Insert Blog Here

Attention-Worthy, Week of 2009-09-19

I a world where micro equals better, it’s sometimes nice to focus on just one thing for an hour or two. Here is a collection of links to longer form content that I’ve found interesting over the past week.

Longest, and my favorite, is From Nand to Tetris in 12 hours. In this 2007 Google Tech Talk, Professor Shimon Schocken describes a one semester course in which students build (simulated) hardware and software, for a fully functioning general purpose computer. It’s an inspiring video, both from an educational point of view, and because it gives an insight into the inner workings of computers.

Even more technical is Rich Hickey’s presentation, A deconstruction of object-oriented time [pdf]. You don’t have to understand it all to appreciate it—it covers a lot of the general design of object-oriented programming, and how that’s based on several assumptions of time.

Next, I’m happy to note that the book Dive Into Python 3 is released as a free download. A great resource for Python geeks looking to learn about version 3.

Website of the week is Russell Beattie’s blog, a title which he earns with two awesome posts. The first is Mobile Web Browser Thoughts, a monster post on design principles of mobile browsers (exemplified by Mozilla Fennec). The second is Empirical User Experience Design Through Action Costs, a new (?) way of measuring usability.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with two absolutely non-technical links - a reddit post correctly titled Random thoughts from people our age [our age being late teens to late twenties] and beautiful illustrations on sleep by NYT’s Christoph Niemann. ❧