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.
Ben Houston's Blog
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 3
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.
One Reconciler, Many Renderers
Part 5 of the React Internals series. React's reconciler produces host operations, and renderers such as react-dom, React Native, and React Three Fiber implement those operations for different platforms.
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 Skips: How Rendering Optimization Works
Part 4 of the React Internals series. React can skip component calls, reuse finished subtrees, and avoid host mutations when props, state, context, and output prove the work is unchanged.
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.
node-prewarm: CLI for Node 25's Compile Cache
New in Node 25 is the node compile cache, which can deliver a 20% to 30% boost in server start-up time. I built `node-prewarm` to make that practical on real projects with minimal changes.
Transferable Pixel-Perfect Material Graphs for Blender & Three.js
How I built the MaterialX Fidelity Suite, then used it to drive pixel-perfect MaterialX support in both Three.js and Blender — including custom noise node implementations that finally close the gap between reference renders and open-source tools.
MaterialX Needs a Single-File Container
MaterialX assets are multiple loose files, which breaks down in online, and collaborative contexts. The community has already solved this with zip packaging. We just need to formalize it as .mtlz.
