Reading through the Preact source, I came across this short introduction to JSX. It’s clear and does a good job of explaining how JSX works. Recommended.
(I’ve avoided the newish JS frameworks over the past few years since things were changing a little too fast to make it worthwhile for me, but React seems to be here to stay, so I’m diving into it when I have free time. (We’re also starting to use it at work.) FWIW, I did look at Angular and Vue, but neither really appeals to me.)
One of my favorite things: driving with the windows down late at night. (Though I have young kids, so for me “late at night” is, like, nine o’clock.)
From The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James:
By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots…. The ROOTS of a man’s virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances whatever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians.
My wife was reading a book yesterday and noticed that the photo in the back was one we’d taken for Mormon Artist. Cue my sudden realization that the ten-year anniversary of the inception of the magazine came and went on June 19 without my noticing. (To be clear, if ten-year anniversaries mean anything, the release of the first issue on September 1, 2008 would be far more deserving. But we’ll just celebrate it today, comfortably sandwiched between both dates.)
I miss Mormon Artist. I made mistakes — the multiple hiatuses, optimizing interview production like mad in the second era (flaying off much of the magazine’s character in the process), ignoring the site’s dire need for a redesign, to name just a few — but I’m proud of what we did. 185 interviews, ten articles, and seventeen podcast episodes. It was hard, but it was wonderful, too, and I hope it helped people in some small way.
While grad school is keeping me from resurrecting the magazine right now, I do hope to do something more (and a little different) with Mormon Artist in a few years. I don’t know exactly what that means, though I have some ideas.
In the meantime, thank you to everyone who was involved — the artists of all kinds who let us interview them; the volunteers who helped with interviews, editing, photography, management, and more; and all the readers. God bless you all.
Just moved this blog to date-based grouping. It’s really only visible on the blog page — it shouldn’t affect the feed at all — but I think I like it more this way. (Idea shamelessly stolen from Scripting News.)
Also, the San Francisco fire department makes their ladders from wood by hand.
This history of steel from Popular Mechanics is fascinating. Highly recommended.
Rewrote my about page to be somewhat more detailed. (The self-indulgence of it makes me cringe a little, but I realized I had stripped out a lot of the humanity of my site over the years, and I’m trying to slowly seed some back in.)
On flying spiders:
Spiders have no wings, but they can take to the air nonetheless. They’ll climb to an exposed point, raise their abdomens to the sky, extrude strands of silk, and float away. This behavior is called ballooning. It might carry spiders away from predators and competitors, or toward new lands with abundant resources. But whatever the reason for it, it’s clearly an effective means of travel. Spiders have been found two-and-a-half miles up in the air, and 1,000 miles out to sea.
Steve Yegge’s post on Grab back in January is fascinating, particularly the bit on how he thinks ride-hailing networks are going to change everything. (Also the Southeast Asia parts, since I lived in Thailand as a missionary.)