winchestro · the technical web

An internet that works for science and industry.

A synthesizer running in your browser — GPU-baked voices, real-time DSP, instrument-grade knobs, and the audio signal drawn live on every cable.

▶ press play in the panel, then turn rate or depth — watch the sound reshape.

Dense-data rendering

The quadtree the DOM can't draw.

A hierarchical level-of-detail engine streaming real satellite tiles onto a globe: a Web-Mercator quadtree with screen-space-error LOD, bounded memory, and camera-relative precision that holds from orbit down to the street. The same engine renders a fully procedural 3D planet from generated geometry — raster tiles or fBm terrain, one quadtree. Fly between worlds in a to-scale solar system; Earth, Mars and the Moon are each a real, browsable map, sun-lit with the correct phase. The kind of dense, streamed, view-dependent rendering the standard web stack chokes on — and it shipped in production for a startup.

WebGL · C/WASM · quadtree LOD · streamed satellite tiles · multi-body solar system · shipped commercially

drag to orbit · wheel to zoom · ← → between planets, ↑ ↓ to moons · zoom into Earth for streamed tiles

An IDE I built from scratch

Describe furniture in plain words. Watch it build.

This is a parametric furniture configurator — and underneath, an IDE I wrote from the ground up: a code editor rendered entirely in C and WebGL, with no DOM and no <textarea> — cursor, selection, text layout and editing all live in C. Every number is a draggable knob; a 3D preview rebuilds live. Tell the embedded assistant “a wardrobe, two doors, four shelves” and it writes the design file through a sandboxed shell over a virtual filesystem; the piece updates instantly. Or grab the dimensions yourself and drag.

The same editor edits and hot-compiles GLSL shaders with a verifier-in-the-loop fix cycle — the compiler is the oracle, the model retries until it builds. A material editor is next.

C/WASM · WebGL · text editor in C (no DOM) · inline knobs · live 3D preview · embedded LLM agent · sandboxed shell + virtual filesystem

describe a piece to the assistant · drag any number · open a shader and edit it live

Physics & kinematics

Articulated machines you can actually drive.

A data-oriented physics core in C/WASM: rigid bodies linked by joints, where each joint is just a six-axis vector of locked / limited / motorized degrees of freedom — one generic solver, no class hierarchy of “hinge” and “ball” types. Two limbs, two ways to command them, both real. Left: a joystick flies an inverse-kinematics target and the arm solves to reach it — IK is just one more position constraint in the same loop, no Jacobian, no hand-written forward pass. Right: a rail joystick drives an excavator the forward-kinematics way a real operator does — pick a joint, jog it; the motors hold the boom against gravity. Drag either scene to orbit.

C/WASM · XPBD solver · motorized joints · inverse + forward kinematics · instrument controls · real-time 3D WebGL

Instrument-grade controls

The web has no knobs.

HTML's form controls were designed for documents and checkout flows — text fields, checkboxes, one flat slider. Instruments need rotary knobs, faders, joysticks, XY pads, gauges. There are none by default; you build every one from scratch. So I did — the controls you actually operate a machine or an instrument with.

canvas · rotary knobs · joysticks · XY pads · concentric dials · mat4 controllers

Why this exists

The web was invented at CERN so people could share data. It grew up into the best commerce platform ever built — and its tooling, defaults, and entire frontend ecosystem bent toward marketing pages, dashboards, and checkout flows.

Technical work got left behind. Serious data visualization, real-time signals, instrument control panels, CAD and product configurators, simulation — the standard stack fights you at every step, and the moment you need real performance you're told to reach for native. You shouldn't have to. WebGL and C/WASM make the browser a first-class rendering target for science and industry alike; almost nobody treats it as one.

This site is built the way I think the technical web should be: real semantic HTML for everyone, with WebGL/C-WASM rendering as a performance layer on top — not the other way around.