Don McCurdy

Geometric Animations / 260306
#p5js
#generative
#creativecoding

Graphic reading “Applications Open! Sovereign Tech Fellowship” above a photo of five smiling people standing arm in arm, wearing matching black “Sovereign Tech Fellowship” hoodies. The text overlay states that the fellowship is open to FOSS maintainers, community managers, and tech writers, with applications due April 6th, 2026 at 11:59 PM (CET), and mentions freelance and employment options as well as flexible working hours.

🎉 Applications for the Sovereign Tech Fellowship are officially open!

What’s new? For the first time, community managers, and technical writers can apply alongside open source maintainers until April 6, 2026, to become Fellows.

@cwilso.bsky.social Hey Chris, wanted to drop a note to say thanks for your Web Audio writeups! I’ve been running into them a lot this past month. ❤️

Feedback and bug reports welcome! In particular, I haven't been able to test on many platforms yet. All desktop and mobile devices _should_ be supported, but testing on Linux and Android is particularly needed.

Because I've just recently submitted the plugin, review and approval will take a while yet, and it won't appear in the Community Plugins list until then. If you're interested in beta testing in the meantime, the plugin can be installed with the Beta Reviewers Auto-update Tool (BRAT) today.

GitHub - donmccurdy/obsidian-field-recorder: Audio recorder with quality settings and waveform visualization Audio recorder with quality settings and waveform visualization - donmccurdy/obsidian-field-recorder

I really enjoy @obsidian.md for note-taking. But, I need some audio recording features that are missing from the app today... so I'm sharing a new "Field Recorder" plugin adding those features:

- mic selection
- quality settings
- waveform/clipping viz
- ...

github.com/donmccurdy/o...

Surfel-based global illumination on the web Can we use WebGPU to compute real-time global illumination with surface patches called surfels? Does it look good enough? Is it fast enough? And can we finally construct viable compute-heavy rendering...

“Surfel-based global illumination on the web, using three.js and WebGPU.” So much good stuff here by @juretriglav.bsky.social — demo! interactive illustrations! source code! A deep dive but clearly explained, fun, and worth the time.

juretriglav.si/surfel-based...

Really worthwhile reading from @icastano.bsky.social! If you're building with WebGPU, spark.js gives you new choices for texture compression that weren't possible with WebGL.

Also, I need to update my older blog post. 😅

sorry if i'm being dense, but is this a PR on the Svelte repo? 👀

that was fast! 👀

filesize numbers look really promising, will be interested to see on output quality.

I’m not sure! I don’t see why not, but I’m also not familiar with when to choose the newer codecs here. For “official” support a bitstream specification would probably need to be written.

Frosted Kingdom

three.js r182 was just released! 🎉

github.com/mrdoob/three.js/rel

I contributed support for RG normal maps, enabling BC5 and EAC_RG normal map compression in both the WebGL and WebGPU renderers.

#webgpu #webgl #threejs

to commemorate alan dye moving from apple to meta, here's one of his best quotes

No other JavaScript course gives you the feeling... of JavaScript for Everyone.

piccalil.li/javascript-f...

A brand new website to celebrate 10 YEARS (!) of beautiful markdown documents with Markdeep:

casual-effects.com/markdeep/

Same efficiency, 100% data privacy, and client-side processing.

New agentic AI support, fancy CSS styles, and compatibility for a seamless document experience.

Same happened to me, but only once so far!

I built this little tool to optimize and re-export GLTF/GLB assets to GPU-compressed KTX2. It runs entirely client-side/in-browser.

You can fiddle with the parameters, compare the before/after, and export to GLB.

Try it here: gltf-optimizer.simondev.io

#threejs #gamedev

3/ I'd been hoping Affinity Serif would make a competitor to Lightroom, but... that no longer looks like a possibility.

2/ I like the idea of managing my RAW photos as normal files, and presumably building an Obsidian plugin to handle RAW preview and the (intentionally very limited) kinds of edits I'd want. But not obvious to me whether Obsidian is a reasonable foundation for that purpose.

Anyone using #Obsidian / #ObsidianMD for photo management? Like Adobe Lightroom, minus the editing features? 1/

Advancing 3D Tiles and glTF in an Open Ecosystem A conversation about open standards between Amanda Morgan, senior director of open standards at Bentley; Sean Lilley, lead engineer behind 3D Tiles and a driving force in Cesium’s development; and Don...

I've joined the Cesium team, now part of Bentley Systems!

Working with Patrick and others at Cesium over the years, on glTF and 3D Tiles, has always been a great joy. More work in open source and open standards ahead. ☺️

cesium.com/blog/2025/11...

I hadn't! I like the design and direction.

Security is the main barrier for me... just a mostly-arbitrary hunch that a web browser needs at least one "security person" on payroll. 😥

Otherwise, I'd love to try Horse Browser too!

3/ With all that done, though, it works great! Enjoying the tab-stacking feature. And it's nice to be using a browser with healthier incentives again.

2/ ... I've been using Vivaldi the past few weeks, and I think that's going to be the move. In contrast to Arc: with Vivaldi I did have to change a fair number of default settings to get comfortable. Move tabs to the sidebar, update some hotkeys, disable the page-changes-sidebar-color thing.

I've used Arc (web browser) for the past few years, and it's good... but for software as security-critical as a browser, I don't love that it's really a side project for a VC-backed AI startup at this point. Writing on the wall and all that.

So... 1/

Val Town 2023-2025 Retrospective The whole story

i wrote everything that i've been kind of nervous to write about @val.town: here's how things have been going the last three years, and read to the end for how we're hiring for two people macwright.com/2025/11/11/v...

Version 0.9.2 of three-mesh-bvh is out now and brings support for raycasting & distance queries using WebGPU compute shaders!

This is the first step towards WebGPU path tracing & other compute-shader features 🚀✨

#threejs #webgpu #javascript

Year Two of the Open Source Pledge Updates and articles from the Val Town team

recommitted to @opensourcepledge.com at @val.town for 2025! very pumped to support projects like zod, fastify, codemirror, unified, and esm.sh with real 💸 as well as positive vibes.

blog.val.town/oss-pledge