Christian Lawson-Perfect explains himself:
Why?
- I can never remember π past 3.14159..., and typing "digits of pi" into Google doesn't always lead you straight to a usable listing, so I wanted a place I could go to to easily get at least the first few hundred digits.
- Ever since I discovered it, I've wanted to write an implementation of an unbounded spigot algorithm for π.
- I enjoy buying novelty domain names.
- It was a fun thing to do for π day.
I'm a total sucker for this kind of thing.
Lovely work by Neal Agarwal, using a long scroll to the bottom of the sea to inform and delight.
Neal has some more fun projects at the aptly-named Neal.fun.
These word puzzles from The New York Times have been running for a while, but I've really been getting into them lately. I enjoy the simplicity of the concept, and it's just as fun to play on my phone as on my laptop.
History textbooks should be written this way.
Sébastien Matos has recreated scrollbars from the Xerox Star in 1981 through Windows 10 in 2015.
An astonishing talk by Ethan Marcotte. At first I wasn’t really sure where he was going with his examples and stories, but his call to organize and his reflection that there are signs of hope already really got me in the end. I have hope because I know there are more talented, motivated, compassionate people out there like Ethan who believe in the ideals that the web is supposed to help us all collectively work toward. There are more of us than of the cynical and broken folks who are currently in power and benefit the most from the corruption of the web.
Thank you Ethan.
Matt Plummer writing for Harvard Business Review:
Here is how to assess the critical thinking skills of each of your team members, how to help those who are struggling, and how to know when a team member has mastered one phase and is ready for the next.
I like how his breakdown echoes the scaffolding in Bloom’s Taxonomy: “ the ability to execute, synthesize, recommend, and generate.”
I imagine these development stages would also be a good framework to reflect independently on your own skills.
Rune Madsen has done a great job of making his design courses available for others to peruse and take inspiration from, which feels like living up to the original purpose of the web. The whole thing is available on github.
Gaby Piñeda delivers an amazing deep dive into designing for Arabic-speaking audiences.
I'm glad that I can still be really impressed by the creativity and professionalism someone like Stéphanie puts into her website. Thoughtful touches in the writing, the illustration style, her positioning, and just overall presentation. I especially like the details on links and button styles.
And on top of that, she shares excellent links and useful resources on a regular basis. Very inspiring.
This looks fun!
There's been a Murder in SQL City! The SQL Murder Mystery is designed to be both a self-directed lesson to learn SQL concepts and commands and a fun game for experienced SQL users to solve an intriguing crime.
*[SQL]: Structured Query Language
Howard W. French:
It may remain a little-known fact, but Africa has never lacked civilizations, nor has it ever been as cut off from world events as it has been routinely portrayed. Some remarkable new books make this case in scholarly but accessible terms, and they admirably complicate our understanding of Africa’s past and present.
There is still a lot of world out there, and a lot of history. The more I travel and read and learn, the more I realize just how ignorant and biased I am.
Khoi continues to inspire:
For years I wanted to be the kind of writer that could write more often, more quickly, more succinctly than I do. But throughout it all, I’ve been drawn back to writing the same kind of posts, which are sort of like opinion column-style essays of 500-plus words or so, and that always takes me way more time to write than I would prefer, if given the chance. Ultimately, I just learned to accept that that was the kind of writer that I am, for better or worse.
Donny gets a letter:
Your work is beautiful and your passion for our language is quite inspiring. I have never seen this sort of appreciation for Vietnamese by a Vietnamese person before. I’m glad to have found Vietnamese Typography and I’ve donated $5 via the support page. I wish you all the best, Donny.
This is how we can win back the web, one person at a time. Take some time to create something you care about and share it with the world. The world might just find you and thank you for it.
Lovely interview with Amelia Barili in 1981.
Mike Caulfield has been working on teaching web literacy, in part as an effort to address misinformation spread and impact. These preliminary results from some of his classes, and his conclusions, are compelling.
Robin Rendle's ending is the best part.
My answer: I don't know.
Jeremy Keith differentiates:
So these two kinds of work require very different attitudes. For production work, quality is key. For prototyping, making something quickly is what matters.
Everything about this is beautiful. I love the deep cuts in the letterforms, I love the weird growths on the website. And I love the simplified black and white user interfaces in the illustrations.
Lisa M. Lane:
An SLO is a Student Learning Outcome. Now, before you roll your eyes, be aware that when the History department was given the task of creating SLOs for all our courses years ago, we were given significant latitude. In our wisdom, we decided to make our SLOs skills-based rather than content-based. Instead of saying what content would be covered, what names and dates and events students had to learn, we would base our SLOs on what skills we wanted students to practice as historians.
Love this approach. Personally, I prefer to go a bit broad and overlappy at this high level, because it allows you to have a dialog about shared goals across subjects.
Manton Reece:
We do not need another social network with 1 billion users. Part of the problem is having so many users and so much power concentrated in one place. And setting out to achieve 1 billion users means it’s an ad-based platform that will inherently revisit many existing problems.
Agreed. And yet I am still bothered by the barriers of entry to alternatives, including Micro.blog. Apart from the usually-discussed technical and know-how barriers to entry (which honestly I find dubious on their own), what of social barriers? I see a lot of what faces whenever I check in on Micro.blog. How do we avoid revisiting this existing problem?
OMG I love these old postcards of the boardwalk at Coney Island.
The wood planks of the Coney Island Boardwalk were designed to accommodate two kinds of traffic: pedestrian and rolling chair. The sections with diagonal planks forming a chevron pattern were meant for foot traffic, whereas the two strips of straight planks were meant for rolling chairs.
If you ever visit New York, I really recommend the trip out to Coney Island. It's kind of a bizarre place so close to such a huge international city. I recommend the freak show, a corn dog or two, and a stroll down the boardwalk.
If it's nice out, take a nap on the pier. Don't forget sunblock.
Derek Powazek:
This PageRank thing, they told us, was an “algorithm.” And, for a time, algorithms were all the rage. We were living in the age of the algorithm. And in all my client meetings and project plans, every time we had a decision to make, someone would say, “the algorithm will do it.”
The algorithm never did it.
I'll let Dionne Warwick take this one:
Gotta get off, gonna get
Out of this merry-go-round
Gotta get off, gonna get
Need to get on where I'm bound
When did I get, where did I
Why am I lost as a lamb
When will I know, where will I
How will I learn who I am
Added this to my reading list last year, and have been digging into it again the past week. So far I'm finding the book to be interesting in terms of case studies, but short on practical advice. Does anyone have any other recommendations as I go down this road?
Lou Downe:
Without professional standards we will continue to expect those around us to be able to do more than they can, and not expect enough of ourselves.
We need to understand that most people can spot a bad service, but won’t be able to tell you why it’s bad or how to fix it. This is the same with graphic design – where most people will be able to identify a bad road sign, but won’t be able to tell you that the kerning is too tight. It isn’t fair to expect them to do this, just as it isn’t fair for us to charge for our services as designers if we can’t.
Reading through these principles made me much more interested in service design.
I'm so glad to see that the third edition of Marijn Haverbeke's excellent Eloquent JavaScript is out.
He's updated it to reflect modern JavaScript, but he wisely leaves alone topics which are subject to tumultuous change:
So it is not uncommon for the code that you find in an NPM package or that runs on a web page to have gone through multiple stages of transformation—converted from modern JavaScript to historic JavaScript, from ES module format to CommonJS, bundled, and minified. We won’t go into the details of these tools in this book, since they tend to be boring and change rapidly. Just be aware that the JavaScript code that you run is often not the code as it was written.
I hope to give this a more thorough read over the next weeks. If you haven't read the earlier editions, now's a great time to pick this up.
Amber asked for some help with checkboxes:
In conclusion to my first two months on a big project, I now know that getting confused, spending a long time studying many different files & folders, and asking other developers for help is a right of passage to becoming a better developer.
As it says on the tin, "Find the perfect spot to eat & drink in Barcelona."
Highly recommended if you're ever in Barcelona. We only got to try a couple of these places while visiting, and will definitely try more next time we're there.
Inspiring comparison of indie game development with playing in a band.
Megan Schmidt figuring out fractions with her daughter, by talking about sharing:
It’s not possible to share 10 brownies fairly with 4 friends. Can we have 5 friends?
More like this, please.
Susan Jean Robertson:
The way we build for the web right now feels problematic in so many ways. Instead of welcoming everyone from our teams with their various skills, we create layers of complexity that shut many out.
This has been bothering me too.
See also: Aging out.
Socrates didn't charge for "education" because when you are in business, the "customer starts to become right". Whereas in education, the customer is generally "not right". Marketeers are catering to what people want, educators are trying to deal with what they think people need (and this is often not at all what they want). Part of Montessori's genius was to realize early that children want to get fluent in their surrounding environs and culture, and this can be really powerful if one embeds what they need in the environs and culture.
I want to believe this, but I don't know how to escape the patriarchal implications of this line of reasoning. As soon as it's the teacher's job to know better what students need...
Nice overview from Ire Aderinokun.