Week 39: Typing the right things fast

• I keep meaning to say something about the return of Little Printer but then forgetting. My main thought is that it’s really nice that they’ve revived the impact-y message style - I wrote the original code for that. It was nearly Christmas and Jack had had this idea for a new messaging style that he thought would be cool. I was supposed to be working on something else so after I’d finished the day’s work I started noodling around with it, trying to work out algorithmically how to get the word sizing right, learning about leading and kerning. It was incredibly fun and when I had finished I pushed a release live and sent a message to Jack’s little printer in his house in the new style. Something like “THIS LOOKS PRETTY GOOD I THINK”.
• The other Little Printer messaging memory I have is the time somebody down the pub sent “HELLO YOU C**T”¹ to Matt Jones’ little printer in the middle of the night. I can’t remember whose friend that was, but I don’t think Matt found it very funny. After that we put some configuration in to stop people messaging you in the middle of the night. A swear filter might also have been a good idea, but these are the kinds of things you only think of after you have kids.
• This is making me want to go find my Little Printer.
• I just bought Yumiko Higuchi’s new book of embroidery from Amazon Japan. I know there will be an english language translation of it eventually bit I absolutely cannot wait for that. I know enough embroidery to not need the instructions. Probably.
• Russell did a good blog post about how you can’t market to old people and it really Made Me Think.
• I’ve done a new layout style for my sewing posts.
• I’ve written that talk abstract I was procrastinating from. If anyone wants a talk about Git HMU.
• Being a good developer is as much about typing the right things fast as it is about helping others to type the right things fast.
• Thanks for the shout out Tom.
• This week’s word is kerning
• This week’s emoji is 😯

Footnotes