Work

Projects

Three things I built, then the four live sites. Each build has a case study: what it was built to, what the AI got wrong, and how I caught it.

In active development · TypeScript, React, Three.js

The Economic Report Influence Graph

Every important number in public life — inflation, a disability payment, how much your city gets for road repair — is calculated from some other number, which was calculated from another, back to a handful of foundational statistical releases. Almost nobody can see that structure, including the people who depend on it.

This draws it. Each sphere is a real published report, each line a documented dependency between two of them, and a report’s size is how much everything else rests on it. It runs in a browser, in 3D, with no backend.

The graph application: a dark canvas holding several dense, differently coloured clusters of spheres joined by fine lines, with a filter panel down the left side and layout controls down the right. — The application itself, filtered to national-tier reports. Colour groups reports by the statistical system that publishes them. The panels are filters on one side and the layout physics on the other — spacing and node size change what a viewer believes about the data, so both are controls rather than settings I picked once and hid.

The rule it runs on, a live slice of one city’s budget, and three things the AI got wrong while building it: read the case study.

Source: github.com/DriftingSplash9/Reports-Clustering

The front page itself · Three.js, Matter

The Back Quarter

The homepage of my personal site is not a page. It is a quarter section of farmland you drive around in a buggy, and every building on it is a part of the site: the farmhouse is the page about me, the medic hut is the page about my diagnosis, the church on the hill holds the family histories. Drive up to one and press Enter to step inside.

I grew up on that land. We moved north to the Peace Country when I was ten, and the farms came one after another — a bird farm at Teepee Creek, LaGlace, a pig farm, then Little Smokey with no gas, a wood furnace and a rabbit trapline. The Back Quarter is that country rebuilt from memory and handed to a visitor as the way in. A menu would have done the job. This does the job and says something while it does it.

What it was built to, three things the AI got wrong while building it, and how I caught them: read the case study.

A low-polygon farmyard in daylight, seen from beside a campfire ring: an orange roll-caged buggy with a spare wheel on the back, a white camper trailer, a sheep and a spotted dog on the grass, and beyond them a brick windmill, twin grain bins, a red gambrel barn and a line of spruce. — The 3D world, mid-afternoon: the quarter section modelled and lit, with a day and night cycle running over it.

Drive it on thomascheesman.ca, on a computer — the 3D world is what the button opens, and it doesn’t load until someone asks for it. A phone gets a still of the farm and the ordinary menu.

Live on thomascheesman.ca · Plain JavaScript, no framework

The Desk and the Drawer

The same site has a second menu, behind a button marked T’s Desktop: a photograph of the desk I work at. The objects on it are the menu: the monitor holds the table of contents, the keyboard opens site search, a toad on the desk opens an arcade, a bin of memory cards opens a slideshow, the mouse changes the cursor trail. Hover anything and it tells you what it is. The footer is the other half — a drawer that slides open as you reach the bottom, with the sitemap in it, a clock running on my time, my email stored rot13 so scrapers get nonsense, and a marble that starts a pinball table.

None of that is the interesting part. The interesting part is that ignoring it costs a visitor almost nothing.

What it was built to, three things the AI got wrong while building it, and how I caught them: read the case study.

A photograph of a home-office desk used as a website menu: a wide curved monitor running a screensaver of falling green characters signed TC 'Ventures, a lit mechanical keyboard, a mug, a small stuffed toy, a rubber duck and a stack of books, with a small on-screen pill reading View as a plain list. — The desk itself, which is a menu. Each object is a hotspot with its own card; the pill in the middle is the way out to an ordinary list of links.

Open the desk on thomascheesman.ca — the button marked T’s Desktop in the bar at the top, on a computer. The Back Quarter above is the front door of the same site.

And four live sites

Written and maintained solo, and deliberately four different designs rather than one template reused.

Bare Your Rare is a patient-led site for ultra-rare conditions, built because most people searching for one of them find almost nothing. It now carries five guides written for patients rather than clinicians — Hajdu-Cheney syndrome, Erdheim-Chester disease, Fechtner syndrome, POEMS syndrome and stiff person syndrome — each one a long read assembled from the literature and put into plain language. Read the case study.

The Grande Prairie Residential Society is a volunteer-run nonprofit providing barrier-free housing — 87 units before the Margaret Edgson Manor fire, with the rebuild under way and the final count not yet settled. I sit on the board, and the site is my donation to it: built, hosted and maintained at no cost to the society. Accessibility and plain language are first-order requirements there, not decoration. Read the case study.

thomascheesman.ca is the personal one, and the place I try things that have no business on a client site — The Back Quarter is its front door and The Desk its second menu, both above, each with its own case study. The fourth is this one, the only one of the four with no WordPress under it: hand-written, no framework, no build step. Read the case study.