Shape Up is an amazing new web-book by Basecamp that details the process they use to define, build, and ship their products. It has great insights, but I especially appreciated how many of the ideas presented just make a lot of sense. I often nodded along in agreement and recognized concepts that we share in our team. The framework is battle-tested and realistic, and there’s a good chance I’ll be able to integrate some new ideas into our existing workflow without having to reorganize how we think about everything to fit a new metaphor.

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Located east of Hiroshima in the Seto Inland Sea, Ōkunoshima (大久野島) is a small island home to over 700 rabbits. The rabbits are wild but friendly, and tourists arrive every day with bags full of food and treats. The island was relatively unknown in Japan until recently when its populality among foreign visitors brought it into the spotlight.

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I happened upon this watch in the mall over the weekend and loved how unconventional it is. The inner end of the loop acts as the hour hand, and the outer end is the minute hand. The in-between part seems to move freely, so you have a watch face that looks pretty different each time you look at it.

I’d probably need to pause for a few seconds to decipher the time so it’s not exactly practical, but it would be a good conversation starter for sure.

macOS Mojave added a system-wide Dark Mode, but it doesn’t do much if all of the websites you see are still bright white. To address this, there is a new CSS media query prefers-color-scheme that can detect Dark Mode and change styles accordingly. There are three possible values: no-preference, light, and dark. You can read more in the W3C specification.

This new option looks to be supported in Safari 12.1 and Firefox 67. As of this writing both of these have not been released officially, but you can try it out in the Safari Technology Preview

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Credit: Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al.

For the first time ever, scientists have captured an image of a black hole. The black hole chosen is a supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, 55 million light-years away from Earth. This is huge news, since before this we only had theoretical proofs of black holes with no direct evidence.

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I’ve come to learn that I really enjoy working in environments with only natural lighting. At my job, I work in a large open room with about 50 people. Many of them are artists who need to minimize the glare on their screens, so the great big windows covering the walls of our room are always covered with blinds, and we instead have fluorescent lights turned on (these do cause glare too, but at least they are more predictable so people can tilt their screens to minimize it).

But every once in a while, I’ll be in the office on a weekend, or early in the morning, and I’ll have the room to myself. The lights stay off, the blinds come down, and I immediately feel peaceful and refreshed. I’m noticeably happier and feel great while I’m working. At home too, I’ve set up my desk next to the window and I love the light that comes in from outside. Now that I’m aware that this is something that has a big impact on me, I’ll do my best to seek out environments with natural lighting in the future.

This blog has an intentionally simple design, but lately I’ve been thinking that it needs more color. A lot of the posts don’t have images and are just text, so large areas of the page are black and white with nothing visually interesting. That said, trying to include an image with every post is a pain. I would probably spend more time browsing stock images than actually writing the posts.

Picular was a big inspiration. Generating colors from text by searching for images is a great idea, and I decided to automatically get a set of colors based on each post’s title. Picular doesn’t have an API that I could use, so I wrote a quick script that does something similar. Unless I’ve changed things since I published this post, there should now be a row of colors next to each post’s title.

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Image: Remove.bg

Remove.bg is a great service that makes it easy for anyone to remove the background of a photo. You can use it with small images for free, and pricing for HD photos seems very fair: you can pay $2 per image, or get a subscription starting at $9 per month.

10 years ago, I was fresh out of college and encountered Paul Graham’s essay about the maker’s schedule, and wrote a response disagreeing with the spirit of the article. While I knew and understood that programmers could be much more productive in one 10 hour chunk than in five 2 hour chunks, I felt like rearranging a business’s operations based on these preferences was going overboard. The typical programmer as described seemed undisciplined, and I wrote that programmers needed to find ways to work around distractions, which are simply a fact of life.

As expected the post got a lot of negative feedback, but it was all very informative. Rather than just telling me to shut up, many people shared their own views and explained where my reasoning might be shortsighted. One person said they would be interested in seeing how I would react to my own post in about 10 years time, so here I am.

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During my last year at university, I decided to learn to swim. I was reasonably confident in my ability to stay afloat in deep water and not die, but it wasn’t what you could call swimming. Luckily, two of my close friends were excellent swimmers and they agreed to work with me in the mornings before class.

As an aside, I did take swimming lessons on and off for a few years when I was a kid, but apparently I retained nothing from those classes. Maybe I was just a terrible swimmer the entire time? Possibly related, I have very few memories from my elementary and middle school years, so I have a suspicion that I didn’t do a whole lot of thinking when I was a kid. In any case, I was essentially a total beginner to swimming when we started. I knew that you kicked your legs and paddled with your arms to go forward, but that was about it.

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