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Reminder: this site is an iterative experiment, so let's put on the janitor hat:
Apologies, the fish school janitor was attacked by a Dangerous Carpathian Bumblesnake and ran away. The only way to scare the snake is to correctly pronounce the word "snake" in Polish.
This week's summary
Honestly, this has been a pretty challenging week. I've picked up too many tasks, ended up rushing and running around like a headless chicken. But we still got the main stuff done!
Goals from the previous "retro":
- Share a usable demo of Sit., the Toy (usable ≠ stable, but the UX should be coherent, now it's just a pile of buttons)
- Publish a follow up to Here's a List of Toys (either Why make toys, why play? or My Bootleg T-shirts)
Missing embed: chirps.mp4
OK, we have a usable demo of Sit., the Toy (codename: Space Kalimba!). You can find the app here: Sit (together)
Check it out and let me what you think!
Brevity
- Most of the stuff I've written this week is longer than 500 words.
- One of the things that people liked enough to message me about it was a single quote with a one-liner introduction: Proteus - Uncertainty is the only Certainty.
Dev logs
I'll try to establish a better format for them: focused on 1, 2 smaller interesting facts and not going too much into detail. I really like Simon Willison's approach and the tiny sketches posted by people like Steve Ruiz. Let me know what you'd like to see here.
Next week
- Focus (again) on brevity and stop being afraid to post shorter, messier, meatier notes.
- (carried over) Publish a follow up to Here's a List of Toys (either Why make toys, why play? or My Bootleg T-shirts)
- (nice to have) another small experiment or toy
Favourite project
NaNoWriMo–National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is starting next week. I noticed some traffic from a forum thread talking about ADHD-friendly writing tools where someone mentioned Ensō.
Frank Sidebottom Head Tutorial – I was going to make a wearable papier-mâché Janusz mask for Halloween. I've seen a tonne of tutorials and this one's far from the best, but it's a good intro.
Favourite site(s)
Tero Parviainen–Tero's a developer and generative artist with some impressive work at the intersection of emerging tech, music and visual arts. I've learned a tonne this week just playing with his demos on CodePen.
Naive Weekly–The Quiet Old and Poetic Web newsletter.
webcurios–If popbitch, Naive Weekly, mmm.page and mrr had a baby, and that baby was a semi-regular newsletter, you'd get web curios.
Favourite piece of tech
Ruffle–a Flash player emulator written in Rust used by Internet Archive. I found it when I tried to recover some of my old Flash-based sites. Unfortunately, my SWFs are gone from the web, so I'll need to travel into a deep dark Carpathian forest to dig them out (that's where my old PC rests in state of torpor, like an antediluvian vampire).
Interesting articles
Don’t Worry, These Gangly-armed Cartoons Are Here to Protect You From Big Tech – Eye on Design – notes on Alegria, a.k.a. Corporate Memphis aesthetic, using visual language to paint big tech as harmless, cute and friendly.
A Journey Into Shaders – concise to the point where they explain the main differences between GPUs and CPUs in two GIFs.
Unlocking reactivity with Svelte and RxJS – using Rx.js in Svelte might sound like overkill, but it seems that Observables can be used almost as a drop-in replacement for stores. I will use a similar (albeit slightly simplified) approach in the upcoming group meditation/doing nothing app I'm building at the moment.
Atomic Design | Brad Frost – I had a free morning to re-read some old CSS/design system related articles and particularly enjoyed this one.
Nakatomi Space – on being a worm inside a big apple.
Things I wrote last week that people liked
Thanks for reading! See you on Monday!
P.S.
I learned that finger piano (kalimba) is a traditional Zimbabwean instrument (called mbira)!
See you next week!
