Interesting article by Payal Arora in Quartz about dispelling some of the techno-optimism applied to the developing world.

Although it starts out with the sentiment The shocking result from years of studying how the global poor engage with new applications is that they are like us, I found some interesting revelations regarding ways of showing status and feeling special on Western social networks.

Super interesting, albeit completely unscientific, look at the history of programming languages, and the way different categories of programmers have switched from one to the other.

Some great advice from Cindy Sridharan on how to write code optimised for others to read, that greatest of Knuthian pursuits.

I generally like Existential Comics, but I particularly enjoy the Marx ones.

Facebook employees, with a few individual exceptions, don’t believe their company has crossed a line yet. Twitter employees, again with a few individual exceptions, don’t believe their company has crossed a line yet. We know this because they haven’t put down the tools. And by continuing to aid the companies making those decisions by selling them their labor, they’ve become complicit in their actions. They haven’t organized. They haven’t made a stand.

And they won’t.

A List Apart’s From URL to Interactive series just concluded, and I think it’s worth a read for any web developer.

It’s structured in a way that reminds me of one of my favourite books, Charles Petzold‘s Code, moving from the bottom of the stack to the top.

This is a really interesting technique from Netflix to fake English strings to look like ones in other languages, in order to make sure long strings aren’t being truncated disruptively.

An interesting report, but I kept wondering about this:

Apple decided to go a step further and just begin hiring these creatives directly into Apple

What do these people actually work on? The story makes it clear it’s not Hollywood stuff (because they’re understandably hesitant to bring that work in to Apple), but then what? Does nothing actually come out of this and are these just the world’s most expensive testers?

A turn-by-turn description of how Julia Evans reverse engineered the proprietary image format used by the iOS Notability app.

As she says:

People don’t usually invent totally custom file formats! Nothing in here was really complicated – it was just some existing standard formats (zip! apple plist! an array of floats!) combined together in a pretty simple way.

Doing the Lord’s work (finding the perfect Unicode arrow to illustrate an external link), I stumbled upon ↯, which I can only assume is a tribute to Harry Potter.