GLSL Shaders from Scratch

Hello! My name is Simon - I am a senior graphics engineer with over 20 years of experience. You might know me from a YouTube channel with over 214,000 subscribers (as of writing this). I have a degree in computer science from the University of Toronto. I started my career in the early 2000s as a graphics programmer, working on the original Xbox and PlayStation 2 consoles. In the gaming industry, I specialized in 3D rendering and performance optimization, developed my own engines and shader tools, implemented visual effects, and configured pipelines. One of my projects—a custom shader graph system—was presented at the GDC conference in 2007, long before popular visual shader editors emerged. Later, I joined the Chrome team at Google, where I spent about seven years working on performance, infrastructure, and tools for large-scale profiling and tracking regressions. At the same time, I worked on various unusual and fascinating projects. For example, I created and maintained an MMO with millions of players and tens of thousands online simultaneously—with a server-side in C++ and a client in Adobe Shockwave. I also consulted on mobile game development for the iPhone, including rewriting the backend from PHP to Python, which reduced server costs from ~$10,000 to ~$50 per month. Now, I create technical demos and run a YouTube channel dedicated to real-time graphics, performance, and game development. I still adore all of this—and strive to share the knowledge I've accumulated.