Week 08 of 2023

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.

• On a technicality by Evelyn Woods

  Let's start with a great blog post by Evelyn Woods. Building communities is challenging and one challenge is how to set up and enforce rules that help the community be a nice place for people to be in. Those who care less about the community are often eager to challenge the rules and find ways to circumvent around the letter of the rules while violating the spirit of them. And if you don't moderate by enforcing rules, the good people will leave and you end up with a toxic or dead community.

• We don't do that here by Aja Hammerly

  Continuing on the topic, Hugo shared this link in relation to the discussion of the blog post above in Mastodon. I really like how the concept of "We don't do that here" is explained in the post. Personally I'm not sure if I'd be able to say that myself though but maybe I should practice because I think it's a good way of phrasing. For me, the difficulty comes from the thought "who am I to tell anyone how people in this community act". In general, I wish I had more integrity to speak up when I see bad behavior but I always just keep doubting myself.

• Modding Stardew Valley for accessibility by Nic Chan

  Modding games is not only great for adding new functionality and to expand the game's world but it can also be crucial for some games to make the game more accessible and enjoyable to players. I'm a huge fan of Stardew Valley (with 588 hours recorded in Steam) and a big thanks to that goes to the modding support and community. Many of the mods that Nic talks about are a great example of how making things more accessible can make things better for everyone, so there's even extra incentive for people who don't necessarily need assistance themselves, to build things in a way that can be accessible and support different people and their use cases.

• Spam Intermediary by Chris Coyier

  If you like email newsletters (I love them!) but don't want to use email client to read them, Chris has a great solution. You can use tools like Feedbin to subscribe to the newsletters and by using a spam intermediary email, you can limit the damage done if one or more subscriptions leak the emails out and get spammed.

• A directory of ethical hacking writeups including bug bounty, responsible disclosure and pentest writeups

  My favorite type of blog post or a talk is when someone explains what they have done. This page collects writeups of different ethical hacking projects like bug bounties and pentests.

• Diátaxis - A systematic framework for technical documentation authoring

  This week I learned about Diátaxis through Benjamin's toot and started to look into it. I haven't dove very deep yet but it's definitely an interesting idea and framework. I also got two talks about the topic on my To Watch list: What nobody tells you about documentation by Daniele Procida and Documenting Django Code in 2022 by Eric Holscher. I'm excited to look into those next week to learn new things about documentation.

• Fix a Wobbly Table (with Math) by Numberphile

  I picked up this video from Mike Bifulco's newsletter post about wobbly tables. I've said before often that creative mathematics is my guilty pleasure and this is a prime example if any.