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Theo Armour
Theo Armour

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2020-04-26 dev.to, glitch, markdown & three.js

Posting to Dev.to?

Blogging as a pastime is a really nice activity for oneself , but where you blog brings other people into the process. So blogging about technical matters on Facebook tends to toward losing followers. Blogging on your own website - unless you are already famous - means almost no readers. Wordpress.com, Blogger.com and Medium.com are all great platforms. I have used and admire all of them. The issue is that the readerships - even when the readers are themselves programmers - don't really have the intention of going to those sites to read about programming.

I have been following Dev.to for a while and this is my second post. From what I have seen so far, Dev.to is a nice place for quick and easy posting dedicated to discussing topical aspects of coding - while at the same fulfilling a bunch of items on my wishlist.

Real 3D in the post

I build real-time 3D web-pages that work on your computer, tablet or laptop. The three.js WebGL JavaScript library is my single dependency. Everything I do is free and open source and in plain-vanilla JavaScript.

What this means is that I do not do 2D. I do not do static. I do not do Ruby. I do not do Node. I do not do Videos (2D after all). I do not do databases. So what do I want to be able to show in my blog posts? Real-time, animated interactive 3D. the question is: where can you do this on the web? I have had some success in embedding iframes in WordPress and blogger posts, but the process is by no means satisfactory - let alone easy, fast and producing nice results.

The other day while going through the help menu I noticed this Liquid Tags thing. Scrolling down screws that I noticed that you could embed Glitch files - actual working scripts - in a Dev.to post. just like this one:

WooHoo! Write the text in Markdown. View the 3D demo "inworld". This could be the beginning of a dream come true.

Today's script

The script you see above is a side hustle on my main current project c10-viz3d. in 2019, three.js added some modules that make it possible to generate and process huge numbers of 3D faces. I just started playing with these modules and the script above has some of the first demos.

This afternoon I set one of the scripts to load and display a million boxes. And to my shock and awe, the script worked - six million faces or twelve million triangles were rotating on my screen at 60 frames per second. I couldn't believe it. Neither could my computer. After three minutes it overheated and shut itself down.

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Qodo Takeover

Introducing Qodo Gen 1.0: Transform Your Workflow with Agentic AI

Rather than just generating snippets, our agents understand your entire project context, can make decisions, use tools, and carry out tasks autonomously.

Read full post

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