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In this newsletter, I'm going to cover:
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Di
Design
Modern Font Stacks shows modern font stacks that use “system fonts”, which are already available on devices. That means there’s no need to download a font so there are no layout shifts and no flashes of different fonts rendered. This site helps me produce fast pages and make quick decisions for side projects, such as selecting some cursive fall back fonts for a data viz project.
Tech Icons provides convenient SVG and PNG icons for 400+ companies, products, and frameworks, including MS-DOS, which I thought was a fun inclusion!
Realtime Colors lets you try out colours and fonts on a “real website” instantly. Set them in the toolbar on screen and everything updates straight away. Nifty!
Design
Shout out to Kontinentalist for these fun footer details:
Steno
If you’ve ever wondered about what coding using stenography looks like, Paul Fioravanti has a great set of steno coding videos, including React, Python, Ruby, Elm, and Elixir. I recommend checking out all of his videos though because he has some fun gems like this Steno Doom Typist - Episode 1 Playthrough!
Steno
Typey Type Lesson: Emily's symbols
The “Emily's symbols” Python dictionary is a popular steno dictionary in the Plover community for writing symbols that are not in Plover's main dictionary and are otherwise hard to type. Thanks to Monniasza for providing a JSON version of the Python dictionary to add to Typey Type and make this lesson possible.
I've updated how "one syllable" and "more than one syllable" words are determined in Typey Type's code, which has resulted in updates to many of the fundamental lessons. This work was prompted by a kind person using Typey Type who shared feedback through a Typey Type Google feedback form, and took the time to specifically review every entry in the One-syllable words with multiple strokes lesson. That lesson used to have 144 entries, including several that were clearly not one syllable as well as some entries that could be written in 1 stroke. It now has just 41 entries.
For the curious developers among you, it turns out programmatically counting syllables in English is hard. I tried several JavaScript packages and even a Rust one, and none of them produced super reliable results. The code now uses specific lists of one-syllable words and multi-syllable words for the top 10,000 words, and then a function to guess at the number of syllables for all other words. That means if you spot a word that doesn't look quite right in the fundamental lessons, we can move it from one list to the other fairly easily. Hopefully a manual list for the top words will cover most cases.
Thanks to a prompt from Monniasza on GitHub, Typey Type now has the ability to save personal “preset” settings for study types. If you don't like Typey Type's suggested 15 words and 5 repetitions to Discover new words, you can change the settings and save your own Discover preset. Enjoy!
Books, Links, and News
The Good Life: How to Grow a Better World by Hannah Moloney
Last year I read The Good Life after it was recommended to me by a friend. It is a blend of gardening, cooking, community and more, with a continuous thread about tackling the climate emergency through small actions. And now I recommend it!
Growing food became an act of defiance for me, albeit a very quiet and non-confrontational one. But to this day each time I sew new seeds in my veggie patch or plant a tree, my heart is doing a little fist pump and saying ‘Take that, multinational agri-businesses disconnecting the masses from where their food comes from and mistreating our precious farmers and soil in the process - we can do this better, not bigger.’
I particularly enjoyed the final chapter on “our community” that, among other things, showcased the small enterprises that aren’t waiting for the government, big banks, or fossil fuel companies to get their act together, and are taking action themselves. For example, The Good Car company imports second hand EVs. Hepburn Energy provides a community-owned wind farm and partners with Hepburn Z-NET to provide blueprints for “how rural communities can satisfy all their own energy needs with renewables”. Farm it Forward connects land owners with spare land to volunteers to grow food on it. This improves soil water-holding capacity and sequesters carbon from the atmosphere for use in healthy soil, providing local food security and minimising food waste.
Books, Links, and News
If you're interested in some perspective on the state of the environment and climate change action that is not entirely doom and gloom, I highly recommend listening to this interview with Hannah Ritchie, Head of Research at Our World in Data, on the 80,000 Hours podcast.
Development
To make it easier to visualise thumb size in my own dev work, I made a custom cursor in a copy-paste friendly bit of code: Custom cursor with CSS/SVG for mobile responsive dev on CodePen.
To illustrate how it works, it uses the cursor
CSS property on all elements, * { cursor: url("…") x y, auto; }
, with an SVG as a data URL:
<svg
xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'
width='74'
height='74'
>
<circle
r='36'
cx='37'
cy='37'
fill='rgba%280,0,0,0.1%29'
stroke='deeppink'
stroke-width='1'
/>
</svg>
For the cursor hotspot’s x- and y-coordinates, I use the same value as the SVG’s cx
and cy
.
Winning
Sometimes when I notice driven co-workers overworking, I share with them Eugene Yan’s post The 85% Rule - When Giving It Your 100% Gets You Less than 85%. It’s a short piece that I think puts “effort” in perspective for people that want to do their best. Being overly tense can work against giving your best performance. Hearing that viewpoint can help people get comfortable with relaxing more.
I also recommend this hilarious tale from Paul Fioravanti (of steno coding fame), “Welcome back”: A short story of overwork from the software trenches of Tokyo.
In related news, the four-day week spreads! After 9 years of working 4-day weeks, I still heartily recommend 4-day weeks for work–life balance.