Damian’s notes

On July 13th 2005, Jacob Kaplan-Moss made the first commit to the public repository that would become Django. This is being celebrated at various events during the year. While awaiting an event near you, here is Simon Willison’s talk on Django’s origins from 2015.

Parsing MIDI messages in Rust (Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya). The venerable MIDI protocol is a beautifully simple way to control muscial instruments. This article breaks down what MIDI is, why it’s cool, and how you might go about processing MIDI content in the programming language Rust.

The design process for the typeface Gosh by Kyle Benson

Soundslice make a scanner for sheet music. They found they had support calls for a feature they did not have—scanning ASCII tablature, a notation used to writing guitar and drum tablatures online. And it seems people were trying to use this nonexistent feature because ChatGPT was telling them to. So they implemented an ASCII tab importer and now owe ChatGPT for requirement discovery?

Speaking of dates and times, here is a superb example of overengineering turning in to something like an art project: the Precision Clock Mark IV shows an ISO timestamp with millisecond resolution and with sufficient frame rate to not flicker even when filmed at 10,000 fps. And because it is so long, it is designed to fold in half to make a 2-line display.

The long history of dates and times means programming involving timestamps, events, and especially schedules is fraught with complications that non-programmers will not be aware of. Zach Holman wrote a pretty comprehensive and surprisingly pretty introduction to the nightmare that is dates and times in code in 2018.

Australia-based Olivia King has created a text font designed for accessibility and readability called Inclusive Sans.

MF Normavaganza Extra started life as a detour in a Type and Media final project and has emerged as its own very extra slab-serif font. Would be useful in very dramatic headlines and strange textured backgrounds. Available as a work in progress from Future Fonts.

‘No, I think it’s a terrible idea, but I definitely think we should do it.‘ One of the surpising projects that came out of the lockdown of 2020 is a production of Hamlet inside the Grand Theft Auto multi-player game. There is a film about it, that got limited release around the end of 2024. You get a glimpse of their production approach from the trailer.