Go Make ThingsMulti Author Blogs3 min read
The SpeechRecognition API
There’s an older deaf gentleman in my town who’s very friendly, and likes to communicate with rudimentary hand gestures, but I have a hard time understand what he’s trying to say. I’d love to learn American Sign Language (ASL) at some point (shoutout King Ron), but until then, I wanted an app that could convert speech into text. Every transcription app I found required a pretty expensive subscription… so I decided to build my own using web technologies!
Go Make ThingsMulti Author Blogs1 min read
Documentation-Driven Development
Last week, I needed to make some pretty major updates to a web component in a design system I use for clients. I’m a big fan of TDD, but I wasn’t mentally in a place to write my tests first. I decided the easiest thing to do was document how the new component would work… before actually writing any code to implement the updates. It was an entirely ADHD-driven decision, but it unlocked something for me!
Go Make ThingsMulti Author Blogs2 min read
Life on Foot
We recently moved from a rural suburb in Massachusetts to a small coastal village in Rhode Island. It’s been transformative, and I wish I’d done it sooner! Trickle-Down Effects Unlike a city, a village has homes with yards. Unlike a suburb, a village has businesses and parks intermixed with homes. It’s the best of both worlds. Being able to walk or bike places has trickle-down effects. Instead of driving 20 minutes one-way to get groceries, I can ride my bike there in 5 minutes.
Go Make ThingsMulti Author Blogs2 min read
The Village
About 14 years ago, we moved out into the rural suburbs. I loved the quiet, the abundant wildlife, and our proximity to farms. I didn’t realize just how often doing anything at all would require a car. The Sprawl Absolutely nothing was walkable. We lived at the very top of a very high hill, so things weren’t really bikeable either. Groceries, restaurants, entertainment, friends, the library, and so on… you need to get in a car and drive at least 15 minutes for all of it.
Go Make ThingsMulti Author Blogs1 min read
We live in a world where...
I saw this on Mastodon today (saved the image, lost the source), and it just brought me so much joy! Did you know that we live in a world where octopuses dream, otters have a favorite shell that they carry with them all their lives, cows have best friends, and bees have different “dialects” of dance depending on the region? Or that cats purr at a frequency that accelerates bone healing, the forest grows flowers first after a fire, and dolphins give each other names and respond to them, and Penguins make proposals by giving each other the most beautiful pebble?
Go Make ThingsMulti Author Blogs1 min read
No human is illegal
I just ordered a bunch of leftist patches to put on my backpack, because virtue signaling is good, actually. One patch I kept seeing over and over again is… No human is illegal on stolen land. I get it. It’s supposed to point out the hypocrisy of complaining about illegal immigration in a country that was founded by stealing it from and genociding the people who already lived here.
Go Make ThingsMulti Author Blogsread at source
Radical books that aren't a slog
I’m loving the resurgence of zines! Violet B. Fox just released on on radical books that aren’t a slog, a collection of books for leftists that aren’t super dense theory by old dead white guys. There’s so many good ones to choose from, but I started with The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. For posterity, I’ve saved a local backup, but you should visit Violet’s site instead.