CORE DIRECTORY // SYSTEM.USER.DIANA_ISMAIL
Labs by Diana — Experiments that ship.
Side projects that got out of hand. AI tools built for problems I kept tripping over — now live, now yours.
Labs
MODULE_001
TECHNICAL_OVERVIEW
Labs is a self-maintaining project showcase where the interface is part of the work. The site opens with a terminal boot sequence, then drops into a reactive canvas field that follows the cursor on desktop and ripples autonomously on mobile. Headlines decrypt character-by-character, view transitions glitch and reassemble, and project cards tilt and lift as the pointer moves between them. Everything runs on raw Canvas API and requestAnimationFrame — no animation libraries.
Underneath the creative layer, a nightly GitHub Actions workflow auto-syncs version numbers and timestamps for every showcased project, so the grid stays current without manual updates. Diana's Digital Twin is embedded as a floating chat widget with persistent session history. The design system — light-mode only, chartreuse accent, Space Grotesk type — was prototyped in Stitch MCP before any code was written. Built with Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS.
PROJECT_LEARNINGS_LOG
KEY_LEARNING_01
Glitch-style view transitions have a narrow timing window — too long reads as broken rendering, too short feels like a flash. Testing across 60Hz and 120Hz displays revealed that frame-rate-dependent animations need explicit duration caps, not just easing.
KEY_LEARNING_02
Canvas-based cursor animations require bounding-box culling — the Signal Field only recalculates dots within a radius around the pointer, skipping the full grid each frame, which is the difference between 60fps and dropped frames on lower-end devices.
KEY_LEARNING_03
Scoping v2 design tokens under a class selector (html.v2) while leaving v1 on :root avoided a full migration — but every v2 component now carries non-portable variable references, a tradeoff that only works because v1 is frozen.