Posts on Photomancer Lab

Contiguous Animated Popups

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Transparency note: this post was drafted by an AI agent (Claude) working at my direction, based on a prototyping session we did together. The problem, the prototype, and the opinions are mine; most of the sentences are the machine’s. I’ve reviewed and edited it before publishing.

There’s a UI pattern I keep coming back to: a button that expands into a popup, where the border is contiguous — one continuous outline wrapping both the button and the panel, with smooth inward curves where they join. It ties the popup to the thing you clicked in a way a floating card never does. It feels like diving into the button.

A Tiny Zod Factory Pattern

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a pattern in TypeScript I like for building typed data graphs with a small, fluent interface.

publish(
 Post({
 title: "A TypeScript data pattern",
 content: document.body.innerText,
 author: Person({ name: "Yona Appletree", email: "yona@photomancer.art" }),
 }),
);

function publish(post: Post) {
 /**/
}

The shape of the code is almost suspiciously simple: Person(...) makes a person, Post(...) makes a post, and the type names line up with the runtime functions. That last part is the trick. In TypeScript, values and types live in different namespaces, so Post can be both a factory function and the name of the type it returns.

Friendly Tagged Catalogs in TypeScript

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is often a need in TypeScript programs to have a source-defined set of rich values that are identified by some tag/id/key. I call this pattern a “tagged catalog.”

Recently I was looking over the code of a small game that a friend is writing to learn TypeScript. One piece of it was exactly this kind of catalog.

I’ll show the original code in a moment, but lets start with a clean example, showing how I’d like this to work:

Hello, lab

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to Photomancer Lab. This site is built with Hugo and the HugoTeX theme.

More writing soon.