Canvatorium (revamped)
I’m excited to (re)introduce my long-term project “Canvatorium”, an experimental design lab for spatial computing.
Why?
It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to work on Canvatorium. Other projects have taken up my time, but I’m excited to return to this type of work. There are a few reasons motivating me to pick up this project again:
Improving Vue JS and Babylon JS Skills
As I work on Canvatorium, I’ll be honing my Vue JS and Babylon JS skills. I’m excited to learn more about these technologies and how I can use them to create better products for my clients and myself.
Building in Public
Building in public is a wonderful way to learn from others while I’m sharing what I’m doing. It allows me to connect with other developers who are working on similar projects or who are interested in learning more about what I’m doing.
Prototyping Features for Other Projects
One of the core motivations for Canvatorium is using it as a place to prototype features for other projects. This will allow me to solidify ideas and test them out before incorporating them into other projects. If I create something novel or interesting, I don’t have to rip it out of another project to share it.
Time for a fresh start
I gained valuable knowledge from Canvatorium last year, but I also created a few areas that made it difficult to maintain or expand the codebase. Rather than refactoring the project, I decided to create a new one. To begin, I’ll start by re-implementing some of the early labs. This will help me reorient myself to this type of work, while also allowing me to reconsider features as I progress. Over time, I’ll recreate most of the labs in the new project.
A very rough roadmap:
- Build the website and shared components needed for the labs
- Re-implement a few of the early labs
- Work on new labs (starting around 30+)
- Re-implement the remaining legacy labs as needed
When I initially started Canvatorium last year, it was intended to be a personal side-project. However, I am now treating it as a business project and allocating additional resources to it.
Tech stack
Last time I used a regular Vue 3 project, but I was still using webpack. This time around, I’m using Nuxt JS and Vite. Nuxt takes care of a lot of busy work for me such as routing and auto-import, making it easier for me to focus on the project itself. The Nuxt project template uses TypeScript, so I’m finally going to spend some time with that too.
I’ll also be making use of GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT as a work out my ideas.
I’m going to freeze the legacy project in place and leave it there for reference: Canvatorium Legacy. I’m still working out the details of where I’ll manage the project and where I’ll publish lab notes and results. In the meantime, you can find the new GitHub project here: Radical Canvatorium. The public version of the site is hosted at https://radical-canvatorium.vercel.app/
I’m excited to dive back into Canvatorium and see where this project takes me. Stay tuned for updates as I continue to work on this project!