Recently
Reading
- Levels of the Game by John McPhee. The second McPhee I’ve read since The Control of Nature, and it’s just as good.
- A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art: this seems applicable across all the forms of art, especially modern music.
- Why is software so expensive?: I don’t usually enjoy reading Dijkstra. Some of this basically says “software is hard for other people because they aren’t me.” But more and more I do think that his point about understanding the basic principles of a system and continously defining them is the thing that experienced, successful developers do and others don’t.
- How to untangle a necklace: Virginia Hoffman’s writing is some of the best feminism on the internet.
Listening
Elsewhere
I’ve been working on /app
, the new interface to Mapbox. A lot of time has been spent tweaking the interface, but I’ve recently been user-testing it and making sure that it can handle data visualization tasks. Hence the focus on data.
- Created awesome-geojson as a catalog of tools, data, and things that work with the wonderful GeoJSON map data format.
- Created geojson-join to join GeoJSON against other files, mostly so I can avoid using PostGIS to recreate Nelson Minar’s map of all the rivers.
- Created openflights-geojson to convert OpenFlights data into something you can put on a map.
- Created stickshift.org and an online demo of Stickshift, an open source SQL analysis tool.
- Gearing up to go on tour next week, through Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Chicago, Urbana, Milwaukee, Bloomington, Columbus, and Baltimore.