February 2024
Tracy Durnell: Effective Creative Processes – Links to books, blogs, and other resources, with a lot of emphasis on writing resources
Terrance Eden: ActivityPub Server in a single PHP file (via Simon Willison)
Co/Recursive: Beautiful Code – Inside Greg Wilson’s Vision for Software Design –
Greg Wilson has been on a decades-long quest to transform how we teach and talk about software design. From getting rejections for using the term “beautiful code,” to empowering scientists through workshops on Python and Unix, Greg has pushed to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
Join us as Greg shares his failures and epiphanies along the way. You’ll hear how he revolutionized research computing by showing physicists the power of profilers. How he taught grad students the elegance of shell scripts. And how he’s crusaded to create a shared language to discuss software architecture with the nuance of true craftsmanship.
Greg’s captivating journey reveals that with perseverance and the right examples, we can elevate software design discussion to an art form. But that we’ve got a long way to go. You’ll come away enlightened and eager to level up your own understanding of software design.
Software Unscripted: Programming and Industrial Design with Greg Wilson – Richard talks with programming teacher Greg Wilson about different types of beginner programmers and how they learn most effectively, what counterintuitive aspects of programming languages they tend to find more or less difficult to learn, and about the surprising relationship between software architecture and industrial design.
The topic of text boxes
Recently, in another post on the subject of textcasting, Dave Winer made a comment about text boxes:
Every time you see a tiny little textbox that’s a sure clue they’re trying to own you, and hoping you don’t notice.
http://scripting.com/2024/02/01.html#a154043
I think this is a reach. In my opinion, the simplest reason to use a text box for text entry is that users are used to it and it is easy to implement (using Occam’s Razor here). Another explanation is that it is use of prior art, as Dave Winer has written about before (see here, here, and here). No sinister plan to “own” anyone here. Could text editors be better/have more features? Sure they could! Could writing apps cooperate with each other and have APIs? Sure they could! Should people be demanding these things? Sure…maybe….or maybe they could make those things happen…or maybe they could submit a feature request….
If the software is open source (Mastodon et al), someone could make their own changes. If the software is a service provided by a company that does not charge for the service (hmmm…Twitter, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky come to mind), it seems more difficult for users to request features and drive changes. If a group of users REALLLY wanted something and no other app seemed interested, maybe they could create their own product (thinking Kickstarter here). To me, it comes down to this: how bad do you want this?
Finally, another take on this sentence comes from Ken Smith:
Based on Ken’s comment, I take this as “any antisocial behavior” in the blank – racism, anti-Semitism, discrimination, manipulation…the list can go on and on as Ken points out. This Quora thread has some good points about someone trying to “own” someone.