Gerrit Wessendorf

Hello, and welcome!

I’m Gerrit, and this is my humble homepage. :)

I created this site as a space for my hobby projects and study work, as a sandbox for experiments and other things I’m playing with in my spare time.

Originally I tried to keep the technical content separated from music, movies, books, poetry, art or people I like, because someone who's interested in programming may not be all that interested in the music I'm listening to. But I changed my mind again because in the end it's all a part of me, and I'm not here with a special agenda.

So you will find topics ranging from programming, computer science, computer graphics, ray tracing, three.js, shaders, WebXR, WebAudio, the demoscene, Blender, Unity and Unreal Engine to the arts and humanities, and a diary of random thoughts about the present, past, future, life & death, the world and the universe. :)

My personal website actually dates all the way back to 1996 when I first taught myself HTML and started playing with Photoshop. I hosted it on my first domain celephais.com inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's short story and was as much a playground for all the new exciting tricks I was learning as it was an archive of my favorite artists and song lyrics.

Celephais 1996/97

Technically, this site was very primitive: just basic HTML and some images and image-maps, and some very basic scripts to replace images. Adding new content to the site was also a lot of work. Literally every new addition required editing and creating new images, measuring, cutting, cropping, etc. The first standard for CSS was published in December 1996, but I didn't know it then and wouldn't have known who to work with styles and sprite maps. But everything was so fresh and exciting, inspired and creative. This really was a work of love and self-expression.

Celephais 1996/97

As life changed over the years, so did the website. To remove some of the shortcomings and make it easier to add and update content, I added PHP scripts, a database, and then I created a framework with reusable components. A few years later the site evolved into a WordPress blog, 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. I really ended up spending more time trying content management systems, creating themes and plugins than to share, talk, write or create content.

I learned a lot during this odyssey, and of course there are still other frameworks I'd like to explore. But the site never felt and looked the same in all its iterations. The heart and soul, the youthful excitement and innocence was missing - it tried to be polished, professional, structured, but there was no true love, spirit and vision compared to the first generation. I decided to return to my roots and rebuild this site from the ground up, and keep it simple and primitive, and "hand-made".

In the next few months and years I'll add new pages and migrate some of my old content. There may be more images again, and some mix-tapes as well. :) Some of the next things to add are:

  • projects I developed during the Udacity VR developer and edX Unreal Engine courses
  • apps I wrote during the Computational Geometry course on Coursera
  • images and animations I created in Blender during the Wingfox Complete Blender Training and Low Poly Characters course on GameDev.tv
  • WebAudio-based drum machine I built during a Futurelearn course on Coding Electronic Music Tools
  • apps I wrote during courses on Fractals, Scaling, Complexity, Dynamical Systems courses offered by Complexity Explorer at the Santa Fe Institute.
  • 3D Audio and 3D GIS app I wrote way back in college
  • apps I wrote during the Creative Coding courses on Domestika

I hope you enjoy or find any of these pages useful, interesting, or inspiring. If you’d like to chat, feel free to contact me on Twitter, Mastodon on graphics.social, or Mastodon on mastodon.social.

   

Changelog

  • 2023/07/07 21:29 - Update intro, add screenshots
  • 2023/05/29 20:00 - Add/update link to ray tracing repo.
  • 2023/05/22 22:12 - Update Mastodon urls
  • 2023/05/21 20:12 - Add homepage, default index.js and the main toc data.