Every page of this site exists at the same time, on one plane. The projects sit to the right of the front page; these notes sit below it; the note you are reading sits to the right of the notes index. Clicking a link doesn’t swap the page — it moves the camera.

The mechanics are almost embarrassingly small. Each panel is absolutely positioned at a grid coordinate, the plane carries a single translate3d, and one long weighted easing curve does all of the acting. The URL hash tracks the coordinate, so the browser’s back button plays the same move in reverse.

The previous version of this site rendered spinning WebGL gears with physically matched rim velocities. It was fun to build and heavy to load. This version ships no 3D, no scroll library, no runtime service calls — just a sheet of paper and a camera. It turns out restraint is the harder trick.

The old version of this site had columns of 3D gears that spun as you scrolled. The first time I wired up the rotation, the gears didn’t spin — they orbited, sweeping huge circles across the viewport like they’d been thrown.

The rotation code was three lines and obviously correct, which is how you know the bug is somewhere else. It was in the assets: the GLB files exported from Blender carried residual transforms on their root nodes — a translation and rotation baked into the scene graph. Rotating the group rotated the mesh around that offset pivot, not its own axis.

The fix was to walk the cloned scene graph and zero out every node’s position, rotation, and scale before use — safe because the mesh vertices were already centered on the origin. Three lines of traversal, half a day of staring. The lesson generalizes: when trivially correct code misbehaves, stop rereading the code and start interrogating the data it was handed.