I left Apple to build. Custom rendering engines for mobile ยท iOS apps ยท Metal & C ยท London
Joined September 2017
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59 Photos and videos
May 22
I recently had a few discussions where mobile GPU architecture (TBDR) came up, so here are some notes.
the gist is:
TBDR saves bandwidth by breaking a frame into small tiles, processing each tile mostly independently and on-chip, then writing the final pixels out once.
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Mar 31
a data visualisation experiment i spun up today: hear arrivals in the tfl network as generative sounds
lots to learn when it comes to creating cohesive melodies out of randomness, but very fun to build!
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Feb 25
Fully agentic shader editing on @XorDev 's fragcoord.xyz
Claude Code reads, edits, verifies errors, and screenshots the canvas on its own.
Wired it up as a skill CLI this morning. Pretty fun!
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Feb 24
was vaguely curious to recreate the water style from Paul's concept art in a shader, but first I thought "why not throw this to a model first". well.
left: sonnet 4.6, right: gemini 3.1 pro (one shot)
Shoot 'em up concept art for Red Interceptor.
Image Gen 1.5 in ChatGPT.
Looks really cool! How would I have to layer the water to get it to tile? ๐ค
Depth gradient with a wave overlay is my first thought. Composite via alpha blending.
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Feb 24
and here's opus 4.6 for fun
all models can identify the techniques needed for the effect: noise, fbm, bump maps, separate colors for each element (e.g. white-ish color for waves)
but putting those together is where most fail and google has the edge
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Feb 24
links to fragcoord (go follow @XorDev )
gemini: fragcoord.xyz/s/rg94hra1
sonnet: fragcoord.xyz/s/ri4offac
opus: fragcoord.xyz/s/rs7i988f
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Feb 23
i finally sat down and did my UK capital gains tax calculations this week
ex-employer shares on a US broker, pdfs, spreadsheets, terminology i half understood. every time i opened them i'd just close the tab
so i just described the whole mess to an agent
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Feb 23
at the end of this i had a clean list of every buy/sell event in GBP in chronological order, ready to run through cgtcalc
first time i'd actually seen my full position clearly
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Feb 23
with that i could see exactly how much i could sell without going over the CGT threshold this tax year
put a limit order today, just before the deadline
honestly the whole thing took an afternoon. the years of avoiding it were entirely about not wanting to parse pdfs manually
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Feb 18
this past month I leaned heavily on codex/claude as the planners/implementers for the rendering engine I'm building with a client.
here are some stats on how work scaled, compared to the previous milestone
it's eye opening
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6 Aug 2025
LatteArtist is #7 in UK, #11 in US for latte art!
Since I released it last week I haven't seen a massive uptick, still working on ASO.
But this is cool!
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6 Aug 2025
My next app, Origins, is for coffee people who, like me, try a bunch of different beans but can never remember what they actually enjoyed ๐
Coffee comes from everywhere - Ethiopia, Colombia, Kenya, Guatemala.
I'm building this as like a passport for all the coffee you've tried.
Let me know what you think of the design so far!
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17 Jul 2025
that was quick! sub 24h review and no rejections so i'm counting that as a win in my book
haven't released yet while i'm still considering a few last minute things
it's a great feeling ๐
16 Jul 2025
here we go
latteartist 1.0 submitted for review ๐ค๐ป
in other news i spent the whole day yesterday debugging an issue with the photo gallery freezing my app, then adding a last minute review request functionality after important events etc...
just sent it because if I get any review blockers I can work them out while I'm preparing the rest of the features I've planned
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16 Jul 2025
here we go
latteartist 1.0 submitted for review ๐ค๐ป
in other news i spent the whole day yesterday debugging an issue with the photo gallery freezing my app, then adding a last minute review request functionality after important events etc...
just sent it because if I get any review blockers I can work them out while I'm preparing the rest of the features I've planned
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