RP
A museum of failures, or a gallery of trying ?
Origin
RP was born on April Fool's Day of 2024, while I was bedridden with fever. That same day, an unexpected on-campus offer arrived — marking a pivotal moment. What started in that fevered haze was a deeply personal project: a birthday wish to someone very close to my heart, that grew into something far larger than I had planned.
I first encountered William Butler Yeats' introduction to Gitanjali in eighth grade. I waded through waterlogged streets of quintessential North Calcutta to borrow a copy from my local library. Yeats wrote:
"I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the tops of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me."
His reflection on the untranslatable emotions in Tagore's poems mirrored my own feelings — a world I had dreamed of for years. RP became my attempt to build that world. I document this journey.
Architecture
Built as a monorepo with Turborepo, targeting both web (Next.js) and desktop (Tauri) from a shared codebase. The architecture explored how far a single TypeScript codebase could stretch across platforms while maintaining native feel.
Tauri's Rust backend handled desktop-native file system access and performance-critical operations. The web shell ran on Next.js with TailwindCSS for styling, Three.js for a 3D GitHub Globe, GSAP for animations, and Howler for audio playback.
A full in-browser terminal was built with XTerm.js and WebSockets, backed by Express and node-pty as the terminal emulator — giving users a real shell session inside the web app. RP can also be downloaded as a cross-platform desktop application from GitHub Releases.
Creative Engineering
The project included a slime mold evolution simulation inspired by the research paper "Characteristics of Pattern Formation and Evolution in Approximations of Physarum Transport Networks" — modeled using P5.js canvas rendering. The simulation visualizes emergent network patterns from simple biological rules.
A word cloud used as a backdrop was generated from a WhatsApp chat analysis tool I built called chatinfo — a Python script that parsed and visualized conversational patterns between two people.
The UI layered PowerGlitch for glitchy transitions, Swiper for Instagram-style carousels, a custom Tiptap rich text editor, and components from both MUI and Shadcn. Arts were generated using GPT-4o Image Generation in Studio Ghibli style.
The Journey
This project developed across places — the local trains of Eastern Railways, the quiet expanses of Jadavpur University and the Open Air Theatre, the riverbanks of Ganga and Padma, and the trails of the old silk route. Each location left its mark as I developed newer features — much like my own journey through love, wait, hope, despair, anger, and apathy.
তুমি ক্রোধের আগুনে জমে থাকা ব্যাথা, আমার শেষ বিকেলের ধোঁকা — কোন রোদেলা দুপুরে তোমায় ফিরে পাবো বলে অর্থহীন খোঁজা
This repository is more than just code. It is a memoir of emotions and experiences, etched in the places I have been and the ones I hope to visit. Not paintings — but a platform, built to hold what words alone couldn't.
জানি বেঁকে গেছে নদী, তবুও তো নিরবধি, মিছিলে-মিছিলে আমি খুঁজেছি তোমায়।