Links and listens #2

What a busy week. We held our first Touch tournament in Taipei for a long time, and so there was a lot of preparation to be done for that. That's on top of coaching and approaching some pretty important milestones for the projects we're working on at the Green Web Foundation.

I'd never heard of pace layering until reading this post by Chris Coyer. It makes a lot of sense, thinking about it, and it aligns with the way I've seen things work in a lot of spaces.

I find this a helpful framework to think in sometimes. For instance, if you feel frustration at how quickly or slowly a particular technology moves, are you considering its place within the layers? Perhaps that speed is because it is part of a system that pressures it to be that way or it being that way is beneficial to the system as a whole. Even zoomed into browser technology, HTML not moving as fast as JavaScript feels like it could be mapped onto Pace Layers.

Thibaud wrote this reflection on his involvement in our Grid-aware Websites project. I'm so glad to be able to lean on the guidance of our advisory group for this project. As as developer, I'm just like write some code, make some cool demos, and success! But having the advisory group to bounce ideas off, and get feedback from, opens our eyes to other things we should be considering - like the business case for making grid-aware changes to a website. Also, I really like this line from Thibaud, and am hoping to work it as a way to frame the Grid-aware Websites project.

Websites, and the web platform generally, are excellently suited to adapt to user needs (color themes, font sizes, responsive, etc).

Simon Willison is 2/2 in Links & Listens appearances this year. My colleague, Chris, shared this idea of "git scraping" to me around a small side-project I'm building at the Green Web Foundation. I vibe with the idea, and reckon it'd be a pretty neat way to track changes in a dataset over time. It's stored away in the back of my mind & hopefully I'll have something to use it on later this year.

I really enjoyed listening to Adam and Jerod chat with Elecia White on the bus to my part-time Touch coaching gig this week. I've tinkered with home automation before, but never got my hands dirty in embedded systems. It's one of those things that I feel I'd like to try out if I have a spare week of nothingness on my hands. I love how she talks about falling in love with software and embedded systems in this clip.

... the first time I moved a motor, because I told it to, not just because I powered on something, but the first time it was under my control, it was magical. It was like software can touch the world. Software can change physical things. It's not just zeros and ones.