Origin Story

Before VectorRen was even a spark, there was SharpVectorGraphics — a project I built with a ragtag crew of "friends" I only knew from the early web, back before Zoom calls, before Twitter, before anyone felt obligated to brand themselves as a "developer advocate." We were just a bunch of people scattered across time zones, hacking on SVG because it felt like the right kind of weird.

Around the same time, I helped Kurt Cagle write Programming SVG — officially credited as the technical editor, which in 2002 meant "the person who keeps the code honest and the examples from catching fire." It was one of the first real books on SVG, published back when writing about web standards felt like mapping an uncharted coastline with a flashlight and a notebook.

And here's the funny part: it's still in print. Still on Amazon. Still quietly doing its job two decades later. Some things really are timeless — vectors, good engineering, and the kind of books written before marketing departments learned how to ruin them.

This was when the web was still figuring out what it wanted to be. Plugin wars, half‑baked standards, browsers that treated SVG like an elective they had no intention of attending. You'd file a bug and the response was basically, "Have you tried not using SVG?" It was chaos, but it was our chaos, and we pushed forward because we saw something in vectors the rest of the world hadn't caught up to yet.

SharpVectorGraphics wasn't glamorous. It wasn't backed by a foundation or a startup. It was stubbornness, curiosity, and the kind of optimism you only have before you've been burned by enough standards committees. But it worked — not perfectly, not universally, but well enough to prove that SVG had a future if the world ever caught up.

And then the world did what it always does: it got distracted.

Canvas arrived and everyone treated it like the second coming. Flash imploded in slow motion. WebGL showed up with a gym membership and a protein shake. SVG got pushed into the corner like the quiet kid who reads too much. It became "that thing you use for icons," which is like buying a grand piano to use as a coaster.

SharpVectorGraphics kept going for a while, but the momentum wasn't there. The industry had decided vector graphics were a niche, not a frontier. So I moved on too — not because I stopped believing in SVG, but because sometimes the timing just isn't right.

Years passed. Browsers matured. JavaScript engines got fast enough to embarrass entire server rooms from the early 2000s. Hardware acceleration became standard. And quietly — almost sheepishly — SVG got good. Not "usable." Not "fine, I guess." Actually good.

Filters became powerful. Transforms became smooth. Rendering pipelines stopped acting like they were held together with duct tape. The tooling caught up. The ecosystem grew up. The future I saw back then finally arrived — it just showed up fashionably late.

Somewhere in that stretch, I started using a line in my talks that summed up the whole journey: "I'm not old, I'm deprecated." It always gets a laugh because it's true in that way only tech humor can be — the kind of truth you earn after decades of watching the industry reinvent the same ideas with new logos.

I use it in my Human API presentation — the one about refactoring your career. Because that's what this whole arc has been: not aging out, not fading away, but evolving. Letting go of the parts that no longer serve you, keeping the parts that still spark joy, and rewriting the rest with cleaner abstractions and fewer side effects.

VectorRen didn't start as a comeback tour. It started the way the best projects do: with curiosity and a little mischief.

"What if I built an Asteroids‑style game in pure SVG?"
"What if I did it the way I used to — small, clean, no dependencies?"
"What if I let a Coding Assistant riff with me and see where it goes?"

Suddenly I was back in that familiar space: tinkering, experimenting, shaping something elegant out of nothing but lines and motion. Except this time, the tools are better, the browser is stronger, and I'm not coding alone — I'm collaborating with an assistant that can match my intent without getting in the way.

VectorRen is the renaissance I always hoped would come. Not just for vector graphics — for the joy of building.

VectorRen isn't a sequel to SharpVectorGraphics. It's a continuation of the same belief:

Simple, well‑crafted, open‑source software still has a place in the world.

It's a reminder that:

• you don't need a framework to make something beautiful
• you don't need a build system to make something fast
• you don't need a giant engine to make something fun
• and you don't need permission to start building again

It's also a chance to show how modern development works when you combine:

• human intent
• clear specs
• clean architecture
• and a Coding Assistant that amplifies your craft

VectorRen is me picking up the thread I dropped years ago — not because I have something to prove, but because I finally have the tools, the time, and the spark to do it right.

So here we are.

A new project.
A new era.
The same love for vectors.
The same belief in simplicity.
The same stubborn optimism that the web can still surprise us.

VectorRen isn't just a collection of games.
It's a return to form — a reminder that the things we build for fun often end up being the things that matter most.

This is where the story picks back up.
Let's see where it goes.

Let's see where it goes. After all these years, the best part is building alongside others. Don Demcsak