Project grid

May 22, 2023 • Yousef Amar • 2 min read • Parent project

When people visit my website, it's not very clear to them what it is I actually do. It used to be that my website doubled as my CV, but after a while that became sort of useless as I no longer needed to apply to jobs, and I stopped maintaining it.

Recently, I began revamping the landing page of my website (yet again) and started off by cleaning up the hero section. I had a bunch of icons that represented links, and thought I was being clever and language-agnostic by using icons instead of text, but then realised that even I was forgetting what icon meant what, so I couldn't begin to hope that others would know what they meant. So I added text. And I made the WebGL avatar have an image fallback in case the browser doesn't support WebGL. Similarly, I froze the parallax effects under the same conditions as those rely on hardware acceleration.

Then, I decided to create a project grid right under the hero. I wanted to treat this as a showcase of the things I am involved in, or have been involved in, loosely in order of importance. This has been inspired by:

I began by adding the most important stuff for now, and might add some more over time. I keep pretty good notes of everything I do, so this list could become very very long, as I've worked on a lot of things over time. I realised that a few, cool, recent things are more meaningful than many, old, arbitrary things, so I'll try not to make this grid too large, and link to the full directory of projects (at least the ones that have made their way online) in the last tile.

It would have also been quite boring I think if I listed all my publications, as they're largely related. The same holds true for every weekend project, hackathon, game jam, utility script, game mod, etc. The projects I worked on during university I think are similarly just too old now. I also left out my volunteering work because it felt a bit too vain to include, and I'm not sure it would actually spur on any meaningful conversation. I also left out the things where I don't have significant enough involvement.

Please let me know your thoughts on the above and/or on how to improve this!