Rendering glass in WebGL without melting laptops
Two refraction passes, a spectral lookup and a frame budget: notes from building this site's crystal.
About
I build products. Properly.
Eight years of shipping backends, infrastructure and UIs that real people and real money run through. Data pipelines and analytics tooling for four and a half years, then two years of iGaming and Web3: wallets, payouts, provably fair games, a consumer app that hit 5M monthly users.
I don’t do “that’ll take six months.” If it can be built, we’ll build it. Node, TypeScript, Go, React, Postgres, Kubernetes, and whatever the problem actually needs.
My two cents.
Scroll-driven scenes that stay accessible
Keeping keyboard, screen reader and reduced-motion visitors in mind when the page is a camera move.
A small, boring stack for client projects
Why the dull choices keep shipping on time, and where a little novelty is worth it.
Typed end to end
Sharing types between the database, the server and the interface without a code generator in the way.
What I check before a launch
A short pre-flight list for performance, analytics, accessibility and the way back if it goes wrong.
Living inside a 16ms frame
Where the frame time goes on a WebGL page, and how to claw it back.
Work
Things I’ve shipped.
Polymer Search: four and a half years, hired by an ex-Google tech lead, promoted several times in year one. Built the data connectors, ELT pipelines, UI, onboarding and a lot of the infrastructure. The product people used was the product we used.
Black Labz: multi-million-user iGaming and Web3 platforms. Wallet and payment flows on a public blockchain, an original games product built from scratch with its own provably fair engine, a Telegram consumer app that reached 5M monthly users, and a few teams led along the way.
Also: Clipflip, a creator marketplace, led four devs end to end. Stampede, an open-source REST framework for Deno, about 200 stars, back when I was a junior.
Contact
Tell me what you’re building.
No forms-for-the-sake-of-forms. Say what it is, roughly what you’ve got, and I’ll tell you straight if I’m the right person. Or just email anur@anurbasic.com.