Have you forgot about VU JA DE? Probably. I almost did too.
That is, until my Wix subscription came up for renewal last January, when the website was feeling especially stale. Decision time: pay $350 to renew for another year, throw in the towel on this project, or… try something else?
I naively chose to cancel Wix and attempt to rebuild the website from scratch. This turned out to be the slowest, most frustrating route I could’ve taken to redo the website, but it’s become one of my most gratifying projects to date. Take a look, and read on for some context on how this came to be.
(It’s an interactive Rubik’s Cube, composed of videos from VU JA DE)
Early subscribers may remember, the first version of the VU JA DE website featured an interactive splash page (created by the brilliant @mpkoz). At some point, this became quite glitchy, and I didn’t have the technical know-how to fix it myself.
Fast-forward to 2024, and some things have changed. While I’ve had no formal training in programming or web development, I’ve begun weaving some JavaScript and Python into my professional work. This gave me enough confidence to use these languages in my website, along with some CSS and HTML.
This project was my first exposure to every piece of the stack, which included:
Backend using Flask and PostgreSQL
Frontend using React, Three.js, Framer Motion, and excellent Rubik’s Cube source code from Keaton Mueller
Hosting on Heroku, with assets on AWS S3/Cloudfront
This project also happened to be my first taste of git, npm, Google Analytics, and basic computer vision (the project used OpenCV to detect scenes and split the videos into the shorter clips you see on the cube).
Ultimately, this website became a nights/weekends project for the last 6 months. I basically became the guy in this meme:
The core app is just over 2000 lines of code (look under the hood in GitHub). With the help of ChatGPT and pointers from several friends and colleagues, it’s finally in a “completed” state.
I never expected that what started as a little Covid video project (and actually my college thesis before that) would evolve into my first foray into programming and web development. And after all that, it actually feels like a better expression of the idea behind VU JA DE than the initial site I launched 4 years ago.
This doesn’t mean I’m turning my back on videos. I haven’t stopped logging ideas — and many of them I still intend to create. But exploring this new medium of code has been invigorating, so I can’t guarantee any consistency (not that you expected consistency in the first place 😅).