With deep sorrow, the Mukerji family announces the passing of Meenakshi Mukerji on June 11, 2024. Meenakshi fought very hard and bravely against stage 4 lung cancer for nearly 5 years, and she passed peacefully surrounded by close family and so much love.
Meenakshi was born and raised in Kolkata, India. She obtained her BS in electrical engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and a MS in computer science from Portland State University, Oregon. After working in the software industry for more than a decade, Meenakshi dedicated her time to her family, her community, travel, and to the arts. She authored many origami books and spread her love and passion for the craft across the world.
Meenakshi was a beloved daughter, sister, mother, wife, and friend. Her strength, creativity, positivity, and love will continue to inspire and touch the lives of those who knew her, and also those who didn’t.
I started a portfolio website with Netlify (iirc), then I moved to Vue + Gridsome (on GitHub pages), then Next.js with Tailwind CSS, and was about to move to Vite.js over winter break.
That's 4 stacks over the course of 5-6 years. Not worth it.
Decided to do the sensible thing and use GitHub's README functionality. I prefer this approach and wish more folks in the tech community adopted it: https://github.com/SuboptimalEng
IMO there's quite a surprising amount of stuff you can do on GitHub that's highly undiscoverable. You only think of it when you see someone else on the site doing it, and then you don't necessarily know what it's called so you don't know how to research it.
I hate the UI layer, for this reason. Nothing is ever stable. I'm looking for "Boring" and "Googleable in the age of AI slop". The other alternative are frameworks small enough to easily comprehend.
The UI is often tangential to the heavy lifting done by the back end. It often needs to be "just good enough".
How can UI be stable if you’re the one changing it all the time even if all you need is a readme page that can be done in the same UI with no change for decades?
GitHub was just down the other day. Why would you want your personal website/portfolio to be tied to GitHub? Crazy "modern web dev" stacks are likely overkill, but that's not an argument against self-hosting.
Logged in to comment this. Very much agree. It's crazy (to me) that books like this gets so much hype on HN when there are much better videos that explain these topics better.
Most of my math learning starting in high school all the way through undergrad was done by watching YouTube videos. I used books to practice problems, but when it came to understanding topics more deeply, it was always some random person on YouTube who did it better.
I hope in the future, all math (at least applied math) is explained using nice visualizations + videos instead of books like this.
The same thing applies to computer science. Try figuring out even the basics, like merge or quick sort, using pseudocode in a traditional algorithms book. It's an extremely difficult and time consuming nightmare. But watch a video of how merge or quick sort works, then you gain geniune understanding within minutes.
Surprisingly one of the best summaries (~10 pages) to applied linear algebra I've found is in Nielsen and Chuang's Quantum Computation and Quantum Information.
Presented primarily without proofs which whilst argubably can be limiting isn't relevant, at least for what their goal is.
Ah, so that's how you do it. Having a template for WebGPU projects is a good idea. I'll have to do the same so I don't waste time setting up web graphics projects.
Cool project btw! Adding this to my long list of graphics blogs to read.
Oh interesting, I always read (on r/GraphicsProgramming) that XCode has some of the best debugging tools out there. That's the main reason it's been on my mind. I just need better debugging tools on Mac!
Wow! First of all, thank you for your amazing blog posts and tutorials! I wouldn't have been able to make it this far without them. Seriously, I was stuck for so long until a random Google search linked me to that WebGL ray-casting article you wrote. (I'd pin your comment if I could.)
The funny thing is that I was getting more confident about using JS + WebGL/WebGPU ecosystem for graphics programming after having read your posts. Very interesting to hear that you've come full circle back to Cpp + WebGL/WebGPU + WebAssembly. I'll look more closely to assess options as I head down this journey. Thank you for your tips and advice!
Edit: Perhaps you'd find my "What is WebGPU" video on YouTube interesting. I'd love to get it fact-checked by someone who's been doing WebGl/WebGPU way longer than most people! I only got into this field ~2 years ago.
Sure I'd be happy to check it out, my email's in my profile (or Github/website).
There are some tradeoffs w/ WebAssembly as well (not sharing the same memory as JS/TS is the biggest one) and debugging can be a bit tough as well though now there's a good VSCode plugin for it [0]. Another part of the reason I also moved back to C++ -> Wasm was for the performance improvement from Wasm vs. JS/TS, but the cross compilation to native/web was the main motivator.
It's interesting to hear that Cpp is faster even though there is an overhead of moving data from WASM <-> JS/TS. I'm not yet ready to "take the leap" to learn Cpp + Metal + XCode + WASM because those are some big hurdles to jump through (especially just in my free time), but you do raise some good points.
I'm certain you could turn this knowledge into a blog post and help many more engineers who are silently struggling through this path. Self-studying graphics programming is tough!
It should pop up first on YouTube if you search "What is WebGPU Suboptimal Engineer", but I'll link it here[0] in case anyone else wants to watch it. (No need for you to actually fact-check it. I didn't mean to put random work on your plate on a Sunday haha.)
Good question! If I knew how to do it, I'd probably write this in just TypeScript. Turns out I don't know how to set that up. So I instead start with Vite and throw React in there to handle rerenders and simple state management. I think R3F is interesting, but I never used it because it makes graphics programming too front-endy.
The most important reason for my code structure is that I just like writing GLSL shaders! It's annoying that I need to set up Vite, TypeScript, Tailwind, React, etc. all so that I can write some shaders. I know I can write shaders in ShaderToy, but then I won't be able to upload custom 3D texture files or add simple user controls.
> The most important reason for my code structure is that I just like writing GLSL shaders! It's annoying that I need to set up Vite, TypeScript, Tailwind, React, etc. all so that I can write some shaders
That's what the frontend hype canal wants you to think!
Your frontend JS could just `fetch` the GLSL files from the backend instead of trying to compile them into your build process.
There are tradeoffs to this of course, but dealing with the complexity death star of JS tooling can be opted out of.
My app does not support DICOM files as input. Just Uint8 256x256x256 raw files that are scaled 1x1x1. Maybe if I had the chance to work on it full-time I'd have the time to add those features, but it's just a side project for now.
Have you looked into Slicer3D[0] which is a multi-platform desktop app or Open Health Image Foundations dicom viewer[1] which is web-based? Perhaps one of these will help.
With deep sorrow, the Mukerji family announces the passing of Meenakshi Mukerji on June 11, 2024. Meenakshi fought very hard and bravely against stage 4 lung cancer for nearly 5 years, and she passed peacefully surrounded by close family and so much love.
Meenakshi was born and raised in Kolkata, India. She obtained her BS in electrical engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and a MS in computer science from Portland State University, Oregon. After working in the software industry for more than a decade, Meenakshi dedicated her time to her family, her community, travel, and to the arts. She authored many origami books and spread her love and passion for the craft across the world.
Meenakshi was a beloved daughter, sister, mother, wife, and friend. Her strength, creativity, positivity, and love will continue to inspire and touch the lives of those who knew her, and also those who didn’t.