Personal portfolio of Raman Pandey (Alpharceus), graduate research assistant at the Center for High Technology Materials, University of New Mexico, working on systems-level engineering for photonic quantum computing.
Deployed via IONOS Deploy Now to ramanpandey.com.
The home page is the Orion constellation, drawn from real sky positions and colours. Each star is one page:
| Star | Page | Pillar |
|---|---|---|
| Betelgeuse | Terminal | Computing |
| Bellatrix | projects.html |
Engineering breadth |
| Alnilam | papers.html |
Physics |
| Mintaka | skills.html |
Photonics |
| Alnitak | blogs.html |
Philosophy & scicomm |
| Saiph | /now/ |
Systems engineering |
| Rigel | rigel.html |
Quantum information |
Clicking a star flies into that star's real system: its companions on their published orbits, then a close-up of the primary spinning down. On-screen notes cover temperature, size, mass, orbits, and flag anything uncertain or illustrative. The page's own intro then picks up from the same colour:
- Projects: a microprocessor board boots up, with one routed module per project.
- Papers: Alnilam collapses into a black hole and evaporates into a new particle field.
- Skills: a physically correct, programmable MZI mesh routes a laser to each skill group.
- Blog: the book opens.
- Now: 650 years of Saiph's starlight arrive and resolve into the live clock.
- Rigel: a quantum circuit builder with one Bloch sphere per qubit.
Every intro is skippable (click, Esc or Space), plays once per session, and is disabled under prefers-reduced-motion. Page content is static HTML, so crawlers and screen readers see everything.
- Blog posts are Markdown in
/articles/.npm run build(build/build.js) renders them to static HTML, generates the project cards inprojects.htmlfromassets/projects.json, and regeneratessitemap.xml. The build also runs in CI before deploy. - Shared code:
js/transition.js: the star-to-page handoff.js/star-dive.js: the per-star system data and dive renderer.js/site.js: mobile navigation behaviour.css/site.css: shared tokens and the site bar.
- Papers data:
assets/papers.jsonholds journal papers only and stays[]until there is one. The schema, for future reference:{ "title": "", "authors": "", "abstract": "", "journal": "", "year": 2026, "doi": "" } - Deploy workflow:
.github/workflows/deploy-to-ionos.yamlis managed by IONOS, so never edit it. Custom build steps go inAlpharceus.github.io-build.yaml. - Local preview:
npm install, thennpm run build, then serve the repo root with any static server, e.g.python -m http.server.