Last Week, 06/19/16

I’m traveling again this week. Posting this from the airport!

Stuff I did

• Posted my first Egghead video tutorial.
• Knit a hat in 24 hours.

Linkspam

• This esoteric programming language list is a wonderful, terrible rabbit hole.
• Erin McKean’s guide to writing free Twitter bots using AWS Lambda + Node.js looks like a great way to start with bot-writing. There are many “good” ways to write a Twitter bot; more guides are always appreciated. (I’ve been meaning to start a bot project. Sometime…)
• Okonomi word looks like a useful, “inline” Japanese dictionary/reader app. I’ve mostly set my Japanese to the side, but it’s still fun to get some practice in.
• Nicholas Zakas’ post on how to support people with long-term illnesses has some good rules of thumb. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s definitely a good place to start. This paragraph in particular struck home:

You see, even though we’re the ones who are sick, we are constantly trying to make everyone else around us feel better about how sick we are. People ask how we’re feeling all the time, and want to hear that we’re better than we were before. But the truth is, sometimes we’re worse than we were, but telling you that will upset you, so we lie.

Stop making sick people manage your emotional reaction to disease, please. It’s exhausting.

• Michael Hayes’ post on the icky parts of React Native is a good roundup of current annoyances.

• A good read on the efforts behind Planned Parenthood’s push for gender-neutral language.

• Did you know that Digg is a thing again? I know, I know, I’m late to the party. Anyway, they’ve got a good article on sensory processing disorder. I like how it explores the uncertainty in the process of defining diagnoses - where are the boundaries of a “disorder”? Who decides? How?

• A compilation of various examples of designing to prevent error.

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