Planet Chris

I started the Endangered Alphabets Project in 2010 when I discovered that about a third of the world’s 120-plus writing systems may become extinct within the next one or two generations. As you probably know, every culture has its own spoken language, and in many cases its own written language, too — a writing system it has developed to express and record its own beliefs, its own experiences, its understanding of the world. What the members of that culture have collectively writ...

In a previous post, I looked at the mechanics of how to create an Alexa skill to tell me which colour bin I needed to put out next. I'll now look at how I chose to implement it in OpenWhisk, using Swift. An Alexa skill consists of a number of intents and you register a single end point to handle them all. As I'm using OpenWhisk, I have direct web access to my actions without having to worry about setting up a separate API Gateway which is convient, as detailed in the last post. However, as I...

An increasing number of applications now offer webhooks as an integration, often in addition to an API. The classic example, familiar to most developers, is the GitHub webhooks which can notify your other systems such as CI tooling that a new commit has been added to a branch. If you imagine how many repositories exist on GitHub, and how many other systems react to changes on each repository ... there's a reason they are excellent with webhooks! Whether it's your source control, updates f...

“But here I come back to Deleuze’s “right to say nothing,” and although we can definitely say that this right is variously accessible or even inaccessible for some, I believe that it is indeed a right. For example, the push for an 8-hour workday in 1886 called for “8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, and 8 hours of what we will.” I’m struck by the quality of things that associated with the category “What we Will”: rest, thought, flowers, su...

“Culture – like religion and nation and race – provides a source of identity for contemporary human beings. And, like all three, it can become a form of confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. Yet all of them can also give contours to our freedom. Social identities connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can make a wider world intelligible, alive, and urgent. They can expa...

“Of course, computers and broadband by themselves don’t magically lead to college degrees and better jobs. After all, much of what people do with Internet access once they get it is hardly productive. But some of them may not be getting the training they need to make effective use of software and online services. And there are many correlations between broadband access and income levels or success in finding employment. ” This is why all of us who work on the web should be...

    Earlier this year, support for CSS grid layout landed in most major desktop browsers. Naturally, the specification is one of the hot topics at meet-ups and conferences. After having some conversations about grid and progressive enhancement, I believe that there’s a good amount of uncertainty about using it. I heard some quite interesting questions and statements, which I want to address in this post. “When can...

Date of connection: July 7, 2016 - Lower East Side You were on the corner of Orchard and Rivington, looking down at your phone. You were in a crowd of other people also looking at their phones but somehow, you stood out. Maybe it was the way you were vigorously swiping your screen and cheering loudly. Maybe it was the way you were hunched over, neck stuck out and spine permanently bent in an upside down U. Maybe it was the way you nearly walked into traffic to catch a Bulbasaur. I knew it wa...

Ian wrote about our experience launching a site for Brian Forde’s congressional campaign. One of the reasons we took the project on was that I thought it would be good for Ian to get a dose of how fast-paced the design and dev process can be. Most of our projects have been for larger companies, which tend to move at a slower pace, so this was a good experience. ...