The one and only codebase I'm ever going to keep working on

A little while back, my contract ended with Treble Technologies, for whom I had been writing (parts of) a geometry processing pipeline for automated mesh simplification and mesh cleanup in C++.

This was my first real out-of-university job – apart from some freelance work, an internship and my VR startup – and I was ecstatic about the opportunity. I traveled back-and-forth from the Netherlands to Reykjavík, Iceland, and spent all day thinking about geometric problems, reading about data structures and finding novel papers.

I still remember the first week vividly of being in Iceland, in a paid-for hotel, with the entire dinner table filled with scribbles, notes on algorithms and drawings of meshes.

It felt like the greatest open-book test: being asked to solve an unsolved problem, and being allowed to use any resources available. Any book, paper, algorithm or technique I could get my hands on – within legal limits of course – could be the key towards solving the problem.

After two extensions of my contract, the company had decided to let go of 10 people out of 40, of which all independent contractors, so I never got around to fully solving the problem.

But the seed had been planted. I was introduced to the world of Computational Geometry and Computer-Aided Design (CAD) through a self-inflicted computer science curriculum speedrun. With professional C++ experience now under my belt and many code-reviews from my colleagues later, I decided to pursue my dream project again: 3D design software for architectural use cases.

I created a new repository, captioning it “The one and only codebase I’m ever going to keep working on.” So far I have always completed a project only to never look back on it, but this time I want to build something durable.

6 months, 1,483 git commits, 19 releases, and 23,824 lines of C++ later, I have a desktop 3D modeling application for macOS, that is able to import part of the geometry of an IFC file.

Last Friday night – or rather Saturday morning – at 4:41AM, after an overenthusiastic late-night programming bender, I took the following screenshot:

The moment I took this screenshot, I felt immense joy. With a view akin to X-ray vision, I could see all that is behind that single screenshot – the late nights programming away on data structures, the thinking about how to solve that one pesky problem, the writing little solutions on my phone when I’m away from my computer and the accidental rabbit hole of writing a math expression parser out of procrastination.

The caption of the repository holds up to this day, and I hope it will hold up for 10 years. I hope I won’t have lost the intellectual curiosity and child-like wonder for computers and how to apply them to 3D design.