Name: Polyhedra, I Choose You! Letting Your Passions Take Form by Nat Alison | JSConf EU 2019
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T18:24:10.000Z
Duration: 21 min 52 s
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My name is Nat Alison and I'm going to make all of you fall in love with polyhedra.

Your first question is, what is a polyhedron.

It's a solid in three dimensions with flat faces, sharp corners or verity seize.

For example, some of you may know of the platonic solid, the cube in the tetrahedron, they have

a single type of face and are really symmetric.

So whichever way you turn them, you get the same figure.

And the relatives, the Archimedean solids, they're highly symmetric and you can rotate

And the Johnson solids which can be made of any regular polygon in whatever order.

These can range from a simple square pyramid to a triangular habesphenorotunda.

They have been used in art and architecture and games and films for centuries.

They're beautiful and symmetrical and found in nature.

They're simple, but somehow extremely alien to us.

But there's another reason that I like them.

And this isn't really it's kind of silly but not really.

Both polyhedra and Pokemon have data associated with them.

Polyhedra have symmetries, Pokemon have different sets and rarities.

There's like a butt load of each of them.

Of a lot of unique polyhedra in Pokemon to discover and that involve in different ways.

The Pokemon just gets bigger and stronger.

And sometimes can branch off and become two different Pokemon or more.

You can do this weird twisty thing, snubification.

And when I was a kid, I spent hours poring over websites looking at models in VR and

origami which was really fun but also made me kind of sad.

The thing was, lots of people love and know about Pokemon, me included.

In fact, I loved Pokemon so much that the first thing I did in Europe was catch one

But not as many people know about polyhedra and that's kind of a shame and sad.

I wanted to make the best polyhedra website that ever was.

To have my quest and understand them as my cause.

Today I'm going to share my journey to becoming a polyhedra master.

But before that, before talking about code.

Let's talk about the other ways that I tried to bring my love of polyhedra to life.

It's cool and artsy and I thought, why not make my own?

I made one cube and I got a paper cut and didn't want to do it anymore.

I thought, maybe I could 3D print them and make cool jewelry.

You know, 3D printing technology advanced a lot.

You need to upload a model and, oh, my god, it's too expensive.

The next step which followed was writing polyhedra fan fiction.

[ Laughter ] But less said about that phase, the better.

I was working as an internal tools engineer making code for engineers who make code for

engineers who make code for other people.

It felt like a Pikachu in the generator just grinding away.

So, I asked my boss, I really wanted to do frontend and I asked him, can I work on frontend

And eventually he got back to me and said well, you know, I heard you like this.

Needless to say, I was not very happy with this, so I decided to take matters into my

And what better way to do that than by making something that I already love.

When I started, I had a bunch of big brain ideas about collecting every single fact about

polyhedra in Wikipedia and putting them on my page, I wanted to do VR.

I wanted to do cool transformations, transforming them into once another.

In Pokemon, before you challenge the elite four, you have to get your first gym badge.

I narrowed it down to an updated version of the sites that hi loved as a kid where I could

I downloaded from one of my favorite websites.

JS was a little too low level and I didn't to want struggle with lighting and buffers.

But I knew D3 and the data binding model and I found a library, xFreedom, letting me express

It took me about a week of part time work to get it working.

And you can see I have a little tetrahedron.

I showed that to a few friends, but kind of left.

it was a good start, but also too simple and not really interactive and I found myself

Fast forward two years later, I got fired because I hated Jenkins.

I took a sabbatical and wrote a video game and more science fiction and started a job

I did that and we were in the process of switching out our frontend from Angular to React and

I thought that I should be a good employee and learn about it in a side project.

But I didn't want to do the basic TD app that everyone does with learning a new frontend

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Polyhedra, I Choose You! Letting Your Passions Take Form by Nat Alison | JSConf EU 2019

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