Links

Links to things that I've found interesting, sometimes with commentary.

Currently a combination of:

I wrote a post about how this system works and there is also an RSS feed available.

Should this be a map or 500 maps?

escapethealgorithm.substack.com

I’m obsessed with this story because it gets at a dynamic embedded within everything designed that we rarely think about. Once you notice it, it is present in almost every conversation, at every aperture and zoom level: modularity is inversely correlated to expressiveness.

Oregon scientists are 3D printing their way to a healthier future for us all

opb.org

“It’s not just the genetic mutations within the cancer that caused it [to form]. It’s also how the cells are arranged. If one cell type is next to a different cell type, that can actually indicate if you’re going to have a better or worse prognosis,” Helms says.

Helms is using her printing technique to figure out how different configurations of cells behave.

“I will take a cancer cell and I’ll put healthy cells around and I will see: How do these cells communicate?” she explains. “Does the cancer keep growing? Do the healthy cells act more cancerous? And we keep changing the patterns and the cell types to find out: How are these cells talking to each other?”

And ultimately, it may reveal what makes one person’s cancer more aggressive than another’s — and that information is very valuable. Because once they understand the interactions between the cells, researchers have the information they need to develop new treatments.

ModularPlay

orllewin.uk

Modular Play is a casual playground game on Playdate for building little music making patches by connecting modules with cables. It’s meant to be fun and not really for serious use but it can create some beautiful music.

The radiating programmer

dev.37signals.com

It’s indeed by comparison that radiating information shines: instead of having someone pulling information from you, you push the information out there for everyone. It might look subtle, but there is a significant difference: the control remains on your side, not anyone else’s.

This ties to my method of working as well, as well as Ben Balter’s 15 rules for communicating at GitHub that we relied on heavily at Mapbox.

A downside, aside from the mentioned one about time, is that it requires good writing, communication, and empathy skills (for others’ time) of all of your teammates. But is that a downside, or just hard — and worth it — to achieve?