Goodbye Fry's
Welcome to issue #2!
On Tuesday, Fry's Electronics announced they are shutting down their entire chain of stores. I wasn't too surprised, as the chain has been suffering ever since electronics sales went mostly online, but I have a fond nostalgia for the store.
I grew up near the Fry's in Woodland Hills, CA. For any computer part, programming book, or game, Fry's was the place to go. I would frequently walk down the aisle with all the oscilloscopes and drool over this expensive equipment that my teenage self could not afford. I even bought my first memory card at Fry's, an 80MB CompactFlash card for about $100 that I loaded up with ebooks.
Most Fry's stores were themed in some way, and the Woodland Hills store's theme was Alice in Wonderland, with statues of various characters and a chessboard floor. There are a lot of photos on Yelp, but the most memorable thing to me (not shown in the link) was a big plastic copy of the book next to the returns line, opened to a page that was almost entirely a footnote ruminating on the physics of falling through the Earth and the amount of time it would take to come out the other side. I spent plenty of time in that returns line reading the footnote.
The Burbank Fry's also famously had a UFO theme, with the storefront featuring a giant spaceship crashed into the front.
Recommended Reading and Videos
Advice on How to Teach Computer Skills
This article dates back to 1994, but most of the advice here applies to anyone building software today. A quick read and highly recommended.
Most user interfaces are terrible. When people make mistakes it's usually the fault of the interface. You've forgotten how many ways you've learned to adapt to bad interfaces. You've forgotten how many things you once assumed that the interface would be able to do for you.
Centerline Labeling
Described as "an explorable calculator for placing curved labels inside weird shapes," this ObservableHQ page by Noah Veltman describes step-by-step how to generate a label like the one below, that fits into the contour of the shape.
Visualizing Data Timeliness at AirBnB
AirBnB has a lot of data reporting requirements, and this article talks about tools they've built to track if data is being delivered on time, as well as flow of data from one dataset to another. Even if you don't particularly care about the topic, it's worth a look just for the elegant methods of visualizing complex data relationships.
What I'm Working On
Social Media Card Image Creator
There are a lot of ways to generate OpenGraph card images for sharing articles on social media. Many of them render an image in a headless browser, but for fun I've been building one in Rust. It's been a nice experience so far, as the image and glyph_brush_layout crates have a ton of functionality for dealing with images and rendering fonts.
Here's what it looks like so far, with automatic font sizing and drop shadows. Still need to figure out a nicer background image :)
Next up for this project, I'm going to make it run in WebAssembly. So far I'm quite impressed with the work done in the Rust ecosystem to make this an easy process. More on that next week.
Git Quicksave
I wrote last week about a Git Quicksave experiment to encourage more checkpointing of code changes when experimenting and refactoring. The very first version is here on Github. Use with care, and please let me know if you find it useful (or not)!
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