This is the personal blog of Ben Houston (bio here), a 3D computer graphics software developer. I've worked on projects like Web3DSurvey, Three.js, Deadline, Krakaota, and Exocortex VFX plugins. I'm also an entrepreneur, having founded Land of Assets, Threekit, Clara.io, Exocortex, and Frantic Films Software.
The architecture behind Web3DSurvey, two Cloud Run services, a partitioned BigQuery store, and a transparent JSON cache that let me report real-world WebGL and WebGPU support for a few dollars a month.
Ben Houston • July 19, 2026
How I built real-time 3D rendering on a slow 486 with only 256 colors in VGA Mode 13h, using fixed-point math, palette quantization, matcap-style Phong lighting, and x86 assembly.
Ben Houston • July 17, 2026
React Native is an excellent development platform again. Here is what changed since AirBNB moved off of it in 2018, how its New Architecture works, and where the Expo framework fits in.
Ben Houston • July 16, 2026
Many founders believe they are running a SaaS company when they are running a consulting company with good internal tools. If your team uses the platform to deliver work for clients who never log in, you are the latter, and that changes how you should hire, price, and focus.
Ben Houston • July 15, 2026
Web 3D Survey v2 rebuilds the site on TanStack Start, adds homepage support summaries, WGSL and adapter reporting, browser capability stats, and a live /machine report.
Ben Houston • July 12, 2026
I spent ten years building fluid simulation tools for VFX: a three-day Stable Fluids prototype, sparse level sets for Scooby-Doo 2, tetrahedral and vortex solvers at Exocortex, and three pieces of my software on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Ben Houston • June 22, 2026
Why SaaS products that stretch one opinionated framework across multiple markets often become harder to use, and why scalable multi-market products separate universal toolkit primitives from market-specific frameworks.
Ben Houston • June 22, 2026
My dad bought an Apple IIe and a stack of Nibble Magazines. This was the start of my career in computer graphics.
Ben Houston • June 21, 2026
TanStack Start runs on Nitro, and Nitro's default Node output can split server code across many files. On Google Cloud Run, that file fan-out can add seconds to cold starts. Bundling the server and pre-warming Node's compile cache reduced first render time on this site.
Ben Houston • June 20, 2026
Static API keys in environment variables and files are too easy to steal. A better model is proof-of-possession, where every API call must be signed by a non-exportable private key that is available only through a constrained signing interface.
Ben Houston • June 14, 2026
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.
Ben Houston • June 10, 2026
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.
Ben Houston • May 15, 2026