10. Two of my coat hangers went down in the fight
“During exile, four of us had to share a single MacBook and iPhone charger. It was actually pretty rough.”
Some personal news now: Parentheses now has a (great!) logo, thanks to Kat Bak, an amazing, talented designer and overall very good person. Here’s an animated version cos they were feeling fun and funny:
I asked them to write a bio here but they demurred, saying they couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t make them want to dry heave. So I’ll try: Kat is a very talented designer, writer, thinker, and doer. They are passionate about social change, and among other things co-founded TGD in Tech. Pertinent to some of you: they actually designed the logo for Versioning, my last newsletter. You may remember it looked like a bearded face. I may remember it as kinda freaking me out to see my cartoon face every day. I’m glad they could come back and I’m glad they didn’t go with a beard.
It would have felt weird had they not run it back for this one, so I am very stoked it worked out!
——
Four years ago Paul Ford (returning fav) got a bit drunk one night and woke up having built a federated website/social network/platform thing. He launched a unix server off a tiny AWS instance and gave anyone who asked a login of their own. They all created whatever weird websites and apps and networks they wanted.
He called it tilde.club and it was silly and good. Paul eventually got too busy to maintain the community, but the concept led to the Tildeverse, communities working along similar lines, with members doing all manner of cool things within those bounds.
Now the original tilde is back, thanks to a similarly kind/weird stranger, who is working through the backlog of requests. And if this story is ringing any bells, check your spam because I did and it turns out I had an invite ready to go. I set my account up and they replied and part of the email said the following:
the greatest value of tilde.club is not the services provided by the
server, but rather the interesting and welcoming community built by its
users. this is possible because of people like you who choose to make
this a great place. the best way you can help tilde.club is by working
to support a great system culture. chat on irc; build cool programs and
share them with others; focus on learning, and help others learn; be a
good example for others; have fun!
So now I have a tilde that I need to do something with! What should I do with it?
Several People Are Designing
Check This Out
The boring tech behind a one-person web company.
How Slack (gradually) built its design system.
Change the colour of your VSCode workspace wth Peacock. Useful when you have multiple instances and you don’t want to get befuddled.
Going Up
Some silly things
An actual musical/general genius uses artists’ rare tracks to create whole new albums.
A new study shows we could build a space elevator, as long as we start on the Moon. Or, my idea: we could do literally anything else?
Tonic, an app built to surface the non-horrible parts of the internet, is extremely my thing. It’s not available in Australia yet, but I will keep track of its progress!
Finally, however disruptive, cutting-edge and powerful your start-up is, sometimes all that’s needed to bring you to a halt is a well-placed umbrella.
Call to Action
Send this to someone you think may enjoy it, as long as they’re cool. I would love to have more of y’all on the team. No haters.
👋 See you next week 👋
One more:
