Hello, and welcome!
I’m Gerrit, and this is my humble ’homepage’.
In its current form it's still more a work in progress, a notebook, screenshot collection and sandbox for hobby projects and study work.
I still need to figure out a good format and direction for this website. I'd like it to be more useful than just being an image gallery, but writing tutorials or indepth articles will take time. I'd also like it to be a portfolio, but most projects were merely course exercises, not works I created on my own as part of a larger vision, but this will take me more time as well.
Expect the site to change and grow though - I'll continue to work on it. I have more course content, images and videos to add. Some topics will include WebXR, WebAudio, Unity and Unreal Engine, Computational Geometry, Algorithms, Data Science and Machine Learning. There will also be a space for music, movies, art and other things that catch my interest.
Some History
My personal website actually dates all the way back to 1996 when I first taught myself HTML. I used to host it on my first domain celephais.com inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's short story. It was a playground and an archive of my favorite musicians and song lyrics.
Technically, this site was really primitive: just basic HTML, tables and images, and and some very basic Javascript to handle click and hover events. Adding more content to the site was painful and crazy time-consuming because it always required creating all new images, measuring, slicing, cropping, etc. But seeing it come together was part of the fun. I still have fond memories of this special and inspired time on my first PC with my first modem, and the very special 'underground' community around my own and other BBS systems, and my first steps on the Internet. It's really incredible what this all evolved into in the last 30 years.
As life changed over the years, so did the website. In the late 90s/early 2000s I added PHP scripts, a database, and then I created a custom framework with reusable components. A few years later it turned into a WordPress blog and a few different themes. After WordPress there was some time with Drupal before I returned to a more static file-based site running on Grav, and later Hugo with Blogdown. Then I returned to basic HTML for a while, and now I'm using React/Next.js. Next.js is still a new chapter for me - there's still a lot to learn. :)
I hope you enjoy or find any of these pages useful, interesting or inspiring. Please check back from time to time - I'll continue to add more to this site in 2025.
Links
Disillusioned by the major social media services, what they've become and how they made me feel in the last few years, I pretty much stopped using Twitter, Instagram, Threads or Facebook. I'm most active on Bluesky now. Sometimes I look at mastodon.social as well. If you're interested in what music I currently listen to, check out my Bandcamp profile. Or visit Mubi for some movies I enjoyed. On VRChat I'm celeph, and on Discord I'm celeph1. Stay tuned - I plan to setup a Discord server as well. I'll share a link as soon as it's up.