Reading list, 4

~~shameless plug~shameless plug~shameless plug~shameless plug~shameless plug~~

Cover of Butterflies EP First of all -- a SHAMELESS PLUG! I released my Butterflies EP last week and if you're into electronic music you might want to check it out! There's also a Too Long; Didn't Listen (TL;DL) 1:30 version in SoundCloud, just in case you're too busy for a full album :-D

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Now for the non-shameless-pluggy list of links!

6th-12th April

  • Atomic Design by Brad Frost - This is a book on progress on an intriguing solution to a most relevant problem: designing for the immense variety of devices we use to access the net. I haven't had much time to look into it, but it won me with just the first chapter's tagline: "Create design systems, not pages". I'm looking forward to Brad's talk in UpFrontConf Manchester!
  • And also from Brad: Accessibility and low powered devices, and as he describes it: "an interesting intersection between performance, accessibility, and devices".
  • Mozilla's Web API Exposure guidelines - Mozilla is not using prefixes on new APIs anymore and opting for browser flags instead. This not news, but more of a reminder.
  • It's OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty by David R. MacIver -- "It’s not a job after all, is it? We’re not paying you to do it." - except for when it seems to be, and it's so damn exhausting sometimes. But as David says: "If the world comes back to you and says “You are a bad person for not supporting this thing I need you to support” then fuck them. If they want that they should pay you for it, or do it themselves."
  • Surprise! Feminism - a follow up by David R. MacIver too! Or: why you will see way less women in Open Source, as it takes free time and money, two things we on average have less of.
  • What Your Open Source Culture Really Says, Part One by Shanley Kane - there are so many thought provoking points in the article, but "The only thing holding this project remotely together is romanticized notions of free and open source software" is a good one to start challenging yourself with. Can projects survive on a romantic idea? (answer: most definitely not)
  • The Spanish entity in charge of issuing SSL certificates for most of the country's administrative and governmental servers uses certificates that trigger "this certificate is invalid" warnings in browsers. Thanks to bureaucracy, the bug is dragging for 7 years already. Fascinating and sad read, including typos in manually copied hashes, processes getting stuck for months because people go on holidays, and technical misconfigurations.
  • Making Music. Creative strategies for Electronic music producers by Dennis DeSantis who apparently wrote the Ableton live manual? - I have never been able to figure out how Ableton works; there's something in its UI that doesn't quite click with my brain, but the book looks interesting (and also beautiful). There are some chapters online!
  • And finally, a FUN ONE: Golden Girls LEGO set! I am a TENTE person but... this is really fun!