"This is why vacations are essential. They hold up the mirror and show how much energy you’re spending simply to achieve baseline steady state in your day." Yes, that.

"It has reached gabber zero – the point at which a programming language is able to support the production of live techno."

Write the documentation for your tool to define the interface. Very nifty, and has polyglot parsers.

"a class factory and dsl for generating command line programs real quick" I like the look of this: solves lots of things I've always made clunky workarounds for.

Great set of pictures from Evo 2013; I really, really ought to go sometime.

"A lot of the stuff going on just isn’t very ambitious. ‘The thing about the advertising model is that it gets people thinking small, lean,’ wrote Alexis Madrigal in an essay about start-ups in The Atlantic last year. ‘Get four college kids in a room, fuel them with pizza, and see what thing they can crank out that their friends might like. Yay! Great! But you know what? They keep tossing out products that look pretty much like what you’d get if you took a homogenous group of young guys in any other endeavour: Cheap, fun, and about as worldchanging as creating a new variation on beer pong.’" Still thinking on this article a bit. It touches on lots of things I have issues with – the startup scene, and in particular the US startup scene, and the usefulness of what it makes; wrestling with the idea that making IS value, something I do a lot; having watched recent Bret Victor videos, what something meaningful would work like. But also: it reminds me why I've chosen some of the work I have recently, that values are something you reassess and fight for, that value isn't just curing cancer or better pill bottles, but also charm and joy and wit and provocation and art. (It's probably not another niche dating service).

"Which game is being called the Citizen Kane of games?" This is why I love Mitch Krpata.

Newspaper Club is a great product – but I'm really glad Tom's written about the technical underpinnings of the latest version of the code, because it's super impressive. They threw out InDesign and replaced it with their own renderer, written in Cocoa; they have a gorgeous, rich Javascript client that's a joy to use; and they have a development team of 2. TWO. Brilliant work, folks.

"Use PiP to show video from any webcam on your screen, nicely integrated as "Picture in Picture" which makes it ideal for live presentations, screencast recordings and in the educational sector." Or filming your hands…

"In this post, I want to pay tribute to my favorite “games” of 2012 – specific performances, instances, and events that really meant something to me. The list is admittedly idiosyncratic, subjective, and a little self-indulgent. And that’s the way it should be, I feel (um, unless you’re a journalist or something), because games, at their best, are deeply personal affairs. Games generate memories, and I want to share some of mine with you." Doug is smart.

"I think it’s valuable to have an understanding of assembly language. Assembly language is the lowest level of abstraction in computers – the point at which the code is still readable. Assembly language translates directly to the bytes that are executed by your computer’s processor. If you understand how it works, you’ve basically become a computer magician." I don't, and this looks like a lovely way to learn. Also: I think I finally get this. Nine-year-old me sure didn't.

"I wanted to compile a list of online, Web-based tools that Web engineers can use for their work in development, testing, debugging and documentation." It is a really good list (I say this mainly because the first thing on the list is RequestBin, which is the thing I always forget the name of).

"In school most people got to try drawing or playing instruments. Trying out code should sit in the same category: as a creative pursuit that you should at least try before you decide whether you like it or not. There is a huge drive now to get kids to do just that, whether it’s to give them skills required by the modern world or whether it’s about teaching creative ways of thinking. CodeClub is one of the initiatives that has the potential to not just show how much this is needed, but provides the solutions. Kids will be okay." [this is good]

"Popularity rules, and fitness for purpose is secondary. We even make up a little rationalization about this: “Our code must be easy to read for the next programmer, so we pick idioms that will be familiar.” That would make stellar sense if idioms are forever, but they aren’t. They come and go like trends in pop music, and Ruby Archeologists can accurately date a business application by examining its gemspec file." I liked this line of thought.

This is marvellous: Tog on magic and software, and what one can teach the other. The stuff about perceived time periods, and also on distraction, is particularly great. It's not just about the functionality: it's about how you present it; showmanship all the way down. (And: I like the reminder about the kinds of honesty that are important, in order that dissimulation still works0.

Excellent, thoughtful article from John Allspaw on what experience in software engineering really looks like. Valuable reading both for software engineers, and also for the people who work with them.