Rachel Smith on code-first vs. product-first engineers. I read this a few weeks ago and it’s been simmering in the back of my head since then.
Dan McKinley on boring technology. I’ve also been thinking about this a lot, primarily with respect to the technologies I use to build my personal projects.
Robin Sloan on permacomputing. The long-term durability of our current technologies — or lack thereof — is also something I think about fairly often. Nice to see movement in that direction.
Ada Palmer on disability. Resonated a lot with me.
Clive Thompson on nine ways to rewild your attention. Good suggestions. I particularly like the one about randomly reading old books.
George Francis on Voronoi tessellations in generative art. Enjoyed this. Seems like a decent alternative to circle packing at least some of the time.
Elise Hein on her experience with stackless dev. The minimalist in me is pretty much always interested in this angle on web development.
WebComponents.dev on all the ways to make a web component. Lots of charts. Prism and Svelte look intriguing.
Josh Comeau on designing beautiful shadows in CSS. The techniques definitely make a difference.
Fleta Selmani’s Escheresque impossible type (via
Kottke). Love this.
Stephanie Eckles on practical uses of CSS math functions. Some great examples here.
Matt DesLauriers on pen plotter art and algorithms. I keep thinking about buying or building a plotter. Someday…
Paul Foster’s HTML tags memory test. Got 70.
Sakira Ventura’s world map of female composers. Love this.
Eric Bailey’s introduction to macOS Voice Control. Both this and Head Pointer are really quite impressive.
Google’s Well-Tempered Traveler. Love this. Baghdad in July, though — whew.
Matthew MacDonald on whether Canvas rendering might replace the DOM. I like Canvas a lot, but I hope this potential future is far from the timeline we’re living in.
Astro is an intriguing newish static site builder.
Tom MacWright on alternatives to SPAs, also in a similar vein. I need to look more into the projects he links to.
Tim Daub on how he builds JavaScript apps in 2021, which I suppose is also in a similar vein. Sensing a theme here. (And much of this resonated with me. The more minimal the build process, for example, the happier I am.)
The Science Museum Group’s Never Been Seen collection. Fun idea. I was the first Internet person to lay eyes on this dental stopper, for example.
Samo Burja on why civilization is older than we thought. Göbekli Tepe, Sumeria, and more.
vfoley on making reasonable use of computer resources. Data-oriented design has now snagged my curiosity. I think about this overall topic fairly often, though I still haven’t done anything about it. Also in this vein: Craig Mod’s essay on fast software.
Robin Sloan on having newsletters live on the web and just emailing out a link instead of the full thing. My own newsletter has been sadly dormant for the past several months, but when I revive it I plan to do this.
Josh W. Comeau on how styled-components works. This was good.
Tauri looks like an interesting lightweight alternative to Electron. Quill is the only Electron app I’m still actively using, but it’d still be nice to reduce its footprint a bit.
Ada Palmer on the Renaissance. Better than the Middle Ages? Doubtful. (Also, there was so much more plague over the centuries than I’d realized. Goodness.)
Robin Rendle on redesigning his personal site. The latter half of the post is what resonated most with me. Sometimes I feel like my site has gotten perhaps a bit too focused on smoothly delivering projects, at the cost of some character. I hope to restore some of that character over the next year.
Bartosz Ciechanowski explains internal combustion engines. His interactive diagrams are superb as always.
Donald G. McNeil, Jr., on the end of Covid. A fairly measured take, I thought. My wife and I are both fully vaccinated now, by the way, but we can’t unquarantine until the kids get their shots (mid-to-late fall is our current loose expectation on that).
Tyler Hobbs on color arrangement in generative art. I haven’t done much generative art lately (and don’t know how much I’ll end up actually doing in the future), but I like Tyler’s work and this is a good writeup.
Phil Plait on David Novick’s colored spheres optical illusion. Wow.
Shawn Wang on quality vs. consistency. Which is something I feel I could do much, much better at here on this site.
Matthias Ott about personal websites. A good thing to remember.
Jason Kottke linking to a map of the world’s lighthouses. Look at Norway!
Katherine Rundell on giraffes. Unexpectedly fascinating.
Sokyokuban, a Sokoban game set on a hyperbolic plane. Mind-bending in a great way.
Shawn Wang on preemptive pluralization when developing software. This seems like a wise practice. (Not following it has bitten me more than once.)
Michael Mulet on how he made a video game in a font. Fascinating and horrifying.
Alan Jacobs on blog gardens. I’m particularly intrigued by the idea of writing about the same topic in depth over longer periods of time as a way of organically writing what effectively amounts to a book.
Rob Weychert’s Plus Equals, a new zine about algorithmic art. The first issue was good, looking forward to future installments.
Riccardo Scalco’s Textures.js, SVG patterns for d3.js. Yum. I don’t even use d3 (at least not right now), but I’m tempted to do something with it just so I can use these.
Jason Kottke on the invention of a new pasta shape. Max sauceability as a concept will stick with me for a long time, I think.
Rytis Bieliunas on some of the darker corners of Go (the programming language). I’m writing a lot of Go at work now and this was helpful.
Austin Kleon on blogging as a forgiving medium. The idea of continually editing and refining posts after publishing them intrigues me. I fix typos if I find them, but that’s about it at the moment.
Dave Rupert on how the web is something different. Celebrating the democratic nature of the web as a space for everyone, not just professionals. I like that.
Adrian Roselli on responsive type and zooming. Over the last few years I’ve become one of those people who scale text up. Not massively — not yet — and not always, but it very much makes a difference for these aging eyes.
Donny Trương’s free online book on Vietnamese type design. Mmm.
Noah Smith on developing countries in the Global South, which tied in nicely with my recent reading of How Asia Works (and mentions the book as well). Nice to see that Malaysia’s doing better than it was when the book was written.
Radio Garden lets you browse worldwide radio stations via a map. Fun.