This is a submission for the New Year, New You Portfolio Challenge Presented by Google AI

About Me

There is a certain sound an old machine makes when it is still alive but nobody expects it to be. A faint fan whine. A drive click. A cursor blinking long after the room has gone dark.

That is where I tend to live.

I collect digital fragments. Half-finished interfaces. Abandoned UI metaphors. Operating systems that feel more like shrines than products. My interests orbit outdated hardware aesthetics welded onto modern infrastructure and logic, the kind of thing that looks wrong until it suddenly feels inevitable.

I am drawn to the era of ASCII art, BBS forums, DIY Linux laptops. Hand-built Unix boxes. DIY Linuxbooks that felt closer to scrapbooks than consumer electronics. Machines that bore fingerprints, rife with personality. Machines that remembered who touched them. That embodied the person who created them.

My work is an attempt to manifest a relic. Something rooted in tactile and hand-coded history but faintly corrupted by future systems watching from a distance. Something almost alien, yet deeply familiar and recognized by us all. A machine that looks like it should not still be running, or should not be accessed, yet is.

*Void OS * is the container for that impulse. A vessel for my identity and my projects, my websites, writeups, guides, and other parts of me- exposed as fragments rather than a clean narrative. You can trace the other manifestations of those fragments and similar on my GitHub, or wander through my other digital ruins at voidrane.nekoweb.org, nolove.neocities.org, and numbpilled.neocities.org.

None of them are finished. That is intentional. My digital artifacts are in constant flux.

Portfolio

How I Built It

Void OS was built entirely inside Google AI Studio, thanks to the project specifications. No external IDEs. No hidden scaffolding. Just an extended conversation with a machine that does not sleep.

I acted as architect, not typist. Using iterative prompting with Google’s Gemini models, I pulled the system forward piece by piece, over a weeks-long dialogue, revisited time and time again until it reached the polished point we have arrived at today.

React and TypeScript formed the structural skeleton, with Tailwind CSS layered on top like insulation pulled from a junk drawer.

Rather than asking for generic components, I directed the AI toward specific artifacts. Files with weight to them. DesktopWindow.tsx. SystemStats.tsx. Island.tsx. Ensuring that my directions specified the exact aesthetic and style/format found within each part of this interface. Each directive or specification was responsible for a visual or conceptual layer in the interface. Each one meant to feel like it was bolted on after the fact.

The prompts were focused less on polish and more on texture, and overall atmosphere/feel. Chromatic aberration. Scanlines. Terminal-adjacent layouts that feel like they were hand-soldered on a kitchen table at 2 a.m. Popup windows from the days of my beloved HTML/CSS/Javascript amalgamations. I do not often utilize the more modern languages of code, mainly sticking to HTML. This project certainly pushed my boundaries on that and allowed me to see and experiment with modern frameworks like never before.

The system runs on Google Cloud Run . I chose it because of the specifications of this very challenge, and it behaves like a ghost. It does not exist until summoned. It spins up when someone reaches for it, then dissolves back into nothing when left alone. A server that only materializes when observed. Haunting, and quite effective.

The service was tagged using the gcloud CLI with dev-tutorial=devnewyear2026 to ensure correct identification within the Google Cloud ecosystem. Even ghosts need paperwork. I even added a few tags of my own, for brevity and on account of my terminal need to stand out.

What I’m Most Proud Of

The entire system was generated through natural language. Not just the surface, but the internals. Even the metadata.json configuration emerged from dialogue rather than direct editing.

This was an exercise in what I think of as vibe-coding, though I detest that exact terminolgy. Translating the emotional residue of old Linuxbooks into instructions a modern AI could execute. Teaching a model what nostalgia feels like in JSX.

Getting the UI stable while preserving the illusion of weight was the hard part. Responsive layouts tend to look clean by default. This one had to feel heavy. Like a custom-built machine from twenty years ago that somehow survived multiple technological extinctions. There was a lot of refactoring, revisioning. Rollbacks were common. Second guessing was paramount, but effective overall.

Working with Gemini felt less like issuing commands and more like negotiating with something halfway awake, and dizzyingly competent. The result is not static. It feels like a living document. A system that exists in us-west1 until someone opens it, then stares back.

Void OS is a small ghost. I am proud to have given it a place to linger.

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Note on Typography: I normally prefer lowercase text for its personal and unpolished feel. For the sake of clarity and submission readability, standard capitalization is used here.

Thank you from the depths of my darkness for your consideration, interaction, and for your perception of what I have created. I would not have had such an experience if not for this challenge, so for the opportunity to create something that I will now use moving forward, I also thank you.

Best regards.

-Splicer Scorn