Archive: September 6th, 2019

Enigma machine / Tom MacWright / Observable

See how an Enigma machine works …and interact with it.

Letters to be encrypted enter at the boundary, move through the wire matrix, and exit.

Getting started

I got an email recently from a young person looking to get into web development. They wanted to know what languages they should start with, whether they should a Mac or a Windows PC, and what some places to learn from.

I wrote back, saying this about languages:

For web development, start with HTML, then CSS, then JavaScript (and don’t move on to JavaScript too quickly—really get to grips with HTML and CSS first).

And this is what I said about hardware and software:

It doesn’t matter whether you use a Mac or a Windows PC, as long as you’ve got an internet connection, some web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, for example) and a text editor. There are some very good free text editors available for Mac and PC:

Visual Studio Code

Atom

For resources, I had a trawl through links I’ve tagged with “learning” and “html” and sent along some links to free online tutorials:

After sending that email, I figured that this list might be useful to anyone else looking to start out in web development. If you know of anyone in that situation, I hope this list might help.

Recursive | Recursive

Play around with this variable font available soon from Google Fonts in monospaced and sans-serif versions.

Offline listings

This is brilliant technique by Remy!

If you’ve got a custom offline page that lists previously-visited pages (like I do on my site), you don’t have to choose between localStorage or IndexedDB—you can read the metadata straight from the HTML of the cached pages instead!

This seems forehead-smackingly obvious in hindsight. I’m totally stealing this.

If you’re at Techfestival.co in Copenhagen, drop in to this shipping container where I’ll be demoing WorldWideWeb.cern.ch