Dense Discovery
Kai Brach hit the publish button for the 400th time last week and I wanted to take that opportunity to create an entry about his work.
I’ve sent an issue out every single week for 579 weeks, bar my usual two-week break over Christmas and New Year.
Dense Discovery is Kai’s current outlet. Every
issue is structured the way. After a thought provoking edito follows a listicle
of articles, tools, books recommendations feeds the reader with quality
content. It always ends with a funny animated gif. The goal is to try to
make sense of our increasingly noisy digital world
.
I don’t have each week the time to read through the entire issue, I try my best though to read at least the edito. I appreciate the time spent in focusing on a topic that matters. And what matters to Kai overlaps more often than not with what does to me. That’s like stopping by the café and having a proper chat with a buddy before heading to work. That feeds your brain, expands your perspectives.
The last example coming to my mind was “Chronically, get well soon”, a text that resonated with me. Sadly the article linked to is no more available, but it was written in such a way, I was nodding all along, knowing well myself the feeling of this pressure that if you don’t get well, it’s that you don’t try hard enough in a way. So it’s not only about tech, it’s about us as individuals too, what we face, how to cope, where to find solutions.
Before that, Kai was publishing the indie publication Offscreen. The entire collection sits on my shelf ’til this day. I was a paying subscriber on the magazine, I’m not for the newsletter but I know I should.
There’s definitely something that I admire in those who manage to show up consistently, produce tangible outputs that earn their living. I don’t necessarily agree all the time with what is said, but I truly appreciate the researched stories, edited interviews, inspiring reviews…
I love the Internet for this kind of telling (purposefully not using “content” here). So much more worth your time than scrolling any social media platform.
Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir
Don Eyles was 23 years old when he joined the Apollo project. In this memoir he relates that adventure.
An essential part of my story is the joy of working in the rigorous but responsive medium of computer code — and seeing it fly in space — so I am obliged to touch on the intricacies of the act itself, even to the extent of exhibiting a few lines of code.
The evoked joy seems to have stuck all his life because he adds in the epilogue:
Phyllis, like me but surely few others, wrote flight code for Apollo, and also code that is running, as I write this in 2017, aboard the International Space Station in Earth orbit.
That has been a fun read, the dealing with the technology of more than 60 years ago, the methods and workflows of the past. So agile that it would make quite a few teams of today envious I believe.
Don Eyles kind of mourns that agility towards the end of the book when relating how he experienced the darker days of Nasa and looks back to what they were able to achieve in the sixties:
“When do you want me to launch, next April?” epitomized for me an arrogantly ignorant management culture that I was sorry to see in such stark display at NASA… Despite our advances in tiny computers and video games and interconnection, I fear that we no longer have the ability to do what we did in the 1960s.
Although it’s called “An Apollo Memoir”, I came to skim through some sections, even an entire chapter for that matter, as the author rambles about his love affairs or other stuff completly unrelated to the Apollo Project. It’s ok for me to read about his music tastes and the culture of that time, but a no-go to go through his private conquests. That felt somewhat inapropriate.
BBC World Service - 13 Minutes
Described as the BBC’s space podcast, 13 Minutes brings space exploration closer to you.
I was sitting at the table of friends enjoying conversation and tasty food, when someone mentioned this podcast. That piqued my curiosity so I gave it a try shortly afterward. I quickly finished Season 1. Not only because it’s about space exploration, Hans Zimmer provides the music. That says something about the level of the series. Listening to an episode while walking to work I’d occasionally find myself matching the crescendo of the music theme with my stride, arms hitting the air passionately. Truly hooked by the music theme.
BBC produces this podcast, so you get to hear the British English I enjoy so much, which only adds to my delight.
Season 1 and 2 are my favorites. It’s all about space but it’s history and much
more. Like in season 1, one episode contains interviews of members of Project
Apollo. One of them describes how far the dedication to the project went.
Many divorced. That’s a point that made me sad and reflective. I find it sad that
when a project reaches a certain scale (We
choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not
because they are easy, but because they are hard
) it has to be at the
cost of the most precious foundations. Family in this case. We praise the
achievements but we should not forget the costs. It certainly balances out my
own perspective of the entire endeavor.
Kevin Fong presents season 1 and 2 and I liked it better than the current presenter, purely subjective though. For sure my own sense of discovery played a role too in me liking the first 24 episodes more. That does not mean though that I did not enjoy what came afterwards, I’m still excited to see new episodes popping up, the magic still works.
The Culture Map
I’ve ordered this book on the recommendation of a friend. I’m often with people from different cultures, how that affects our communication? I thought interesting to dig into that, that’s why that book caught my attention.
Cultural patterns of behavior and belief frequently impact our perceptions (what we see), cognitions (what we think), and actions (what we do).
Of course, it’s impossible to reduce one being to the country he comes from. Nevertheless, the author makes it a point, we are shaped by the place we grow up in. Its government, how stable or volatile things stay, how others function around us, it all affects to some extends the way we perceive time, hierarchy, trust, and many other key elements that impact our communication.
To make this tangible, a dozen of countries are plotted on 8 distinct scales. Each extreme of the scale supporting an opposite stand. For example, scale disagreeing: confrontational (far left) vs. avoids confrontation (far right). Each country would then be plotted in-between those two extremes.
It becomes visible that a French thrives in heated debates, what an American (as the author personally relates) might find very uncomfortable, whereas an Philipino would loose face if challenged.
It helps also to realize that some cultures are more peach and some are more coconut. If Americans are so easy in striking conversations and showing interest in strangers, that might quickly be felt as shallow. I would often use superficial as description. After The Culture Map, I will describe that as being peach culture. Soft skin until you hit the kernel. At the opposite of the scale, you’d have cultures like Russians, coconut culture. Hard skin first, if you manage to pierce it, you likely find a loyal friend. That reminded me a trip I’ve done through Russia years ago, indeed to me it felt very difficult to get any sort of conversations.
Making something visible leads to understanding. Without falling into the trap to reduce people to their country of origin, this read could help me do better in certain contexts.
It’s filled with personal experiences and other feedbacks, that makes it entertaining and certainly not dry. I needed some time though to truly enjoy it.
Bird by Bird
To write well, we have to notice:
There is ecstasy in paying attention. If you start to look around, you will start to see. When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope.
Putting effort into practicing:
To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care.
And find a way to trust ourselve:
Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance… If you don’t know which way to go, keep it simple. Listen to your broccoli. Maybe it will know what to do.
Bird by Bird is like having a conversation with a good friend. I giggled many times, because Anne Lamott has a good amount of humour when writing about writing. The references she makes (“It’s like so-and-so who once told me”), the personal experiences she relates (her discovering the novel written by her father), the painful and the joyful, she sheds light on Life with a constant twist of humor.
It’s more than just about writing, we find good principles of life in there, like unfailingly showing up, finding the good around us and putting words on that like picking our most beautiful flowers from the garden to put them in evidence on the kitchen table. She champions the idea that, yes we are all going through a terrible mess, but the important is what we make with life, we all have the choice to see the beauty and share hope.
The Power of Habit
When learning about our own behaviors meet entertainment, it hits a kind of soft spot that makes me like a book. Here it goes about our habits, what makes them habits, how to transform them, what makes a difference.
From nail bitting up to institutional habits.
The pace is dynamic and thanks to the different real life cases, it’s an entertaining journey. I felt sorry for this mum squandering money at Casino, but I felt crushed for that man who killed his wife while sleeping. He has been found not guilty by the court. These are two of the many accounts gathered in this book and all connected to how our brain relies on these three steps: 1. cue, 2. routine and 3. reward.
I got intrigued by the opening case of Eugene Pauly which leads the author to say:
The brain has this amazing ability to find happiness even when the memories of it are gone
Another fact that I liked was when stating the importance of writing down about goals and about expected challenges. It’s when the author takes hip surgery patients as example.
The patients who had written plans in their booklets had started walking almost twice as fast as the ones who had not.
It turns out that writing down goals and strategies to overcome specific challenges that can be anticipated gives better chances to succeed.
The patients plans were built around inflection points when they knew their plan–and thus the temptation to quit–would be strongest. The patients were telling themselves how they were going to make it over the hump.
Without habits our life would be unbearable. We may be thankful for this behavior to exist. Who would not wish for better habits though? This read reinforces the idea that it’s possible to transform habits and gives hints of strategies that optimize our chances to succeed in doing so.
The Making of Prince of Persia–Journals 1985-1993
I’ve never played Prince Of Persia myself but I remember a school mate having a good time during some of our labs in high school. That seemed retro back then already, that was the early 2000s.
Reading these journals, I’ve got to understand that this game has to be completed in 60 minutes, that picked my interest. I think I’ll give it a proper shot soon.
Anyways, this book is, as the title mentions, the journals of Jordan Mechner at the time when he developed and released POP to the world.
It’s raw, that feels unedited. But there’s no rules, that is a personal journal. Plus, as he explains, this book has no publisher or marketing team behind it.
Mechner states his motivation in the introduction, telling the response he got when publishing extracts of his journals to his personal website:
The old journals seem to resonate not only with game developers, but with writers, artists and creators of all stripes, some of whom weren’t born yet in 1985.
I enjoyed to read about the creative process, the struggles to deal as a team to make the game a success and how over time the whole excitement peaks to tremenduous results.
It’s hard to not be nostalgic, that seems fun being a game developer in the 80s.
I wished I could better understand how he got to translate video captures into game sprites while reading. But as it turns out, this kind information is available on his personal website. Have a shot at the ArsTechnica mini doc/interview he shares there to know more.
Unbroken Will
Leopold Engleitner is one of the many who proved himself stronger than the autoritarian nazi regime. That fascinates me, that strength, that resolve.
The author shares his own impression at the outset of this book:
What I have found so impressive is the outstanding simplicity and uprightness of Leopold Engleitner’s life; he succeeded in maintaining his personal integrity and his faith under the most adverse conditions imaginable. It is phenomenal that a huge, totalitarian system failed to break the will of such an unassuming man. Twentieth-century history would surely have been written differently if more of his contemporaries had acted as courageously as Leopold Engleitner.
Each documented interaction between Leopold and the authorities never fails to
show how respectful he remained when explaining his stand. He would never
compromise but did so with a mild temper and deep respect
:
Engleitner was perfectly happy to accept work that the Nazis found for him but refused to support Hitler. Engleitner answered: “I’m grateful for all that governmental institutions do for citizens. In fact, I don’t smoke or drink and am therefore not a burden on the national health service.” “Well, that’s very commendable,” said the man, “but you must also defend the Fatherland!” “There’s no fatherland for me to defend,” Engleitner replied, “because all men are brothers. I take God as my guide, and he knows no borders. If you want to make war, I’m not going to stop you, but I won’t join in!”
Leopold and his fellows were shown remarkable trust during there time in the camps.
The SS displayed great trust in the Bible Students. They were among the few detainees assigned to shave the SS men because they could be trusted with razors.
Such an example of integrity is precious to me, I deeply hope to be able to display the same kind of courage and will. As Leopold says in the book this kind of strength is not only a matter of personal disposition, this comes from something greater. One has to trust and fully rely on that power to successfully face opposition. Of any kind. That account is an additional proof that this is possible. Leopold lived 107 years.
CSS for JavaScript Developers
I’ve more than 800 lines of personal notes as I completed this fantastic course. Very comprehensive and so useful for an oldie like me. Heck, the table layout is something I’ve used myself:
In the old days, table layouts were used for just about everything. Nowadays, Flexbox and Grid are better solutions in most situations. We won’t be covering table layouts in this course.
Ouch… When I first learned to build websites, I had
frameset
elements in my markup, that gives you a bit of an idea what kind of old I am.
No worries though, I’ve not been stuck to that old days, in the meantime I’ve
enjoyed following the new features in CSS. But for example, Flexbox and Grid
were 2 layouts that I did not take the time to study seriously. I think
initially when I did find out that Josh would publish such a course, that was
my main incentive, to get up to date on those new additions to the CSS world.
The content of this course is split into 10 modules, each one is filled with videos, interactive explanations and exercises. At the end of each module, a workshop helps to internalize all the concepts tackled within that particular module. I plan to redo all of them now that I’ve finished the course.
I particularly appreciated the solution videos of the workshops. Josh is very good at sharing how he would do particular things, what he pays attention to, even how he would approach designers around specific challenges. All this return of experience is extremly valuable. On top of that, I just find it enjoyable to follow, he has a nice way to communicate.
If you are used to his blog posts, you might have notice how Josh gives a particular attention to the details. For example, here’s an extract of his latest post, Sneaky Header Blocker Trick:
This is a fairly subtle thing, and I suspect most readers have never even noticed it. But there’s something about it which just feels so satisfying to me. It’s one of my favourite little bits of polish on this blog.
Just feels so satisfying to me
. Yes, you can feel that he just enjoys what
he’s doing and that he wants to produce something of quality. You have to
appreciate that as it’s definitely not a given these days. That is present in
this course too, it’s comprehensive yet approachable. The content is thorough
but split in nicely sized chunks.
I leveled up my CSS skills, if you are coming from a Javascript developer perspective and you are eager to improve yours, this course will be a joy to complete. Go get it, it’s available under https://courses.joshwcomeau.com/css-for-js.
Source Code Meine Anfänge
Bill Gates gives away at the very end that this would be the first book of a trilogy. Not sure yet, if I’ll read the 2 others.
It might be because I’ve read it in German, was something lost in translation? I could not be really taken by the writing style.
Anyways, I still enjoy being brought back to that time when computing was less mainstream, more hobby like. The exploration, the excitement, I might just get old but I feel like it was more present then. Well, some might wonder if it’s still a hobby when your read from this book. They enforced a grueling schedule on themselves to make Basic work on the Altair machine, Bill Gates relates that famous time when he would basically sleep at his terminal. By the way, that is mentioned in Deep Work too as an example of focus work.
Was nice to see that Bill Gates was a keen hiker, and that during his time in nature he would think about how to improve his code. That’s how it is with software, you keep twisting your mind to reach a goal, staying within the constraints of the machine at hand. He would do that often on paper as he had not permanent access to a terminal, other times I tell you. For some reasons, I romanticise those time. I’m sure my fond memories of using MS-DOS to boot up my copy of The Settlers has something to do with that, is that nostalgia?
Mit einem blauen Kugelschreiber unterstrich ich den wichtigsten Absatz: "Die Heimcomputerbranche wirkt zunehmend wie eine Miniaturversion der Mainframeindustrie – bei beiden beherrscht ein Anbieter den Markt."
Definitely interesting, simply wished for a more engaging writing style. But that’s personal taste I believe.