Ya ok sure bud, but what even is this?

Ah yes. I thought you'd ask. Long story short, this is the best way I could think to describe the type of work I do. It's a portfolio, an art showcase, an art piece itself, and also just a wonky excuse to play with perlin noise fields. So that actually makes this page recursive!

This web app is built using SvelteKit with the Notion API as a backend, and most importantly, NoiseJS.

Perlin Noise and Flow Fields

Tyler Hobbs has a great writeup of flow fields here. The short story version is that perlin noise generates random numbers on a grid that vary gradually. This is great for simulating things like landscapes and turbulence.

I’m treating the noise like a pond.

I used NoiseJS, an old but very easy to use JS implementation of perlin noise. I’m considering switching to P5 so I can play around with visualizing the field in real time behind the blocks, but we’ll see.

Notion API

I’ve been wanting to harness Notion’s ease of editing and nice formatting ever since they announced their plans for a public API over 9000 years ago.

When it finally came out, it was alarmingly low level and didn’t exactly make it easy to harness the formatting. A couple of folx out there have built various incarnations of page parsers to process the block objects of a page, but they fell by the wayside and never ended up implementing all of the block types I wanted.

It took some doing. I basically had to manually reimplement every block type (and there are still a couple left on the todo list, like youtube embeds).

But now my personal portfolio has all its content hosted in a nice, malleable notion DB with functionally instantaneous publishing!

If anyone’s interested in using this little library, please hit me up! With a little bit more work, it could be publishable as an NPM module.