Towards Growing Peaches Online - by Claire L. Evans
A beautiful meditation on Christopher Alexander by Claire L. Evans.
Link tags: building
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Balisage: Metaphors We Code By
My talk, Building, was about the metaphors we use to talk about the work we do on the web. So I’m interested in this analysis of the metaphors used to talk about markup:
- Data is documents, processing data is clerking
- Data is trees, processing data is forestry
- Data is buildings, processing data is construction
- Data is a place, processing data is a journey
- Data is a fluid, processing data is plumbing
- Data is a textile, processing data is weaving
- Data is music, processing data is performing
Townscaper
Now you can play a demo of Townscaper right in your browser.
There goes your productivity.
Why William Gibson Is a Literary Genius | The Walrus
On the detail and world-building in 40 years of William Gibson’s work.
Space Elevators: How a sci-fi dream could be built today
Surveying the current practical and theoretical factors for and against space elevators (including partial elevators—skyhooks!).
Why Civilization Is Older Than We Thought – Palladium
When we find remains of beavers, we assume they built beaver dams, even if we don’t immediately find remnants of such dams. The beaver dams are part of what biologists would call the animal’s extended phenotype, an unavoidable necessity of the ecological niche that the beaver occupies. When we find Homo sapiens skeletons, however, we instead imagine the people naked, feasting on berries, without shelter, and without social differentiation.
Revisiting Adaptive Design, a lost design movement (Interconnected)
This sounds like seamful design:
How to enable not users but adaptors? How can people move from using a product, to understanding how it hangs together and making their own changes? How do you design products with, metaphorically, screws not nails?
Software and Home Renovation | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog
Lessons for web development from a home renovation project:
- Greenfield Projects Are Everyone’s Favorite
- The Last Person’s Work Is Always Bewildering
- It’s All About the Trade-Offs
- It ALWAYS Takes Longer Than You Think
- Communication, Communication, Communication!
And there’s this:
You know those old homes people love because they’re unique, have lasted for decades, and have all that character? In contrast, you have these modern subdivision homes that, while shiny and new, are often bland and identical (and sometimes shoddily built).
node_modulesis like the suburbia/subdivision of modern web development: it seems nice and fancy today, and most everyone is doing it, but in 30 years everyone will hate the idea. They’ll all need to be renovated or torn down. Meanwhile, the classical stuff that’s still standing from 100 years ago lives on but nobody seems to be building houses that way anymore for some reason. Similarly, the first website ever is still viewable in all modern web browsers. But many websites built last year on last year’s bleeding edge tech already won’t work in a browser.
Mystery Flesh Pit National Park
A Cataloged Archive of Information Relating to the Now Closed Mystery Flesh Pit National Park
The difference between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript | Zell Liew
HTML lets you create the structure of a website.
CSS lets you make the website look nice.
JavaScript lets you change HTML and CSS. Because it lets you change HTML and CSS, it can do tons of things.
Building on Vimeo
Here’s the video of the opening talk I gave at New Adventures earlier this year. I think it’s pretty darn good!
Earth day at Clearleft
Isn’t this just lovely?
Cassie made a visualisation of the power we’re getting from the solar panels we installed on the roof of the Clearleft building.
I highly recommend reading her blog post about the process too. She does such a great job of explaining how she made API calls, created SVGs, and calculated animations.
Building
Here are the slides for the opening keynote I delivered at the New Adventures conference in Nottingham on Thursday. They make no sense out of context like this. You kinda had to be there (or suggest to some other conference that I should deliver this talk again—hint, hint).
Good Tech Conf | Using technology for social good
This looks like a really interesting two-day event here in Brighton in November. Like Indie Web Camp, it features one day of talks followed by one day of making.
After a day of tech talks from project teams using their skills for social good, you’ll have the chance to take part in workshops and hackathons to use your own talents for a worthy cause.
And you get to go up the i360.
Brighton Guide
Fascinating snippets of information about some of the most interesting buildings in Brighton.
(The website was made by Lydia and Tash as a project for Code First: Girls)
Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future
It is common to refer to universally popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest as “walled gardens.” But they are not gardens; they are walled industrial sites, within which users, for no financial compensation, produce data which the owners of the factories sift and then sell. Some of these factories (Twitter, Tumblr, and more recently Instagram) have transparent walls, by which I mean that you need an account to post anything but can view what has been posted on the open Web; others (Facebook, Snapchat) keep their walls mostly or wholly opaque. But they all exercise the same disciplinary control over those who create or share content on their domain.
Professor Alan Jacobs makes the case for the indie web:
We need to revivify the open Web and teach others—especially those who have never known the open Web—to learn to live extramurally: outside the walls.
What do I mean by “the open Web”? I mean the World Wide Web as created by Tim Berners-Lee and extended by later coders. The open Web is effectively a set of protocols that allows the creating, sharing, and experiencing of text, sounds, and images on any computer that is connected to the Internet and has installed on it a browser that can interpret information encoded in conformity with these protocols.
This resonated strongly with me:
To teach children how to own their own domains and make their own websites might seem a small thing. In many cases it will be a small thing. Yet it serves as a reminder that the online world does not merely exist, but is built, and built to meet the desires of certain very powerful people—but could be built differently.
Moving Slowly and Fixing Things / Paul Robert Lloyd
Although design gets conflated with creation, its the act of improving what already exists — organising a room, editing a text, refining an interface, refactoring a codebase — that I enjoy the most.
Nature takes over – ROMAIN THIERY | Photographe professionnel
Ballardian spaces.
Google Maps’s Moat
A fascinating bit of cartographic reverse engineering, looking at how Google has an incredible level of satellite-delivered building detail that then goes into solving the design problem of marking “commercial corridors” (or Areas Of Interest) on their maps.