The Journal
Articles & Blog
How we build, in public: engineering deep-dives, build stories, essays, and dated lab notes from the studio floor.
Deep dives
The engineering, measured and explained.
Making Mobile Safari Fast: Two Bugs, One Symptom
A mobile Safari performance campaign in two halves — prerendering the locale tree took TTFB from 250–950 ms to 3–8 ms, and a runtime diet cut 91 KB of JS.
Jul 27, 2026 · 13 min read
Twenty-five tools, zero uploads
“Nothing is uploaded” is an architecture, not a checkbox: a Web Worker RPC contract, flat-memory file processing in the tab, and a streaming SHA-256.
Jul 26, 2026 · 12 min read
Listening to Earthquakes: Ray Tracing a Whole Planet
Inside Tremor: an ak135 travel-time engine, seismic shadow zones nobody drew, and earthquake sonification from a hand-written miniSEED decoder.
Jul 25, 2026 · 13 min read
One Engine, Thirteen Games: The Lab's Shared Layer
Eight React Three Fiber games, five Canvas 2D originals, one shared layer: WebGL quality tiers, a global mute key, pure sim modules, and a single canvas.
Jul 14, 2026 · 11 min read
Orbital Mechanics in the Browser: Project Orrery
We didn't embed a satellite widget — we wrote the propagator. Roughly 16,000 CelesTrak records, Kepler plus J2, a Web Worker, and exactly one mesh.
Jul 10, 2026 · 12 min read
Six Languages, One Codebase: Next.js i18n as Architecture
Six locales from one Next.js codebase: localized pathnames, 1.19 MB of message catalogs, eleven namespaces on the client, and hreflang that doesn't lie.
Jun 24, 2026 · 10 min read
Build stories
How a thing actually got made.
A concierge that read everything we ever published
The site can answer questions now: a streaming AI concierge grounded in every page and every Journal essay we ever published.
Aug 7, 2026 · 7 min read
A Museum with Other People in It
Reliquary v2: the 3D museum now holds eight visitors at once — avatars, proximity voice, a rail tour, a floor plan — and still stores nothing at all.
Jul 28, 2026 · 13 min read
We Attacked Our Own Toolbox: 30 Defects in 24 Hours
The day after shipping 39,246 lines of client-side tools, I ran an adversarial code review against my own work. Eight skeptics, 30 confirmed defects.
Jul 26, 2026 · 11 min read
An AI Architect With Honest Prices
Building Vaynerov Project Blueprint: the model proposes an architecture, and a deterministic engine — never the model — decides what it costs.
Jul 8, 2026 · 10 min read
Rebuilding the Front Page: Putting the Offer First
Our home page buried the offer 4.9 screens down. Fourteen sections became twelve — and the Lighthouse sprint that followed ended at 100/100 with CLS 0.001.
Jul 5, 2026 · 8 min read
A Museum for Anything with a URL
Four days after launch: how the Reliquary turns a pasted link into a 3D exhibit — the SSRF guard, the image proxy, and a floorplan that never moves.
Jun 17, 2026 · 11 min read
Essays
Positions we hold about the craft.
Craft in the Age of Generated Code
AI writes code faster than anyone can read it. That doesn't lower the bar for judgment — it moves it to review. Generation is cheap; verification is the craft.
Jul 20, 2026 · 8 min read
Why We Give the Lab Away
A studio that bills by the project ships free browser experiments: twelve games, a museum, a satellite map, an AI architect. Here is the actual accounting.
Jul 16, 2026 · 6 min read
The Conjuring Standard
Why our tagline says conjure. A founder's case for engineering standards over vibes: honest limits, numbers instead of adjectives, and prices published in public.
Apr 30, 2026 · 6 min read
Lab notes
Dated dispatches from the lab.