Week 19 of 2022

Weeklies are my notes of things not big enough for a blog post but worthy of being mentioned and linked to. Find all of my Weeklies at /weeklies.

• Converting Integers to Floats Using Hyperfocus by Mara Bos

  If there's one writer, to whose level I'd like to get as a writer, it's Mara Bos. Her deeply technical blog posts are brilliant pieces of technical content but always with a fun and casual style.

  This post is an exciting adventure into binary representation of numbers and how to convert integers to floats and how to do it in Rust. It's a great read even if you're not into Rust because she explains the binary conversion with such detail while still keeping it easy and light to read instead of a heavy math class.

  Here's one of my favorite quotes from this blog post that exemplify that style:

  While I was sitting there, struggling for hours banging virtual rocks together to light a spark to make a campfire, Rustc was just sitting there with a lighter in its pocket. “Hey you never asked,” Rustc laughed, “I figured you were just having fun.”

• Write An Excellent Programming Blog by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

  This is a great article about how to create a programming blog: what to write about, how to find and audience, how to improve and how to maintain a steady pace. I added it as an extra inspirational material to my blog post You should start a blog today but wanted to bring it up on Weeklies as well.

• Why blog? by Chuck Grimmett

  Another inspiration for blogging. I'm always on the lookout for other people's perspective on the topic since I'm very passionate about blogging and sharing to others why it's a good idea. Chuck has plenty of references to other blog posts and tweets about the topic so it also functions as a great starting point to dive deeper.

• Unbreak.tech

  Unbreak.tech is a collection of articles about the problems in our industry when it comes to sexism and misogyny.

• SOS: Sustainable Open Source by Floor Drees

  Floor wrote a great article about sustainable open source. She writes about the ecosystem and the problems that the open source community – and by quite direct proxy the entire industry – is facing. By the way, if you're not following Floor, I recommend doing so, she's amazing.

• The 62.5% Font Size Trick by Aleksandr Hovhannisyan

  In Twitter, a discussion sparked last week about the 62.5% font-size trick and I had never heard of it so I seeked out for material to learn it better. This post by Aleksandr was one of the best explanations I found. The basic gist is that the browser's default font size is 16px which can be a hard number to multiply so using 62.5% font-size changes it to 10px which is easier for humans to deal with. It doesn't come without its own problems though (that's why Twitter discussion sparked) and I think he makes a good case looking at all the aspects.