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Ben Houston's Blog

Portrait of Ben Houston

This is the personal blog of Ben Houston (bio here), a 3D computer graphics software developer. For a quick overview of the work I am proud of, see my portfolio. I've worked on projects like Web3DSurvey, Three.js, Deadline, Krakatoa, and Exocortex VFX plugins. I'm also an entrepreneur, having founded Land of Assets, Threekit, Clara.io, Exocortex, and Frantic Films Software.

Latest writing, page 2

  • Introducing vitest-command-line

    Testing command-line tools is deceptively hard - hanging processes, lost stderr, temp file juggling, and unreadable failures. I built vitest-command-line to make CLI testing in Vitest simple and robust.

  • React Server Components

    Part 7 of the React Internals series. React Server Components split a tree into server-only and client-interactive pieces, serialize the server result as an RSC payload, and still rely on SSR and hydration for the Client Components that reach the browser.

  • Server-Side Rendering and Hydration

    Part 6 of the React Internals series. Server-side rendering creates an initial HTML snapshot on the server; hydration lets react-dom attach event handlers and fibers to that existing DOM instead of replacing it.

  • React Spring: Motion Between Renders

    Part 8 of the React Internals series. Animating through setState re-runs React's render-commit loop every frame; react-spring instead commits a target once and writes intermediate frames straight to the DOM (and, via a separate adapter, to React Three Fiber's scene graph).

  • An Introduction to Tailwind CSS

    A practical introduction to Tailwind CSS for people who know basic CSS and want to understand utility classes, React className patterns, responsive variants, and why zero-runtime CSS fits modern React better than styled-components.

  • An Introduction to CSS

    A primer on how CSS attaches styles, resolves conflicts, sizes boxes, hides and overlays content, and lays out modern UI with flexbox and media queries.

  • React Scheduling

    Part 3 of the React Internals series. React schedules fiber work with lanes, interrupts lower-priority renders, keeps committed UI intact, and uses Suspense boundaries when a subtree cannot finish yet.

  • React Fiber Tree: The Virtual DOM

    Part 2 of the React Internals series. React stores UI work in fibers, schedules updates through queues and lanes, reconciles current and work-in-progress trees, and preserves state through keys and hook order.

  • React Prerequisites

    Part 1 of the React Internals series. A practical primer on components, elements, hosts, React's trigger, render, commit, and paint cycle, effects, the core hooks, and the immutability rules that let React skip work.