I’m Tauseef. I build games and tools. I’ve worked on things with millions of users, like a rich-text editor, photo editor, RAG pipelines at Paradigm and Acely. This is where I scribble, often about web and game dev.
Here’s what I’ve been up to recently:
ReadableStream hooksOn Christmas last year, I came across a video by Tsoding. Now when I say that he has a gift for distilling complex and sometimes even scary topics in a way that completely makes sense, I’m not exaggerating. In this particular video, he quite literally demystifies the illusion of 3d graphics created on a flat 2d screen. I spent some time building an extension to his project here, an attempt to demystify rendering on the GPU, by way of matrices. ...
In the year of our Lord Claude Code I think it is important for reasons of fairness that if a human won’t review their own AI-generated code, we cannot expect other humans to do so either. The time required to conduct a thorough human review is much higher than the time it takes Claude to generate tens of thousands of lines of code. This wouldn’t have been a problem if it were trivial to identify the parts of code that are good and the parts that need to be improved. If 5% of something is bad, and it’s non-trivial to identify which 5%, then the whole is unusable. Separating the wheat from the chaff is the whole point of a code-review. ...
This is a prelude to Rust for JavaScript Engineers series. If you have written some amount of Rust and are familiar with cargo and Rust project structures in general, skip ahead to Building Connect-4. Hello, world Now before we get into building the Connect-4, let’s get a “Hello, world” program going. This is extremely straightforward as long as you have Rust installed. Here’s the place to start: Rust Installation. Once you have Rust installed, let’s check the version to verify that the installation worked by running rustc --version in the terminal. ...
Connect Four | Repository In the last post we looked at setting up the Connect-4 game board and transfering data back and forth between the JavaScript and WASM boundary. This allowed us to render a randomized board to the screen, however for it to be a real game we need allow users to make moves. In this post let’s take a look at adding a bit of interactivity to allow players to play a full game, and at the very end calculate the winner! ...
Connect Four | Repository In the last post we looked at setting up the codebase to build Rust crates, and then importing them into a JavaScript project. By the end of the post we’d gone over a simple enum based design for each position of the Connect 4 board. In this post, I’m going to expand on how we can take that simple data structure, build out the entire grid, and then render it using HTML elements. ...
Yesterday I got nerd sniped into missing a workout. Frankenpenguin | Repository [2:30 PM] I discovered a blog post about vibe coded performance benchmarks for drawing a large number of rectangles on the HTML canvas. It was an interesting read and I was nodding along until I saw that all the Typescript benchmarks were better than the Rust ones. That can’t be right? [3:00 PM] My hunch was that most of the time was spent crossing the boundary between Rust and Javascript. This is something I’ve been burned by in the past. ...
Connect Four | Repository [Edit] After receiving some generous feedback from my friend Tim, I’ve made some changes to clarify confusing topics, and added another post that should make it easier for first time Rust users to get started here. If you’re already familiar with Rust project structures, and have written some amount of Rust, please continue reading. When I first wanted to learn Rust in 2017, I had no idea where to start. I had written some C starting back in 7th grade, however I wasn’t particularly good at it. The only language I was competent at was JavaScript, and there weren’t a lot of resources that bridged the gap between JavaScript and Rust. ...
Flashlight | Perf comparison I recently talked to a group of engineers about integrating WASM into Javascript projects. I’ve integrated some Rust compiled to WASM into my projects a few times for various reasons ranging from performance to FOMO. I wanted to write down the architecture of a tiny game I wrote recently (with vanilla JS, HTML, and WASM), to demonstrate how to integrate very small parts of Rust using WASM into Javascript/TS projects. And eventually let it consume your entire life. ...
Full disclosure, I hate frameworks of frameworks. How does a thing become so large that it needs other large things to prop it up? Especially if the scaffolding is opaque, and you can’t fathom why it does what it does. People complain about Webpack, but at least you could reason about the pipeline end-to-end. I’ve written UI apps in React since before the first major version was released. Things like a rich text editor, a photo-editor, some games etc. Back in my day, things had lifecycle methods.. And we injected an instance of V8 inside Laravel to SSR before it was mainstream. ...
Previous post | Photo-editor In the last post I built the UX component, but so far it doesn’t do anything other than being highly entertaining for cats. In this one I’m gonna write a render pipeline and by the end it still won’t makes sense how to connect the *cough* Dots. How old is this browser? In a past life I worked on an extremely cool photo editor that had a ton of features and 100k MAUs. It was built using WebGL, and it works on most browsers and most phones. So naturally I wanted to build this one on WebGPU which is available on less than 50% of the browsers that matter. ...