برچسب: Codrops

Hi, my alias is “MisterPrada,” and I’d like to share a short story about how I came to the decision to become a creative developer.

Background

I’m just about to turn 30, and over the years I’ve come to many realizations that I’d like to share as echoes of my journey. I’ve been consciously programming for about 14 years, and I’ve been using Windows since childhood—battling the infamous “blue screen of death.”

From a young age, I knew who I wanted to be—a programmer. In my childhood, nothing was more exciting than a computer. However, my academic skills weren’t strong enough to get into university easily. I was never particularly gifted in any subject; my grades were average or worse.

Somehow, I managed to get accepted into a university for an engineering program related to programming. I tried hard, but nothing worked—I ended up copying others just to pass exams. After some time, I realized it was time to get serious. I had no special talents, no head start—just the need for hard work. I wrote my first function, my first loop over a two-dimensional array, my first structure, my first doubly linked list—and I realized I liked it. I really, really liked the fact that I was starting to make progress.

I didn’t stop copying completely, but I began writing my own programs. We studied C++, C#, Assembly, databases, and lots of things I couldn’t yet apply in real life. So I bought a book on PHP, JS, and MySQL and realized I could build websites using WordPress and other popular CMS platforms at the time like Joomla, Drupal, etc. And you know what? That made money—and it was insanely cool. I just took on any work I could find. Since I had spent all of university copying code, I found it really easy to understand and adapt other people’s code.

Years passed, and I was building simple websites—tweaking templates downloaded from torrents, grabbing CSS styles from random websites, and so on. Something like these:

Eventually, I realized that my growth had stalled and I needed to act fast. I started reading various books, trying to improve my skills and learn new, trending technologies. This mostly broadened my technical horizons—I understood more, copied more, and tried harder to boost my self-esteem.

At one point, I felt confident, thinking I was pretty good and could handle anything. But then something happened during the final year of university. A classmate told me he had gone for an interview at a major company, and they asked him to implement a binary tree. I was shocked—I had no idea what a binary tree was, how to build one, or why I was even supposed to know it.

Honestly, it hit me hard. I started questioning everything—was I even a real programmer? Maybe I was third, fourth, or even fifth-rate at best, especially with my modest PHP/JS skill set…

No matter how tough things got, I never felt like this wasn’t for me. I never thought of quitting or doing something else. I just accepted that I wasn’t the best, not the smartest, and unlikely to be in Steve Jobs’ dream dev team. And you know what? Something strange happened.

One day, while playing my favorite game, World of Warcraft, I decided I wanted to become a cheater. And it wasn’t just a casual thought or curiosity—it became a full-blown obsession. I was just a regular programmer with average web development knowledge, yet I decided to write a cheat, dive into hacking, and understand how it all worked.

For a whole year, I obsessively studied the C++ source code of the game—despite not really using C++ at all. I explored how the server worked, dug into Assembly, network traffic, data packets, and hex code. I read books on cybersecurity and anything even remotely related. It felt like an endless world of discovery. I could spend months trying to understand things that didn’t make sense to me at first—occasionally achieving small victories, but victories nonetheless.

I started building a toolkit of tools like IDA Pro, xDbg, and even something as simple as https://hexed.it/, which let me quickly modify binary files.

After achieving real success—writing my first memory manipulation programs for protected software—I realized that what really makes a difference is a mix of luck, hard work, and a genuine passion for what you’re doing. And I had both of those things.

That became a kind of guiding principle for my further development. Sure, I’m not the most talented or naturally gifted, but I began to understand that even without full knowledge, with persistence and effort, you can achieve goals that seem impossible at first—or even at second or third glance.

Getting to Work

I got a job at an outsourcing company, and honestly, I felt confident thanks to my freelance commercial experience. At work, I handled whatever tasks the client needed—it didn’t matter whether I already knew how to do it or not. My goals were simple: learn more and earn money. What did I work on? Pretty much everything, except I always thought of myself as more of a logic guy, and frontend wasn’t really my thing. It was easier for me to deploy and configure a server than to write 10 lines of CSS.

So I focused mostly on backend logic, building systems, and I’d often hand off frontend tasks to others. Still, I was always afraid of losing touch with those skills, so I made an effort to study Vue, React, Angular, and various frontend libraries—just to understand the logic behind it.

I read a lot of books, mostly on JavaScript, DevOps, and hacking. At work, I grew horizontally, gaining experience based on the clients’ needs. In my personal time, I was deeply interested in hacking and reverse engineering—not because of any grand ambition, but simply because I loved it. I saw myself in it, because I was good at it. I definitely had some luck—I could click randomly through code and somehow land on exactly what I needed. It’s comforting to know that not everything is hopeless.

Years went by, and as backend developers and DevOps engineers, we often felt invisible. Over time, the huge amount of backend code I wrote stopped bringing the same satisfaction. There were more systems, more interfaces, and less recognition—because no one really sees what you do behind the scenes. So why not switch to frontend? Well, I just hate CSS. And building simple landing pages or generic websites with nothing unique? That’s just not interesting. I need something bold and impressive—something that grabs me the way watching *Dune* does. Game development? Too complex, and I never had the desire to make games.

But then, at work, I was given a task to create a WebAR experience for a client. It required at least some basic 3D knowledge, which I didn’t have. So I dove in blindly and started building the app using 8thWall. That’s when I discovered A-Frame, which was super easy and incredibly fun—seeing results so different from anything I had done before. When A-Frame became limiting, I started using Three.js directly on commercial projects. I had zero understanding of vector math, zero 3D modeling experience (like in Blender), but I still managed to build something. Some things worked, some didn’t—but in the end, the client was happy.

After creating dozens of such projects and nearly a hundred backend projects, I eventually grew tired of both. Out of boredom, I started reading books on Linux Bash, Kubernetes, WebAssembly, Security, and code quality—good and bad.

All of this only expanded my technical perspective. I didn’t become a hero or some programming guru, but I felt like I was standing alone at the summit of my own mountain. There was this strange emptiness—an aimless desire to keep learning, and yet I kept doing it day after day. Some topics I studied still haven’t revealed their meaning to me, while others only made sense years later, or proved useful when I passed that knowledge on to others.

Over the years, I became a team lead—not because I was naturally suited for it, but because there was simply no one else. I took on responsibility, began teaching others what to do, even though I wasn’t always sure what was right or wrong—I just shared my logic and experience.

Alongside trends, I had to learn CI/CD and Docker to solve tasks more efficiently—tasks that used to be handled differently. And you know what? I really learned something from this period: that most tools are quite similar, and you don’t need to master all of them to solve real business problems. In my mind, they became just that—tools.

All you need is to read the documentation, run a few basic examples, and you’re good to go. I’m simply not one of those people who wants to stick to one technology for life and squeeze value out of it forever. That’s not me. For over 5 years, I built 70–80 websites using just WordPress and Laravel—covering everything from custom themes and templating systems to multisites and even deep dives into the WordPress core. I worked with some truly awful legacy code that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

Eventually, I decided to move on. The developers I worked with came and went, and that cycle never ended—it’s still ongoing to this day. Then came my “day X.” I was given a project I couldn’t turn down. It involved GLSL shaders. I had to create a WebAR scene with a glass beverage placed on a table. The challenge was that it was a glass cup, and around version 130 of Three.js, this couldn’t be done using a simple material. The client provided ready-made code written in Three.js with custom shaders. I looked at it and saw nothing but math—math I couldn’t understand. It was way too complex. The developer who created it had written a shader for glass, water, ice, and other elements. My task was to integrate this scene into WebAR. I was lucky enough to get a call with the developer who built it, and I asked what seemed like a straightforward question at the time:

(Me) – How did you manage to create such effects using pure math? Can you actually visualize it all in your head?
(Shader Developer) – Yeah, it looks complicated, but if you start writing shaders, borrowing small snippets from elsewhere and understanding how different effects work, eventually you start to look at that mathematical code and visualize those parts in your head.

His answer blew me away. I realized—this guy is brilliant. And I honestly hadn’t seen anyone cooler. I barely understood anything about what he’d done—it was all incredibly hard to grasp. Back then, I didn’t have ChatGPT or anything like it to help. I started searching for books on the subject, but there were barely any. It was like this secret world where everyone knew everything but never shared. And if they did, it was in dry, unreadable math-heavy documentation that someone like me just couldn’t digest. At that point, I thought maybe I was simply too weak to write anything like that, and I went back to what I was doing before.

The Beginning of the Creative Developer Journey

About a year later, I came across this website, which struck me with its minimalistic and stylish design—totally my vibe. Without hesitation, I bought the course by Bruno Simon, not even digging into the details. If he said he’d teach shaders, I was all in. My obsession was so intense that I completed the course in just two weeks, diving into every single detail. Thanks to my background, most of the lessons were just a pleasant refresher—but the shader sections truly changed my life.

So, I finished the course. What now? I didn’t yet have real-world projects that matched the new skills I had gained, so I decided to just start coding and releasing my own work. I spent a long time thinking about what my first project should be. Being a huge fan of the Naruto universe, I chose to dedicate my first creative project to my favorite character—Itachi.

I already had some very basic skills in Blender, and of course, there was no way I could create a model like that myself. Luckily, I stumbled upon one on Sketchfab and managed to download it (haha). I built the project almost the way I envisioned it, though I lacked the experience for some finer details. Still, I did everything I could at the time. God rays were already available in the Three.js examples, so creating a project like that was pretty straightforward. And man, it was so cool—the feeling of being able to build something immersive was just amazing.

Next, I decided to create something in honor of my all-time favorite game, which I’ve been playing for over 15 years—World of Warcraft.

In this project, the real challenge for me was linking the portal shader to sound, as well as creating particle motion along Bézier curves. But by this point, I already had ChatGPT—and my capabilities skyrocketed. This is my favorite non-commercial project. Still, copying and modifying something isn’t the same as creating it from scratch.

The shaders I used here were pieced together from different sources—I borrowed some from Bruno Simon’s projects, and in other cases, I reverse-engineered other projects just to figure out what I could replicate instead of truly engaging my own thinking. It was like always taking the path of least resistance. Ironically, reverse engineering a Webpack-compiled site often takes more time than simply understanding the problem yourself. But that was my default mode—copy, modify, move on.

For this particular project, it wasn’t a big deal, but I’ve had projects in the past that got flagged for copyright issues. I knew everything lived on the frontend and could be broken down and analyzed bit by bit—especially shaders. You might not know this, but in Safari on a MacBook, you can use developer tools to view all the shaders used on a site and even modify them in real time. Naturally, I used every trick I knew to reach my goals.

That shader developer’s comment—about being able to read math and visualize it—kept echoing in my mind. After Bruno’s course, I started to believe he might have been right. I was beginning to understand fragments of shader code, even if not all of it. I ended up watching every single video on the YouTube channel “The Art Of Code“.

After watching those videos, I started to notice my growth in writing shaders. I began to see, understand, and even visualize what I was writing. So I decided to create a fragment shader based on my own experience:

Along my shader-writing journey, I came across someone everyone in the shader world knows—Inigo Quilez. Man, what an absolute legend. There’s this overwhelming feeling that you’ll never reach his level. His understanding of mathematics and computer graphics is just on another planet compared to mine. For a long time, that thought really got to me—20 years ago, he was creating things I still can’t do today, despite programming for so long. But looking back, I realized something: some of the people I once admired, I’ve actually surpassed in some ways—not because I aimed to, but simply by moving forward every day. And I came to believe that if I keep going, maybe I’ll reach my own peak—one where my ideas can be truly useful to others.

So here I am, moving forward, and creating what I believe is a beautiful shader of the aurora.

I realized that I could now create shaders based on models made in Blender—and do it with a full understanding of what’s going on. I was finally capable of building something entirely on my own.

Just in case, I’ll leave my Shadertoy profile here.

So what’s next? I dove back into Three.js and began trying to apply everything I had learned to create something new. You can find a list of those projects here.

I bought and completed all the courses by Simon Dev. By then, the shader course wasn’t anything groundbreaking for me anymore, but the math course was something I really needed. I wanted to deepen my understanding of how to apply math in practice. I also played through this game, which demonstrates how vector math works—highly recommended for anyone struggling with the concept. It really opened my eyes to things I hadn’t understood before.

I became obsessed with making sure I didn’t miss anything shared by the people who helped shape my knowledge. I watched 100% of the videos on his YouTube channel and those of other creators who were important to me in this field. And to this day, I keep learning, studying other developers’ techniques, and growing in the field of computer graphics.

Interesting Projects

I really enjoy working with particles—and I also love motion blur. I came up with an approach where each particle blurs in the direction of its movement based on its velocity. I left some empty space on the plane where the particle is drawn so the blur effect wouldn’t get cut off.

Using particles and distance-based blur effects in commercial projects.

After watching Dune, I decided to play around with sound.

I really enjoy playing with light sources.

Or even creating custom light sources using TSL.

I consider this project my most underrated one. I’m a huge fan of the Predator and Alien universes. I did borrow the plasma shader from CodePen, but honestly, that’s not the most important detail here. At the time I made this project, Three.js had just introduced a new material property called AlphaHash, which allowed me to create an awesome laser effect. It really looks great. Maybe no one notices such small details, but for me, it was an achievement to come up with that solution right as the new version of Three.js was released. That’s where my luck comes in—I had no idea how I’d implement the laser at the start of the project and thought, “Oh well, I’ll figure something out.” And luckily, the engine developers delivered exactly what I needed just in time.

One of my favorite projects, and it always brings me joy.

You may have already noticed that I don’t build full frontend solutions with lots of interfaces and traditional layout work—that just doesn’t interest me, so I don’t do it. In commercial development, I focus on solving niche problems—problems other developers won’t spend hours watching videos to figure out. I create concepts that later get integrated into projects. You might have already seen some 3D scenes or visual effects I’ve built—without even knowing it. A lot of development happens through two, three, or even four layers of hands. That’s why, sometimes, creating something for Coca-Cola is more realistic than making a simple online store for a local business.

And what have I learned from this journey?

• Never give up. Be like Naruto—better to fail 100 times than never try at all.
• I’m not a saint of a developer—I forget things just like you, I use ChatGPT, I get lazy, and sometimes, in trying to do more than I’m capable of, I give in to the temptation of borrowing code. And yes, that has sometimes ended badly for me.
• I assure you, even top developers—the ones who seem untouchably brilliant—also borrow or adapt code. I’ve reverse-engineered projects and clearly seen others use code they didn’t write, even while they rake in thousands of views and win awwwards. Meanwhile, the original authors stay invisible. That’s why I now try to focus more on creating things that are truly mine, to grow the ability to create rather than just consume. And to you, I say—do whatever helps you get better. The takeaway for me is this: share what you’ve made today, because tomorrow it might be irrelevant. And believe me, if someone really wants what you’ve built, they’ll take it anyway—and you won’t even know.
• Even if your job makes you build projects that don’t excite you, don’t assume it’s someone else’s job to teach you. You have to sit down, start learning on your own, and work toward what truly inspires you.
• Don’t be afraid to forget things—remembering something isn’t the same as learning it from scratch, especially with ChatGPT around.
• See new technologies as tools to reach your goals. Don’t fear them—use everything, including AI, as long as it helps you move forward. Making mistakes is the most normal thing that can happen to you.
• Nothing is impossible—it’s just a matter of time you personally need to spend to understand something that currently feels incomprehensible.
• When using ChatGPT, think critically and read what it outputs. Don’t blindly copy and paste code—I’ve done that, and it cost me a lot of time. If I had just thought it through, I could’ve solved it in five minutes.
• If new technologies seem absurd to you, maybe you’re starting to age—or refusing to accept change. Try to shake yourself up and think critically. If you don’t do it, someone else will—and they’ll leave you behind.
• Hard work and determination beat talent (Inigo Quilez is still out of reach for now), but the price is your time.
• In the pursuit of your own achievements, don’t forget about your family, loved ones, and friends—otherwise your 30s will fly by even faster than mine did.
• The more techniques you learn in digital art, the more you’ll want to understand math and physics—and many things you once found boring may suddenly gain new meaning and purpose.
• Ideas that you create yourself may become more valuable to you than everything you’ve ever studied.
• Programming books are often so huge that you don’t even want to buy them—but you don’t have to read them cover to cover. Learn to filter information. Don’t worry about skipping something—if you miss it, GPT can explain it later. So feel free to skip the chapters you don’t need right now or won’t retain anyway.
• In the past, it was important to know what a certain technology could do and how to use it by memory or with references. Today, it’s enough to simply know what’s possible—documentation and ChatGPT can help you figure out the rest. Don’t memorize things that will be irrelevant or replaced by new tech in a few days.
• Start gradually learning TSL—the node-based system will make it easier to create materials designed by artists in Blender. (Year 2025)
• Don’t be afraid to dig into the core to read or even modify something. The people who build the tools you use are just people too, and they write readable code. Take Three.js, for example—when you dive into the material declarations, the hierarchy becomes much clearer, something that wasn’t obvious to me when I first started learning Three.js. Or with TSL—even though the documentation is still weak, looking at function declarations often reveals helpful comments that make it easier to understand how to use different features.

To be honest, I didn’t really want to write about myself—but Manoela pushed me, so I decided to help. And you know, helping people often comes back around as luck 🍀—and that always comes in handy later!

Alright, I won’t bore you any longer—just take a look at my cat ♥️