"It is pleasant to work on something that people draw benefit from. It is especially pleasant to work on something lasting. And I enjoy the looking-glass aspect of our industry, where running a mildly profitable small business makes me a crazy maverick not afraid to break all the rules." Pinboard is – obviously – one of my favourite products. And yes, I love the tone of Maciej's "brand" that he's built. But I also love how straightforward he is about describing the business and process of making something that Just Works and doesn't have ideas beyond being solid and dependable.

"You are in a library that may not exist. You are having a terrible time." And so forth.

Chunky has replaced Comicflow as CBR/CBZ reader of choice. It's really nicely made.

Fog usage for Elastic Beanstalk

"Many people hack together shell scripts quickly to do simple tasks, but these soon take on a life of their own. Unfortunately shell scripts are full of subtle effects which result in scripts failing in unusual ways. It’s possible to write scripts which minimise these problems. In this article, I explain several techniques for writing robust bash scripts." This looks really useful.

"…the general consensus was that some kind of concierge experience combined with a lot of physical interfaces roughly like we operate with today was what people wanted. But the general fear was that we’d end up with a bunch of dashboards and silo’d apps in perpetuity and ad infinitum." Tom's notes on his FOO session on connected objects.

"Over time, working at the Branch Library, I came to think of all books as just misprinted editions of Moby-Dick. Carol told me she felt the same way." I enjoyed this.

What it says on the tin.

Useful, although "make an AMI from your app" isn't much use if you need to, you know, redeploy…

"This site is based on the first section from Steve Reich’s 1967 piece Piano Phase. Two pianists repeat the same twelve note sequence, but one gradually speeds up. Here, the musical patterns are visualized by drawing two lines, one following each pianist." Lovely.