Saturday links, delivered while watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Did you know, backtracking from the baseball game they go to, it was 30 years ago today. Still a great film. But you probably want links.
The Fallen of World War II – I’ve watched a lot of data-driven videos over the years, but this one is amazing. The accompanying website is a stand out as well. Give it a watch and just think how lucky most of us are nowadays.
A graphic tale: the visual effects of Mad Max: Fury Road – I’m still riding my excitement from Mad Max and this visual breakdown is excellent. I knew there was CGI in the movie, but it’s a testament to the new wave of vfx shops that so much of it went unnoticed.
New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual – I’m not much(/any) of a designer, but I love the precision that goes into things like this.
Mr Robot – This show completely sideswiped me, coming out of the blue. Rami Malek plays the hacker-cliche so well. Can’t wait to see if there’s more.
Species in Pieces – This is half an exercise in CSS transformations and half a chance to learn some species I’ve never even heard of outside a Far Cry game. Watch and play and enjoy.
Korean is virtually two languages, and that’s a big problem for North Korean defectors – This is a great story. A simple app that actually helps people. Sometimes app devs go after the flashy and social and forget there’s a great opportunity through just helping people accomplish tasks.
What Twitter Can Be – Warning: this is a really, really long read. But it’s a great piece from one of Twitter’s earliest investors. I’m an outlier Twitter user: I hate the social crap they introduce, I never use the default clients and I have a tiny circle of people I follow. My best advice? Sack off the fucking marketing emails.
My Website Is 20 Years Old Today – Zeldman is as close to a legend as we have in the Web circles. CSS and modern standards, they may not have started with him, but he pushed us all as an industry onwards.
How We Spent $500 on Tech to Ship $2.6M of Soylent – I’ve yet to try any ground-up people (as far as I know), but this seems like a very odd way to bootstrap a business. Surely they could have found an actual logistics company set-up for this kind of thing and saved themselves the days they spent jerry-rigging it.
It’s not easy being green: Secure communication arrives! – So Plex (the media server I’ve been using for years now) has finally added SSL support. To. Every. Single. Client. That’s a pretty impressive achievement and I wish they had a tech blog just to dive into more detail.
Web Decay Graph – On the opposite end of the spectrum to the above, this is just depressing. I have a database of ~5K links going back ten years and I’d expect to see the same breakdown. Still, at least some of them work, unlike any apps pre-XP/OSX.
Recommending items to more than a billion people – Anything at scale is cool. I might not like Facebook, but I can’t deny they’re pushing stuff along.
Valhalla – Last year I had a chance to look into routing systems and what I found was they’re all a bunch of poo. Difficult, slow, outdated, take your pick. Valhalla, and it’s Norse-themed components, looks pretty neat.
Deploying branches to GitHub.com – We’re slowly moving along with deployment processes at work, so it’s nice to see how others do it. The biggest downside is not having a single product, so everything has to be replicable across projects.
Porting an Angular 2.0 App to Aurelia – So, Angular 2.0 is going to be a completely different beast. Not even Laravel 4 -> 5 style. I figure, if I’m going to have learn something completely new, I might as well see what the alternatives are like and Aurelia is pretty nice.
10 Rules for Writing Safety Critical Code – This is mainly in the wake of Airbus code-snafus, but the same principles hold for most projects. Stuff is gonna fail, that’s a given. A modern program nowadays has more parts than a space shuttle. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try and engineer away some of the risks (manual memory management, I’m looking at you).
This Team Used Apache Cassandra… You Won’t Believe What Happened Next – I like plaintext files, and I like a nice orderly RDBMS. If I reach a billion users, I’m pretty sure I’ll have other problems than “can I add another read slave”. Twenty years from now I still want to be able to read the content on this blog and I doubt very much a lot of these new-stores will still be around.
Using Protobuf instead of JSON to communicate with a frontend – I’m not sure how much traffic you need to be sending to make this worthwhile, but it’s a nice write up to finish on.
So, until next week. And I expect all of you to have watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off!
