The first commit for this website was on Jun 15, 2021 where I had decided “I want to make a website with a blog!”
That led me to discovering Gatsby and digging into the JAMStack, so I would not have to deal with any messy hosting and easily spin up and manage entries. Of course I though it’d be easier than it actually was for me, but the next day Jun 16 I did get it deployed on Netlify.
The other major investment I made was to dabble with three.js and bring in some 3D space into my site, as I had recently moved to designing for Oculus so I wanted my portfolio to reflect some light 3D integration. I kept the premise simple: a basic slideshow of 3D models with some text over them. The two react libraries three-react-fiber and react-three/drei were immensely helpful here.
The thing that took the longest and most number of attempts was actually getting horizontal scrolling to work. I went through numerous react libraries that I ended up abandoning as I wasn’t thinking in 3D: I should move the camera on the X axis instead of worrying about scrolling the window. That’s what ScrollControls in drei allowed me to do. (but it still doesn’t work on mobile shhhh I’m working on it)
I then downloaded/created my own 3D models to put over the site. Shout out to Elin and Marcus Kane from Sketchfab for the Meta and Quest Pro models. Had to bust out my Blender skills to clean up the models and also make some of my own. I also leveraged the new Bezel website which is like Figma but for 3D (started by a former co-worker!)
Some irritating bugs that still exist is that for some reason the home page does not work on iOS at all! The canvas is set to display: none just on iOS which makes no sense to me, so hopefully I’ll be able to figure it out soon. EDIT: the fix is in
But, 1 year and a half later, on 1/18/2023 my site is now live!