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section 12
field notes
print - pin - steal

Field Notes

The extra-credit shelf: one-page cheat sheets you can print and pin next to your monitor, plus breakdowns of how things on this site were actually built. Dead ends included, because the dead ends are usually where the learning is.

01

Cheat Sheets (Print These)

Sheet - 1 page

Math For TAs

Dot, cross, lerp, remap, smoothstep - the whole family with what-it's-for one-liners and the formulas you keep re-deriving. The most-requested sheet in every TA Discord.

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Sheet - 1 page

VEX Quick Reference

The syntax, attribute bindings, and twenty functions that carry daily wrangle work - the pocket edition of the 950-snippet library.

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Sheet - 1 page

Texture Compression Formats

BC1 through BC7, ASTC, when sRGB goes on or off, and bytes-per-pixel - the table you need every time an import dialog asks questions.

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02

Breakdowns

Breakdown - long-form

How The Channel Packer Was Built (And Why It Encodes Its Own Pngs)

A full postmortem of this site's Texture Channel Packer: the premultiplied-alpha trap that breaks most web-based packers, why the fix was writing a PNG encoder from scratch in JavaScript, and what the whole detour teaches about trusting your pipeline's file formats. Reads as a case study in TA debugging - the tool is almost beside the point.

canvas internals - premultiplied alpha - png format - crc32 - the "trust but verify bytes" doctrine
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3cheat sheets
1breakdown (more coming)
A4print-friendly
0pdfs to maintain
"The best documentation is the page someone actually pins up."