Ethan Hawksley

The spacing of elements has been improved. I’ve been tweaking values until I’m happy with how the page sits. It should now be far more cohesive. On the backend, there’s been an awful lot of code cleanup to make it neater and more maintainable.

One of the biggest changes is I’ve migrated to the IBM Plex Sans and IBM Plex Mono typefaces! These are much more stylistic and give the site far more personality than the previous fonts used. I’ve also redone the layout used for the first page and the blog index. I’m now using clean blocks instead of the ugly cards previously.

I’ve been redoing my website, transitioning over to cybersecurity. Page speed is better than ever, and I’ve made a new blog post! I’m happy to have such a lean site compared to the heavy react apps you see everywhere. I learned that CISA doesn’t even support post-quantum encryption surprisingly!

Fixed my sitemap so it stops reporting incorrect modifiedDates for all my pages. Updated to the latest version of Astro. Improved the performance and accessibility of all my pages through inlining assets such as my arrows only once, and having more accurate aria labels.

Polished up the html output quite a lot, adding some more meta tags to conform with other pages on my site

Added screenshots to the home page to make it look extra interesting

I have taken the accessibility of the site and run it through all sorts of online checkers. Every concern that was flagged I have since addressed. Additionally, there have been many SEO optimisations leading me to perform the top of search results when searching my name! Finally, I performed several touch ups around the site to make it more intuitive and idiomatic to interact with, boosting performance with preloading.

The browser port has been finished now, the game is compiled to WASM and run in the browser. It can be played on any modern browser, and comes with a royalty free NES game built with the emulator too for testing purposes. The emulator is done!

And now the emulator supports controller, meaning its fully playable!

It’s taken a lot of effort but I finally have the graphics fully functional! It can play the intro to super mario 1 perfectly :D

Been working super hard on the PPU, been implementing cycles, which has caused me to need to rethink a lot of my architecture :p
It’s a really fun project despite the challenging scope

I’ve been optimising all over the place :p the blog now uses Inter and JetBrainsMono without compromise as a result of the performance budget I’ve freed up. Now featuring read time indicators, better accessibility, and much nicer spacing!

The blog side of my site is now all completed! It took quite a while and some headaches but now my site automatically indexes and displays markdown posts in the same style that the rest of my site is using. The developer experience of working with Astro really has been phenomenal so far, and I’m really pleased with the final result! I’m glad I’ve managed to make a site that is evidently reflective of myself and my style instead of the default react/nextjs website you see people vibecoding up in half an hour 😁

Worked on overhauling the site from scratch! I had an old personal website but I wanted to modernise it. I’ve switched over from basic HTML to Astro, as that means I can hopefully start implementing a blog soon!

The emulator now has graphic support!!!
Here is the character data for Super Mario 1 as an example

Done a whole lot of finishing touches, and the CPU of the NES is now fully emulated!! Onto the Picture Processing Unit :D

Added loads more opcodes to the emulator, now supporting operations like incrementing and binary shifts / rotates.
Also migrating out repeated code into functions to improve readability!

Initialised the project, started implementing lots of opcodes! Got functioning loading, writing, branching, and even a stack :p Discovered a set of test roms that i can run online, and I’m making sure they all pass.

I’m working on my first project! This is so exciting. I can’t wait to share more updates as I build.