002 - the site started becoming a place

The last time I wrote about this site, I’d basically decided I didn’t want my portfolio to be a second résumé.

Apparently the logical next step was to turn it into a map of my brain.

reasonable.

Since then, I’ve added two pages that probably explain where this site is going better than anything else on it:

Now and Places.

Neither is particularly useful in the traditional portfolio sense.

They don’t tell you what programming languages I know.

They don’t have a giant HIRE ME button.

There is no strategically placed testimonial calling me a highly motivated self-starter.

Instead, one is a weird interactive sphere full of things currently floating around in my head.

The other is a map of places I’ve been, with photos, memories, and a completely unnecessary glitch explosion when you click something.

Which, at this point, feels much more appropriate.

now is basically the inside of my head, roughly

I wanted a Now page for a while.

A normal /now page is pretty straightforward.

What are you working on?

What are you learning?

What are you listening to?

What’s happening in your life?

Useful stuff.

I also knew there was absolutely no chance I was going to make mine a normal list.

So now there’s a sphere.

It’s full of little nodes representing things currently floating around somewhere in my life.

Work.

Objects.

Places.

Music.

Projects.

Thoughts.

Random shit I care about for reasons that probably make sense to me.

Some things are connected.

Some barely are.

Some probably should not be connected at all, but somehow ended up next to each other anyway.

which is pretty accurate.

You can drag the whole thing around, fling it, stop it, inspect things, and follow the connections between them.

The movement ended up mattering way more than I expected.

I didn’t want it to feel like rotating a product model in a configurator.

I wanted it to have weight.

If you throw it, it should keep moving in that direction.

If you stop touching it, it shouldn’t suddenly launch itself somewhere else because some velocity calculation got confused.

If you hold it still and let go, it should stay still for a moment before slowly starting to move again.

That took an embarrassing amount of tweaking.

Nobody is ever going to open this site and say:

wow, excellent rotational inertia implementation

but they’ll know if it feels bad.

That’s becoming a recurring theme with this site.

A lot of the things I spend time on are things nobody is supposed to consciously notice.

They’re just supposed to make the whole thing feel right.

There are dozens of nodes in there now.

The bright ones are things that feel more present.

The dim ones are still there, just further away.

There are categories, counts, little labels, coordinates, figure numbers, and lines everywhere.

It looks vaguely like some machine is trying to diagnose me.

I like that.

The caption underneath is:

fig. 01 the inside of my head, roughly

which is probably the most accurate documentation I’m capable of providing.

places is the same idea, except geographically irresponsible

Places started for a much simpler reason.

I’ve lived in and moved through enough places over the last few years that I wanted somewhere to keep them.

Not a travel blog.

Definitely not a list of:

TOP 10 THINGS TO DO IN TOKYO

Nobody needs that from me.

I just wanted a map.

Somewhere I could click Tokyo and see some photos.

Or Calgary.

Or some random highway service area where something memorable happened.

Places that mattered for five years.

Places that mattered for fifteen minutes.

The first version was basically dots on a map.

Then I touched it.

This was a mistake.

Now it has grouped locations, regional nodes, hover labels, photos, metadata, little bits of writing, zoom-dependent detail, and an explosion effect that distorts the map when you open something.

Because apparently opening a photo normally was unacceptable.

On desktop, some locations split into smaller places.

On mobile, things collapse into larger groups so the whole interface doesn’t become an unreadable pile of dots.

As you zoom in, more of the map appears.

Borders.

Grid lines.

Labels.

Details that don’t need to exist while you’re looking at half the planet.

When you open a place, the surrounding map gets pulled into the transition.

Lines warp.

Red artifacts show up.

The grid gets fucked with.

Photos cut through it.

It feels less like clicking a pin and more like the map temporarily breaking around a memory.

Which is a ridiculous amount of drama for a photo of me standing beside a river.

perfect.

somewhere in here I stopped liking developer fonts

The site also looks pretty different now.

For most of its existence, I assumed it needed some kind of monospace or technical sans-serif.

Makes sense.

Developer website.

Computers.

Tiny labels.

Grid lines.

Cyber-whatever.

I tried Inter.

Too normal.

I tried Martian Mono.

Too much like I was trying to prove I owned a terminal.

I tried Barlow.

Good font.

Wrong site.

Eventually I tried a serif mostly because I thought the contrast would be funny.

It was.

Then it became immediately obvious that it was better.

The site already has enough computer in it.

There are coordinates everywhere.

Numbered sections.

Little red status indicators.

Grid lines, diagrams, nodes, arrows, 3D models, maps, timestamps, and enough tiny monospace text to make an aircraft manual nervous.

The main typeface did not also need to yell:

COMPUTER.

So now the actual content is serif.

Japanese uses Zen Old Mincho.

English follows the same direction.

Headings.

Names.

Body copy.

Navigation.

Actual human-readable stuff.

The monospace type is still there.

It just has a job now.

It’s the machine voice.

FIG. 01

51.05°N 114.07°W

NOW / 32

01

02

dates.

statuses.

technical notes.

Stuff the interface is telling you rather than stuff I’m saying.

That distinction made the whole site make more sense.

The serif is the person.

The monospace is the apparatus around them.

That sounds incredibly pretentious when I write it down.

unfortunately it’s also true.

I also killed dark mode

kind of.

I am absolutely one of those people who turns on dark mode the second an app gives me the option.

White backgrounds at 1am feel like being interrogated.

So naturally I built both light and dark themes for this site.

Then I changed the typography.

And suddenly the light theme looked better.

way better.

The serif on the warm off-white background made the site feel less like an interface and more like printed material.

A technical manual.

A catalogue.

A weird little newspaper.

The red marks stopped feeling like generic cyberpunk decoration and started feeling more like registration marks from something that came off a printer slightly wrong.

The Japanese Mincho looked better.

The English serif looked better.

Long-form writing looked better.

Everything started feeling like the same object.

So I did something deeply offensive to myself and locked the production site to light mode.

The theme toggle is gone.

The dark theme config still exists because I am absolutely not deleting perfectly good work like some kind of psychopath.

It’s just not part of the active site anymore.

There is one exception.

The 3D desk.

That stays dark.

The page around it is light.

The equipment list is light.

The status bar is light.

Then, in the middle of all that paper-colored UI, there’s a dark viewport with a grey grid, shadows, warm desk lighting, and a little block version of me sitting in front of some monitors.

It feels less like “dark mode” now and more like a screen embedded into the page.

That was not the original plan.

It is absolutely the plan now.

I think the contrast is the actual design

I used to think consistency meant everything had to look like everything else.

Same font language.

Same color mode.

Same treatment.

Same degree of seriousness.

Now I think this site works because a lot of it doesn’t match.

There’s an old-looking serif sitting above an interactive 3D scene.

Japanese Mincho next to tiny monospace coordinates.

A warm paper background around a dark graphical viewport.

A world map behaving like corrupted software.

A giant diagram of my current interests that looks significantly more important than the information it contains.

A voxel desk on the homepage because I thought modelling my chair badly would be funny.

The visual system is consistent.

The things inside it don’t have to be.

That’s kind of the whole point.

the site is becoming less of a portfolio

There’s still a Work page.

There’s still an About page.

You can still find my experience.

You can still figure out what I build.

I’m not trying to make that information difficult to find just for the sake of being weird.

But those things are starting to feel like pieces of the site instead of the reason the site exists.

Now tells you what currently occupies my attention.

Places tells you where some of that came from.

Writing tells you what I thought about something long enough to bother writing it down.

Gear is literally just stuff I like.

The homepage has my desk.

And Work is there when you actually want the résumé-adjacent part.

Together, they’re starting to feel less like sections of a portfolio and more like parts of an archive.

Not a complete one.

Not even a particularly organized one.

Just a growing collection of things that made enough of an impression on me that I wanted to give them somewhere to live.

I think that’s what I actually wanted when I started rebuilding this.

I just didn’t have the language for it yet.

anyways, I’m apparently making a personal operating system

The little button in the corner says brian·os.

That started mostly as a joke.

I’m becoming less convinced it is one.

Not because this is actually an operating system.

Please do not email me about process scheduling.

But because I’m slowly building the site around the way I organize things in my own head.

Work is one part.

Places are another.

Objects matter.

Memories matter.

Whatever I’m obsessed with this month matters.

Things connect to other things for stupid reasons.

Some stuff gets archived.

Some stuff comes back years later.

Some things are useful.

Some absolutely are not.

And apparently all of it needs little red squares.

So I don’t really know what the finished version of this site looks like anymore.

That’s probably good.

The old ones were finished the second the project cards lined up properly.

This one keeps giving me reasons to add something.

Right now, that feels like a much better problem to have.