Hello and welcome to the final edition of Parentheses Season One. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’m winding this season down while my wife and I welcome our new baby (and then spend all our time high-fiving each other) (I’m assuming that’s what parents do).

As I prepare for the next phase of my life, I’ve unintentionally been spending a bit of time looking back. I was recently inspired to create a gigantic playlist of all the music that was on my last iPod (before smartphones) circa 2005-2011.

We’ve all heard that line about how “the computer in our pocket is orders of magnitude more powerful than the one that sent men to the Moon." That is amazing, imma let you finish, but I wasn’t involved in that project, so I found “taking an hour to simulate an 80GB iPod full of music that took me years to accumulate” a bit more interesting. I recommend doing the same, assuming you have an hour, and you also lost all your music due to multiple computer migrations.

If you’re feeling similarly keen to relive the past, check out YouTube Decade, a fun little tool that shows you the most popular videos from exactly 10 years ago. For example:

Of course one of the biggest cultural losses in the last decade was Vine. Here’s one of about a billion Vine compilations on YouTube notable for me because it has the stupid Nickleback “Look at this graph” video in it. RIP Vine.

Draw the Line

Check out this cool thing

roughViz is a JavaScript library that’ll give you a hand-drawn effect in the browser.

Noria is a streaming data-flow system that acts as fast storage for read-heavy web apps.

Weavel Knievel

Learn/try this thing

Programming principles for early-stage start-ups.

How to weave one CSS element over and under another.

And Around and Around We Go

Some silly things

This Analogue Pocket handheld video game system definitely feels like the kind of thing that should exist in the world and that I should own.

Draw a perfect circle. Mine was 93% perfect, which is to say: not perfect.

The lines of code that changed everything. From Hello, World! to the code that helped us say, “Hello, Moon!”

Meet Fox E, Yelp’s best/horniest reviewer. Yes.

John Hodgman promoted his new book by writing about corgis, which should be the only method of promotion, really.

Finally, a list of confusing things for a DJ to say.

Call to Action

Wish me luck with fathering, and have a great rest of 2019 (or until I am next in your inbox). You’re all great, keep it up! See you next time.