Yesterday I attended my first TEDx here in Birmingham. It was an amazing collection of topics covering everything from gravitational waves through to food start-ups in Detroit. I can wholeheartedly recommend finding your nearest one and going. What follows is a big pile of links, none of which are related to TED, but which I’ve been meaning to get out for a while.
Sunspring – What happens when you train an AI on AI films to write a film? You get something amazing.
Programming Sucks – Perhaps the most astute observation of what it’s like to be a programmer I’ve ever read.
A Conversation About Fantasy User Interfaces – I love fantasy UIs, but having played with Wiis and Kinects, there’s no way you could spend an 8-hour day waving your hands around.
What UX designers can learn from 1990s Japanese video games – Some nice little takeaways from things in completely separate areas.
A guy trained a machine to “watch” Blade Runner. Then things got seriously sci-fi. – It’s like one of those early VHS pirate vids.
Emoji: how do you get from U+1F355 to :pizza? – Everything you (n)ever wanted to know about emoji.
Why I turned down $500K, Pissed off my investors, and Shut down my startup – Not wanting to do it, I can understand. But why not hand it off to someone else rather than take all the toys home?
All of Star Wars Ep. IV in one infographic – This is what you term a labour of love.
googlecreativelab/anypixel – For those crazy display ideas you’ve had.
Barba.js – I remember when page transition events were all the rage 10+ years ago. Everything goes in circles.
Real Time Users – Remember when forums used to say how many people were online? It’s back.
microlight.js – A tiny (2.2 kb) syntax highlighting library.
About HTML semantics and front-end architecture – I’ve started doing a bit of (horrible) front-end work and it’s nice to read up on the new topics out there.
Obscurity is a Valid Security Layer – The military always teaches cover over camouflage, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to do both.
Typosquatting programming language package managers – This is a terrifying thought because I know I’ve done this before. All someone needs to do it register symphony/request and you’ll have a lot of vulnerable people.
Introducing HyperDev – A node instance, with a domain, instantly. I could never use it for anything more than a codepen-esque playground, but this is amazing.
Thoughts on Algolia (vs Solr & Elasticsearch) – I love Algolia and I love Elasticsearch. The ease of the former is always a difficult compromise over the power of the latter.
Enabling HTTP/2 for Dropbox web services – A lot of real world experiences from running HTTP2 at scale.
Analysis of Coding Conventions – Some of these I agree on, others not so much. As long as people stick to one, I’m happy.
Experiences of Running an Online Game for 3 Years – A nice write-up on how to make your stack work around the world.
Functional Core Reactive Shell – It used to be procedural, then OO, but now there’s a resurgence in alternative ways of making things.
