Posts from October 2022

8AM — The people behind the fantastic iA Writer have a new product, iA Presenter, helping you make better presentation slides. Its design makes pretty slides but still very much encourages 90-minute karaoke sessions led by university professors, just like bulleted walls of text made with PowerPoint.

8AM — Imagine you’ve been in your current job for three, four, maybe five years. Your company is acquired by an erratic billionaire. And you spent a Friday printing out code you’ve written recently to have it reviewed by external engineers who have zero context of the product you’re building. You’re interviewing for the job you already have. You work at Twitter.

3PM — A website that only works when you smile. Ben Werdmuller, who built the thing, writes:

It’s a simple use of a little JavaScript, but it feels freaky - particularly as you continue to read the page, your face forced into a false grin that feels more and more of a burden as time goes on.

12PM — Like everyone else, I’ve been reading Matt Levine’s Crypto Story over at Bloomberg Business. It’s the most well-written, comprehensive, and least-biased writing on blockchains and cryptocurrencies I’ve seen.

10AM — Oh hey, a new build tool for JavaScript applications. Turbopack is build in Rust, it’s faster than Webpack, and that’s about it. Build speed always seems to be the only benchmark with build tools, even though most JavaScript projects build in good-enough time. The reason to make a new build-tool is never ease-of-use or extendability or a fundamental change in how we make websites that actually justifies a new build tool.

12PM — Feedland is a new feed reader, developed by RSS veteran Dave Winer, but it’s more than that. It’s an attempt to build a community around feeds, you can explore other people’s feed lists, see what’s popular, and like and subscribe. Ken Smith has a nice write up on Feedland.

11AM — “Wikimedia is adding features to make editing Wikipedia more fun.” When I first read the headline, I thought they were adding leaderboards, badges, and highlighting editing streaks. But these changes are thought-through, involve the community, and are tested with real users.

8PM — Get Blogging!

6PM — Just spent an hour playing slow roads, a very simple but strangely addictive racing game in the browser.

9AM — Jon Keegan downloaded almost 60,000 images taken by Perseverance, the Mars rover, and lined them up chronologically in a twelve-hour video.

4PM — Are We Past Peak Newsletter? The newsletter hype has always been a fad. Newsletters have existed before, and they will continue to exist. For a couple of years, there were enough companies with enough money to throw into marketing campaigns to make people believe emails are cool again. This time, for sure, everything’s different. You will connect with your audience, and this new square to enter words is better than the other squares you’ve used before. Just like blogs, many were started only for their writers to find out that they don’t have enough material for a periodical.

7PM — 37Signals is leaving the cloud:

But this isn’t just about cost. It’s also about what kind of internet we want to operate in the future. It strikes me as downright tragic that this decentralized wonder of the world is now largely operating on computers owned by a handful of mega corporations.

Somewhat related to my previous post.

3PM — Paul Ramsey about managing “the cloud”:

[I]t feels like my whole career has been spent watching geological layers of technology pack down on each other, layer upon layer upon layer, and that the result seems, in aggregate, completely unapproachable.

And:

I stand amazed at newly minted technologists who can start, and get productive, in this intellectual garbage tip we call a “profession”. We couldn’t have built a less enjoyable or consistent collection of tools if we had tried, and yet you persevere and exceed all of us. Hats off to all of you!

12PM

I have been a fan of both Loyle Carner and Madlib ever since. Now I want an entire album between the two.

9AM

Lots of fresh air, exercise, creating something with your hands, a girl to help — map-making in the sixties must have been a splendid vocation. 

(via The Map Room)

8AM — Jerry Seinfeld is a role model for aspiring managers:

The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That’s my way of life.

The rest of the interview is about as dull as you’d expect when a publication focussing on business and management interviews a comedian. “How effective is humor as a leadership tool?” “As a live performer, how do you improve?”

5PM — Public-transport stations worldwide play music to discourage loitering and anti-social behaviour and deter crime inside stations.

At Parliament Station in Melbourne, it might be Fleetwood Mac if you’re lucky, but it’s mindless pop music on most days. They should be playing funk. At Penn Station in New York, it’s classical music; same as at Euston Square Station and 64 other stations in London, and it had an effect on crime rates:

Initially set up in 2007, the initiative proved successful, within 18 months, robberies dropped by 33 percent, assaults on staff were down 25 percent and vandalism by 37 percent.

11AM — In the 1990s, Anton Ertl did not use Netscape, or any other modern browser of the time.

I occasionally use Lynx just to find out what that flashy website looks like in an old browser. If Lynx can render your website and I can still read its content then you built a good website. Indy websites pass this test more often than commercial websites.

6PM — It’s quite crowded up there, in low earth orbit.

1PM — Someone is running a scheme where they try to land engineering jobs by applying with other engineers’ profiles and then hiring people who impersonate those engineers in job interviews. I’ve heard stories where engineers got hired after several interviews, and someone else showed up to work — this is a different level.

9AM — Scripting News, one of the earliest weblogs, is still going. David Winer has been writing the site since 1994 and continues to do so, with several daily updates.