Hello Mars Podcast

Hello Mars was (is???) a podcast I created with my good friend Alastair Choo where we discussed computer science, tech, and sometimes a little bit of politics. We stopped recording it because we were both quite busy. In reality, I just used it as an excuse to hang out with an old friend.

For the podcast, I built a website with Gatsby. It relied on a self-hosted instance of Strapi as the data storage. An instance that no longer exists, so the website can't be built anymore. I managed to obtain the latest build of the website, which you can check out here.

I looked into mocking the API calls to create a version that builds with some static dummy data. Unfortunately, it was built before I fell in love with Typescript, so I have to sort of reverse engineer what the API responses looked like.

Anyways, just wanted to share this, because the spinning Mars graphic is pretty cool (it's not a GIF or an animated webp). It actually loads a Mars texture and a Mars bump map provided by NASA and renders it onto a sphere with Three.js.