Tom MacWright

tom@macwright.com

Recently

Reading

  • Levels of the Game by John McPhee. The second McPhee I’ve read since The Control of Nature, and it’s just as good.
  • A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art: this seems applicable across all the forms of art, especially modern music.
  • Why is software so expensive?: I don’t usually enjoy reading Dijkstra. Some of this basically says “software is hard for other people because they aren’t me.” But more and more I do think that his point about understanding the basic principles of a system and continously defining them is the thing that experienced, successful developers do and others don’t.
  • How to untangle a necklace: Virginia Hoffman’s writing is some of the best feminism on the internet.

Listening

Elsewhere

I’ve been working on /app, the new interface to Mapbox. A lot of time has been spent tweaking the interface, but I’ve recently been user-testing it and making sure that it can handle data visualization tasks. Hence the focus on data.