This site has been rebuilt, and this post is the ribbon-cutting.
Why rebuild
The old site worked, but it had accumulated the kind of debt personal sites always accumulate: a 3D homepage living in an iframe, content welded into components, and an internationalization pipeline that was clever but opaque. Every improvement meant fighting the architecture instead of using it.
The rebuild had three goals: make the 3D navigation a first-class part of the application instead of a guest, make content something I can actually write (markdown files, not JSX), and make the 30-locale translation system earn its keep as a real product rather than a party trick.
The mantas
If you arrived at the homepage, you met the school of manta rays. They are new — or rather, they are the same idea rebuilt properly. The old version animated thousands of vertices in JavaScript every frame and talked to the rest of the site through a postMessage bridge. The new engine is react-three-fiber: wing-flaps computed in vertex shaders, the whole school drawn in three draw calls, banking flight dynamics, and — because a navigation system should navigate — full keyboard support and a calm mode for visitors who prefer reduced motion.
I've written up the full engineering story in the manta engine case study, including the parts where the first version was a museum of anti-patterns. Building in public means admitting your old code was the "before" picture.
What's next: Champollion
The big project ahead is Champollion — a machine-translation evaluation platform that grew out of the tooling that keeps this site's thirty locales in sync. Machine translation is excellent for a dozen lucky languages and unreliable for hundreds of others, and there's no transparent, public way to measure which systems work in which language pairs. Champollion's answer is a blind head-to-head arena, per-language-pair leaderboards, and a knowledge base for the languages that benchmarks forget.
The CLI half is already open source and in production on this very site. The platform half is being built in public, which is partly what this blog is for.
What to expect here
Engineering writeups, notes on machine translation and evaluation, the occasional manufacturing story from the other side of my working life, and progress reports on Champollion. Short, concrete, and honest about the failure modes.
If any of that is your kind of thing — welcome. The now page has the current state of play.