David Cain on using paper dictionaries — this resonates with me a lot, even though by profession I build web tools; I think this may be part of why, in my personal projects, I tend to prefer making discrete, downloadable objects like PDFs and EPUBs
Zeynep Tufekci on the new Covid strain — astute as always, and yikes (though my feel for plot points thanks to my reading of apocalyptic novels had me expecting a twist like this)
Robin Sloan on newsletters having seasons — I love this idea and plan to swipe it for my own newsletter, and also see what other projects it might work for (boundaries are good, and I miss publishing a magazine where the issues provided those constraints)
Ethan Marcotte on design systems again — reducing the disconnect between design and code as much as possible sure seems ideal (which makes me think mainly of expanding browser dev tools to include design, though that’s still not a perfect fit)
Joel Hooks on blogs and digital gardens — this makes me want to finish my revamp of Slash so I can more easily add an actual digital garden to this site (and at some point I’ll write about that revamp since I don’t think I’ve gone into any detail on it)
Amy Hoy on how blogs broke the web — it’s not quite as bad as the headline sounds, but still some good food for thought (you could say this is another way of looking at stock vs. flow)
As schoolwork starts to wind down, I’m finally starting to make progress on the creativity tools and HCI explorations I talked about back in September. This week I’ve also realized that graphical tools for art and design are what I want to focus most on. (I do still intend to explore textual interfaces, but they’re on the backburner for now.)
In the spirit of working in public, then, Cirque is a small WIP web app I’m building for making patterns via circle packing:
This is very much a rough initial MVP. You can tweak some settings, generate new patterns using a simple circle-packing algorithm, and export SVG (with the turbulence/displacement filters enabled by default), but that’s it. Some of the features I’m planning to build next:
Replace the settings text box with, you know, good UI (I’m also excited to explore color picker design here)
Add the ability to manually place both circles and anticircles (so artists are able to create intentional negative space)
Add a way to programmatically set the circle colors (probably via something like shaders, so you could say all circles smaller than a certain size get one color and the rest get another, or circle color is dependent on position or something else)
I’ve also thought about moving the circle packing code from JavaScript to Rust, to be able to play around with WebAssembly, but it seems overkill, at least at this point. (Instead I think I’ll plan to Rust and WebAssembly on the graphical type design tool I want to build.)
Chris Coyier on simple and boring web work — same kind of thing, and the minimalist in me eats this stuff up (though I think certain types of apps do warrant using the more complicated frameworks)
Bryan Braun (again) on web components — the past few years I’ve avoided frontend dev (I’m allergic to unnecessary stack complexity), but this post gives me hope
