REVITALISING MY WEBSITE
I have been a bit myopically focused on completing my new BIM framework for the past few years, to the exclusion of most other things. However, that seems to be how I get stuff done, and I _really_ needed to get that done. Ten man-years for a software project is actually quite a small one, but it still takes me ten years. Thus, it's pretty amazing now to be slowly coming out the other end of it. I also have a heap of half written posts about development stuff that I encountered over that time, so my New Year's resolution for 2025 is to revitalise my website, get some posts finished and demo apps released, and then respond to the absolute mountain of messages I have received in the interim.
Introduction
At first glance, this new website may not look all that different from the previous one, but a lot has happened in the web development world since I moved away from Drupal back in 2016. Updating this site was therefore a great opportunity to do a dry run for my new framework website(s), so I really wanted to completely rewrite everything for the very latest versions of Bootstrap , Hugo and (eventually) Vue , a process that took many more weekends than I had hoped.
Apart from adding some new imagery, the main visual changes have been refining the responsive layout to make it work much more consistently across all devices, and the ability to switch between light and dark modes. This meant lots of image formatting and checking by sight pretty well every page.
Not Much Has Changed
Going back through my old posts was actually pretty confronting because I can see so much that I’m still working on a decade later, and so many things that haven’t really changed much. I am still working on generating charts and graphs in SVG and WebGL, still working out how to generate complex geometry and shapes, still working out how to dynamically dimension building elements, still exploding building levels to see the spaces inside, still designing new annotation systems for sensors and fittings, still calculating dynamic daylight levels and shading, etc…
The only consolation is that at least I seem to be getting better at a few things. My buildings now kind of look like buildings and my dynamic analysis is actually pretty dynamic, so maybe there is something to be said for continually iterating on the same things over and over.
Background Imagery
With this website update I wanted to more concisely convey what it is that I do and the kinds of things that I am interested in, so I created some artwork to include in the background of each page. Creating these over the past few months has been so much fun and has led me down so many different paths with different versions and contexts for my other websites. I hope you enjoy some of them as much as I did.