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I enjoyed this, in part as analysis of the unique role of masterclasses as opposed to lessons or crits. Also, useful to think about the _many_ ways feedback can exist, and how 'changing it up' can sometimes just be useful.
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I actually write READMEs a bit like Sam describes – onwards, never erased, first-person diary accounts of what I'm trying, where I'm typing it, and what happened. But the case for pen is a good one. (Also: I enjoy Sam's writing).
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"Our internal studies showed that gaslighting users by showing them a completely new interface once in a while and then switching back to the old one the next time they loaded a page increases user engagement, so we made sure to implement such a system based on a Medium article we found that had something to do with multi-armed bandits." Every sentence in this is Doing Work; pitch-perfect.
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Loving Mohit Bhoite's circuit sculptures. where resistors, LEDs and brass rods take on structural elements within the circuits to beautiful effect. Just gorgeous.
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"COBOL is often a source of amusement for programmers because it is seen as old, verbose, clunky, and difficult to maintain. And it’s often the case that people making the jokes have never actually written any COBOL. We plan to give them a chance: COBOL can now be used to write code for Cloudflare’s serverless platform Workers."
Not an April Fool; instead, a deep dive for newcomers to COBOL, a platform to make it on, and some movie trivia. Great blogging all around.
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Everest Pipkin's vast list of free tools and tool-likes for making games, interactive things, art, and so on. Comprehensive, worth diving into several times.
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This is nice: a collection of single-serving web tools that do one useful thing, primarily for software/web developers. Bookmarked for the next time I Need A Thing.
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I don't use Python much. But: this is a good list of tools (notably pipx, which may come in very handy). And it's a similar approach I have to my own development environments: reasonable amounts of isolation, not just defaulting to Docker.
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"Fetch’s longevity has been a continual surprise to me. Most application software has the life expectancy of a field mouse. Of the thousands of other Mac apps on the market on September 1, 1989 I can only think of four (Panorama, Word, Excel and Photoshop) that are still sold today. Fetch 1.0 was released into a world with leaded gasoline and a Berlin Wall; DVD players and Windows 95 were still in the future. The Fetch icon is a dog with a floppy disc in its mouth; at this point it might as well be a stone tablet."
I always love reading about properly long-lived tools. I remember using Fetch in the late 90s at school, I think.
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"asciinema is a free and open source solution for recording terminal sessions and sharing them on the web." Oh, nifty.
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This feels really familiar. I roughly agree with a lot of it (I miss straight up server-side MVC, the reactive pattern is a winner, React makes a lot of sense for PWAs, I feel old). But it's well written and covers some good ground.