drawn into an offscreen canvas and mapped onto the screen mesh. It works because the virtual mouse already mediates interaction — the hit-testing is ours either way — so leaving the DOM costs nothing and buys a real shader over live UI.

Low-frequency state, and only that.

Quality tier, ready flag, reduced motion. Pointer state is pointedly not in here: it changes at pointer frequency, so it lives in a plain mutable module object written by native listeners and read inside the frame loop. A React render per mouse move would be absurd.

The camera moves.

The transition that finds a phone in your hand and goes into its screen. Its descent follows a quadratic Bézier arced back from the desk, because a straight line from a camera already close to the glass reads as the monitor being yanked out of frame.

The bitmap face everything here is set in.

Self-hosted through `next/font`, which hashes the family name — so the canvas reads the real one out of a CSS variable rather than naming it and silently falling back. Every line on the grey is bold: measured through the shader, 8px regular is 3.5:1 and bold is 5.3:1.