Building BLOKS: A Few Weeks of Controlled Obsession

June 3, 2026 · Misc

Over the past few weeks, I've spent an unreasonable amount of time building, experimenting, breaking things, fixing them, and occasionally wondering whether sleep is really all that necessary.

The result is the latest evolution of BLOKS—a creative technology platform that's slowly transforming from a long-term idea into something tangible.

The main hub at bloks.net has become the home for tutorials, articles, experiments, and resources centered around creative coding, graphics programming, real-time visuals, and interactive technologies. It's the kind of website I've wanted to build for years—a place where art, programming, engineering, and education can comfortably coexist.

One of the biggest additions has been BLOKS Labs, my experimental playground. It's where new ideas begin life, whether that's a shader concept, a visualization technique, or a new tool that may eventually become part of the larger BLOKS ecosystem. Some experiments work immediately. Most don't. That's exactly why the lab exists.

I've also been laying the foundation for the BLOKS Shop, which will eventually offer plugins, themes, realtime visuals, and other creative tools. It's still early, but it's exciting to finally see the framework taking shape.

Much of my development time lately has revolved around GLSL shaders and the incredible Synesthesia visual performance environment. Shaders have become one of my favorite creative mediums because they combine mathematics, programming, animation, and digital art into something that comes alive in real time. Every shader starts as a few lines of code and ends up becoming its own little universe.

That work has expanded into an entire collection of BLOKS tools, including Shader Player, Shader Studio, Shader Builder, and LAVA, my WordPress plugin for embedding realtime animated visuals directly into websites. Rather than showing screenshots of graphics, I can now embed live, interactive examples directly inside tutorials and articles—a much better way to teach visual programming.

Behind the scenes, I've also been redesigning much of the BLOKS web platform itself. Over the past few weeks I've migrated my development workflow to BoCE (BLOKS Code Editor), which gives me a cleaner, faster way to build pages and reusable components without relying on heavy page builders. Combined with my growing collection of custom WordPress themes, it's making the entire platform easier to maintain and far more enjoyable to develop.

Perhaps the most satisfying part of all of this is watching so many independent projects begin to connect together.

For years, many of these ideas existed only as notes, sketches, unfinished prototypes, or forgotten folders scattered across old hard drives. Now they're gradually becoming part of a single ecosystem, with each project supporting the others.

There's still plenty left to build.

More tools.
More tutorials.
More experiments.
And undoubtedly a few more ideas that will keep me awake far later than they should.

But that's part of the fun.

After all, BLOKS isn't simply a collection of websites and software projects.

It's another chapter in a lifelong fascination with building things, understanding how they work, and discovering what happens when creativity and technology meet.

— RJ Shelton