Deckhand (slide engine)

Overview

Deckhand turns the bespoke slide engine I built for the AI × Design 2026 talk into a reusable, web-based presentation system — so future decks are new content + a new theme, not a new codebase. The engine was extracted clean-room (content-free) from the talk's repo into its own project.

What the engine does

• Slide progression — keyboard, clicker, touch/swipe, fade transitions
• Deep-linkable slides, speaker notes (inline overlay + pop-out presenter window), overview mode
• A rich, typed modal content model (~15 block kinds: terminal, chat, flow, pipeline, code, quote, graph, image-grid, carousel…)
• A layout system (full / split / deco / bare)
• WebGL2 background shaders (animated ASCII + CRT phosphor)
• Markdown as the canonical content format for slides and notes

The goal: dynamic themes

The original green-phosphor “matrix” look is just one theme. The core deliverable is a theme contract — tokens for colour, typography and spacing, pluggable background renderers, optional effect layers, per-block styling — versatile enough to generate a brand-new look for each project.

Principles

Accessible by design (per-theme contrast + reduced-motion), keep it simple but not simplistic, users own their content.

TODO (Milly): add the live demo URL once Deckhand is deployed (so the screenshot generates), or drop in a screenshot.