Tau Ceti IV

Fan-made map explorer for Marathon

Design & engineering · Built the 3D explorer, squad sim and soundtrack

Tau Ceti IV is a 3D surface-data explorer for the three maps in Bungie's Marathon. It's an independent fan project rather than client work, built over three days with Claude Code, and the role covered the design, the engineering and the soundtrack.

Built the explorer in three.js and React Three Fiber, drawing each map's line geometry as one set of segments with a height-graded shader.
Rebuilt the interface in Marathon's visual language, from the palette and type to the field-tag markers and HUD.
Shipped a live contacts layer where runner crews and UESC patrols walk, fight, fall and extract, driven by a unit-tested simulation core.
Added adaptive render quality that keeps weaker GPUs smooth, and a six-track soundtrack made in Suno.
Live at marathon.withseismic.com.

marathon.withseismic.com How Tau Ceti IV was built

#typescript #react #nextjs #simulation #realtime #reverseengineering

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Doug Silkstone

The gates are open: a Marathon fan project in three days

On 2 June 2026 I started an empty repository at 11:24. By 14:08 the same afternoon, it held a working 3D explorer for the maps of Bungie's Marathon. By 08:38 on 4 June it had a squad simulation, adaptive rendering, a soundtrack and a design language borrowed from the game. It's live at marathon.withseismic.com.

It's a fan project. Nobody paid for it and nobody asked for it, but it's the clearest example I have of how my work has changed. The technical side was never the hard part. The hours were, and for years they decided what got cut before I'd written a line. This time nothing got cut, so taste led the project instead of the time I had.

Read how Tau Ceti IV was built.

#typescript #react #simulation #realtime

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Doug Silkstone•Living mockups

Living mockups

Editable 3D product mockups with live screens and LED walls

Design & engineering · Built the scenes, surface mappings and inline editor

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A set of Three.js product scenes — a newspaper, a phone in hand, a reflection room and an industrial laptop — where every screen, page and LED surface is a live, editable texture rather than a flat render.
The headline and the artwork are edited inline; the change lands on the curved wall, the reflections and the phone display at once, because each surface is mapped back to one shared source.
Backgrounds are generated, the reflection and emissive shaders are hand-written, and the whole set runs in the browser at interactive frame rates.
Part of the Studies & Experiments gallery: a collection of standalone scenes that can be dragged, played and inspected.

Open the study How it was built

#typescript #react #nextjs #motion #designsystems

Doug Silkstone

From a napkin sketch to a year of full tables

In November 2024, Dinners With Friends was a revived idea and a napkin sketch. By the start of September 2026, it had welcomed more than 500 guests across 50 dinners. Dates were routinely selling out six to eight weeks ahead, and nearly all of the remaining 2026 calendar was booked.

Pamela Silkstone first ran the concept twenty years earlier: put people who have never met around one table, give them a host, and make the first conversation easier. I took the relaunch from idea to first version, first paying customers and a business with more demand than seats. Along the way I built the brand, website, booking system, internal tools, mobile app and the search programme that now brings new people in.

The search programme delivered 5,530 Google clicks in June–August 2026, up 66.1% on the previous three months, alongside 381,345 search impressions. Building and maintaining a library of local guides gave the business a way to be discovered by people looking for food, activities and places to meet across Exeter and Devon.

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dinnerswithfriends.co.uk

#typescript #react #reactnative #expo #nextjs #hono #postgres #railway #stripe #seo #ai #lifecycle #attribution #growth

Dinners With Friends homepage showing the event-discovery and booking experience — The live product joins discovery, social proof, availability and booking in one path.

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Doug Silkstone

Hogsend

Lifecycle messaging for software teams

Founder & CTO · Built the product, journey engine and cloud platform

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Hogsend lets software teams automate onboarding, customer messaging and retention in TypeScript rather than a visual workflow builder. The founder and CTO role covered the whole product: strategy, design, the journey engine, developer tools, cloud infrastructure and launch.

Built lifecycle marketing as code, with journeys reviewed in pull requests and tested before release.
Shipped the TypeScript development kit, journey engine, automated tests, Studio, command-line tools and MCP tools.
Built journeys that survive restarts, provider failures and releases while running for days or weeks.

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hogsend.com