The Winter Throat

About this website

  • This website was made with NextJS, and aims to be mostly statically generated which is why it's so fast (..sometimes, when I don't fuck it up).
  • It used to be a public repository but by now the Git history has so many dangerous mistakes in terms of privacy (pictures, information) that I had to decide against it.
  • The Score is a very basic personal note of 1 to 3, but some projects have higher score because they also get points for other pieces they inspired/are linked to it.
  • It is programmed in Typescript for full type safety which saves my ass
  • It uses TailwindCSS for the styling because I just love it somehow fight me
  • All data is centralized in a Notion database which is fetched, processed and cached into a reusable dataset for all pages and oh boy was it a pain
  • The icons come from FontAwesome
  • The fonts are still sadly from Google Fonts, they're currently:
    • Aleo
    • Pirata One
    • Quicksand
    • Syne Mono
  • The blogposts use Remark for processing and PrismJS for syntax highlighting (by the epic Lea Verou)
  • The images used for the short stories come from Unsplash, here are the credits for them.
  • It went through four iterations over my life
    Le Huitième Jour
    Le Huitième JourJanuary 2005 (at 15)websiteTechnology, PHP, Code

    I had a lot of websites about interests of mine but this was the first that was about me and for me. The name comes from the short story of the same name which you can find on this site. It contained at the time my short stories, the start of my blog, my drawings and such. It was in baby PHP with includes and stuff, dreadful shit.

    Unfortunately the screenshot is from the older blog-based site, but the actual website was lost in time because it was mostly images and Wayback Machine archived none of them, so nobody will ever see what it looked like.

    Les Fleurs d’Avril
    Les Fleurs d’AvrilJune 2010 (at 20)websiteTechnology, PHP, Code

    When I started to master programming and (web)design more I redid my website to reflect it and to have a more up-to-date showcase of my skills for employers. It already had the outline of all the main sections it still has now, with the webcomics and the music having joined the ranks.

    It was in teenager PHP with lots of messy shit but less repetition but I was still by not the best programmer just an okay webdesigner.

    The name again came from one of my short stories, one I’m most proud of which I had done for a contest but that didn’t end up winning.

    Autopergamene
    AutopergameneDecember 2012 (at 22)websiteTechnology, PHP, Laravel, Code

    The first version I did after I had become an actual programmer, and I did it again to showcase my updated knowledge and design skills. It was made in Laravel which is still my favorite PHP framework.

    It was the first to have really cool clean code and the concept of fetching data directly from the third party sources like the Github repositories. It was done manually with nice abstractions through SDKs and such. Sometimes I almost think this was the best stack.

    The title doesn’t come from a short story but this time from a landmark Nadja album that had really spoken to me. I actually talk about it in one of my articles about the band. Autopergamene means “self parchment”, in the album it translates as literal writing on the skin, Clive Barker style. It really spoke to me and the concept of website about myself on myself etc so it became a symbol of it and later the name of my company.

    The Winter Throat
    The Winter ThroatJanuary 2019 (at 29)websiteTechnology, Javascript, Gatsby, NextJS, React, Code

    Way later in my career as as (now proper) software engineer, I wanted to play with all the cool new Javascript framework that were coming out. Particularly I loved Static Site Generators (which was by no means a new or JS-specific concept) so I ended up picking Gatsby at the time. It allowed me to create a clean, fast and responsive website that centralized data from dozens of third party sources into a GraphQL API that all pages queried to be then rendered fully statically. It was a marvel of performance but also a pain to build and maintain especially as Gatsby got abandonned.

    So I rewrote the website in NextJS which was a pain but allowed me to simplify greatly the whole stack. And I decided to continue updating it with more cool things that aren’t just my content, to make it more my digital garden like I had originally envisioned, make it more of a website like we used to do them. Hopefully I’ll manage.

    The name comes from my second album Out Through the Winter Throat, it’s an album that touches a lot about war and cataclysm, and its main title comes from humanity on the album being kicked out through the (nuclear) winter’s throat. Not disappeared, but swallowed in it. This is likely the boldest most political version of my website, and it’s still miles away from how much I would want it to. But this image of us all gradually vanishing in our own doom stuck with me as I rewrote my website at a time where I myself felt like I was being swallowed in my own life.

The Winter Throat

About this website

Back

About this website

  • This website was made with NextJS, and aims to be mostly statically generated which is why it's so fast (..sometimes, when I don't fuck it up).
  • It used to be a public repository but by now the Git history has so many dangerous mistakes in terms of privacy (pictures, information) that I had to decide against it.
  • The Score is a very basic personal note of 1 to 3, but some projects have higher score because they also get points for other pieces they inspired/are linked to it.
  • It is programmed in Typescript for full type safety which saves my ass
  • It uses TailwindCSS for the styling because I just love it somehow fight me
  • All data is centralized in a Notion database which is fetched, processed and cached into a reusable dataset for all pages and oh boy was it a pain
  • The icons come from FontAwesome
  • The fonts are still sadly from Google Fonts, they're currently:
    • Aleo
    • Pirata One
    • Quicksand
    • Syne Mono
  • The blogposts use Remark for processing and PrismJS for syntax highlighting (by the epic Lea Verou)
  • The images used for the short stories come from Unsplash, here are the credits for them.
  • It went through four iterations over my life
    Le Huitième Jour
    Le Huitième JourJanuary 2005 (at 15)websiteTechnology, PHP, Code

    I had a lot of websites about interests of mine but this was the first that was about me and for me. The name comes from the short story of the same name which you can find on this site. It contained at the time my short stories, the start of my blog, my drawings and such. It was in baby PHP with includes and stuff, dreadful shit.

    Unfortunately the screenshot is from the older blog-based site, but the actual website was lost in time because it was mostly images and Wayback Machine archived none of them, so nobody will ever see what it looked like.

    Les Fleurs d’Avril
    Les Fleurs d’AvrilJune 2010 (at 20)websiteTechnology, PHP, Code

    When I started to master programming and (web)design more I redid my website to reflect it and to have a more up-to-date showcase of my skills for employers. It already had the outline of all the main sections it still has now, with the webcomics and the music having joined the ranks.

    It was in teenager PHP with lots of messy shit but less repetition but I was still by not the best programmer just an okay webdesigner.

    The name again came from one of my short stories, one I’m most proud of which I had done for a contest but that didn’t end up winning.

    Autopergamene
    AutopergameneDecember 2012 (at 22)websiteTechnology, PHP, Laravel, Code

    The first version I did after I had become an actual programmer, and I did it again to showcase my updated knowledge and design skills. It was made in Laravel which is still my favorite PHP framework.

    It was the first to have really cool clean code and the concept of fetching data directly from the third party sources like the Github repositories. It was done manually with nice abstractions through SDKs and such. Sometimes I almost think this was the best stack.

    The title doesn’t come from a short story but this time from a landmark Nadja album that had really spoken to me. I actually talk about it in one of my articles about the band. Autopergamene means “self parchment”, in the album it translates as literal writing on the skin, Clive Barker style. It really spoke to me and the concept of website about myself on myself etc so it became a symbol of it and later the name of my company.

    The Winter Throat
    The Winter ThroatJanuary 2019 (at 29)websiteTechnology, Javascript, Gatsby, NextJS, React, Code

    Way later in my career as as (now proper) software engineer, I wanted to play with all the cool new Javascript framework that were coming out. Particularly I loved Static Site Generators (which was by no means a new or JS-specific concept) so I ended up picking Gatsby at the time. It allowed me to create a clean, fast and responsive website that centralized data from dozens of third party sources into a GraphQL API that all pages queried to be then rendered fully statically. It was a marvel of performance but also a pain to build and maintain especially as Gatsby got abandonned.

    So I rewrote the website in NextJS which was a pain but allowed me to simplify greatly the whole stack. And I decided to continue updating it with more cool things that aren’t just my content, to make it more my digital garden like I had originally envisioned, make it more of a website like we used to do them. Hopefully I’ll manage.

    The name comes from my second album Out Through the Winter Throat, it’s an album that touches a lot about war and cataclysm, and its main title comes from humanity on the album being kicked out through the (nuclear) winter’s throat. Not disappeared, but swallowed in it. This is likely the boldest most political version of my website, and it’s still miles away from how much I would want it to. But this image of us all gradually vanishing in our own doom stuck with me as I rewrote my website at a time where I myself felt like I was being swallowed in my own life.