Post

🫠 automerge.org The new Automerge website is live!! The biggest (smallest) surprise? How fun it was to build the demo! Automerge is so robust, it withstood all our weird ideas — like using physics-driven particles to literally push changes between docs — and it just worked. Perfectly. Every time.

waa really really beautiful, congrats. that particle animation is so crazy! really cool to have the text selected to see how it morphs from the animation to html.

Hahah I was THIS CLOSE to just doing it all on the GPU. Not many good, performant ways to figure out "where on screen is this one character of DOM text?" But in the end, using a monospace font and some carefully-fudged calculations did the trick 🍰

The reason I didn't take this approach is that any time the number of tasks changes, I need to recompute all the positions particles will have *when they arrive*, which is in the future, which requires doing a lot of speculative positioning. Doing that inside the DOM was like 100x slower.