About WanTheDev
About
I am Wan. I make games and software, usually small things: a tool that does one job well, a game built around a single idea, an interface that stays out of the way. This site is my attempt at that last one.
The background is not a video and it is not an image. It is a grid of characters. Five sine waves decide what each one should be, the result is rounded onto a ramp of ten steps that runs from a space up to an @, and the browser paints the whole grid about nine thousand times per frame. It looks the same on a phone as it does on a desktop.
Why it is built this way
Everything here is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. There is no framework, no templating language in the output and no analytics. The page you are reading was assembled at build time from a markdown file in this repository, and your browser downloads no parser to display it.
- The colour palette is generated and contrast checked by a script, not chosen by eye.
- The page works with JavaScript switched off. All of the text is in the first response.
- Motion is optional, and the pause button is a requirement rather than a bonus.
What it does not do
It does not track you. It sets no cookies apart from the one that remembers your palette, and it sends nothing about your reading back to me. The only live part of the site is the contact form, and that one is rate limited and spam protected, because it is the only thing here that costs me money to run.
The source is private. Some of what this site does is meant to be found rather than read, and those things stop working the moment the repository is one click away. So this page tells you what the site does, and leaves the how to whoever goes looking.