How I made my portfolio

For my portfolio, I wanted to create something special to show off my skills, without resorting to flashy CSS animations or over the top 3D WebGL stuff.

I went with a simple page featuring a piece of generative ASCII art, similar to Conway's Game of Life, but with added randomness, plus many more types of cell, and some very complex rules for each cell type. The complexity of the system leads to a wide range of patterns, mimicing the growth of microscopic life.

I carefully balanced the rules for growth and decay to allow the system to stay 'alive' indefinitely.

You can also mouse over the art to draw more '#' cells.

It was written first as a go module, and then transpiled to a WebAssembly module (WASM), which allows it to run in the browser at a high frame rate.