One of wonderful things about the Internet is the deep dives you can do on things you didn’t know existed only a few minutes earlier.
I found the below video when researching the overlapping worlds of math, art, and computers. I was looking into motorized pen draings when I found the world of the harmonograph. Traditionally haramonographs are mechanical devices that power a drawing tool. Using a repetitive drawing motion on a surface that changes position creates some incredible results.
Tools that allow anyone to create, and get results that spark intrigue are my favourite type. They’re accessible, but bring people into both the art and math world.
It reminded me of Turtle Programming (Logo), where the user is given immediate visual feedback to their input. I recommend reading Turtle Geometry by Abelson, and Papert’s Mindstorms to understand the care put into Logo that allows for sufficently complex drawings and logic, while balancing accessibility.
As I dived further into the world of harmonographs I found that motors aren’t completely necessary. As slow, and methodic...
Shipping a Fellow
Good news — today the Open Journalism Project is announcing the start of a Fellowship program.
A few months ago when Asad and I wrote about the experience and research we’d done in understanding problems that student newsrooms are facing — we got many thoughtful responses. We were able to talk to students quite literally scattered across the globe, from Pakistan and India, to small-town USA, and big cities in Europe. These were students that shared our frustration with the lack of opportunities at their universities to tinker at the intersection of code and journalism.
While we’ve written, talked, and advised students newsrooms — we’ve been lacking in our methodology. At best we’re able to recommend similar setups we’ve seen at professional newsrooms. We haven’t been able to clearly point to what has (and hasn’t) worked. We can’t share how we got a student newsroom curious about programming or obsessing over data. In part this is because nothing like this exists in Canada — we’re carving out a new and important path in journalism education. Today we’re announcing...
In this post we’re going to take a quick look at npm scripts, and the thought process behind writing them. We’ll do this by taking Mozilla’s Makerstrap project and its Gruntfile and convert it to npm scripts to show us the benefits of npm scripts as a frontend build tool.
I should note before starting that there are many use cases for Grunt or Gulp, and npm scripts may not cover all of them. While it’s likely npm scripts can reduce your Grunt or Gulp files greatly, this post’s goal isn’t to diminish the usefulness of those task running services.
The goal of this post is to introduce another way that arguably has some simplification benefits. I ❤️ what Gulp and Grunt have done for frontend workflows—npm scripts is simply another option that we should consider.
Quick overview
If you already have a good understanding of npm scripts you can skip this overview.
If you’re less confident with npm scripts, all you really need to know is that it allows you to add tasks to your...
Shipping a Fellow
Good news — today the Open Journalism Project is announcing the start of a Fellowship program.
A few months ago when Asad and I wrote about the experience and research we’d done in understanding problems that student newsrooms are facing — we got many thoughtful responses. We were able to talk to students quite literally scattered across the globe, from Pakistan and India, to small-town USA, and big cities in Europe. These were students that shared our frustration with the lack of opportunities at their universities to tinker at the intersection of code and journalism.
While we’ve written, talked, and advised students newsrooms — we’ve been lacking in our methodology. At best we’re able to recommend similar setups we’ve seen at professional newsrooms. We haven’t been able to clearly point to what has (and hasn’t) worked. We can’t share how we got a student newsroom curious about programming or obsessing over data. In part this is because nothing like this exists in Canada — we’re carving out a new and important path in journalism education. Today we’re announcing...
