Karl Oscar Weber October 22, 2020

Redoing Everything

Hi,

It's been a while, but 2020 has just kept on going... A website redesign is the farthest thing from important at the moment. But I need to work and apay bills so I've got to convince ya'll that I can do my job. So here are all the latest details about the redesign.

Throwing it all out

I became really frustrated with the direction of the redesign sometime in July I think. It wasn't really looking nice to me. My typfaces choices were alright, but everything felt small and unambitious. I needed to go in a new direction.

I first revaluated the homepage design. Before It was much more functional, introductory text with inline links to interesting parts of my website. Now I've taken that idea to the extreme. JUST the text with links.

Bold new design attempt for the homepage.

I wanted to do some experiments with the hover states, so I did:

The vision for the site is Bold pieces of color contrasting against pretty plain hues of grey. I didn't want the background to be white, white is the internet's color, the color of websites. Just like white everywhere. Grey feels better.

I also switched a bold, sans-serif typeface for all headlines. I was using Playfair-Display before, and although it was playful, I just never leveraged it in a way that was satisfying. When redoing everything I started with a baseline system instead of designing individual pages. I already had a pretty good type scale that I modified, so It was all about nailing the weights and sizes.

I think I did a good job. I outlined how the text should look and feel next to each other, then I put it all into CSS. Having links be bright splotches of color felt like a really great choice to me. I have an idea to use nth-child to alternate colors, but I'll push that in another update.

Moving onwards to design the how each page type would look, I became really restless and simplified a lot. Now there are 4 types of pages: Index, Page, Post, Chapter. Pretty simple. Every post wherever it is, is a post. Book Chapters are, well, chapters. I've decided to put the whole book I'm writing online right on my site, no separate site to messy things up. It would just get stuck in endless redesigns and never launch anyways.

Components

Moving to a more bold design and building from scratch meant that I would need to build some baseline components first, and then fit them together. I started with Type, then continued with colors.

I had/have a plan to add lots of content, I thought it would be interesting to give each content type their own accent color. Going to each section would mean the links would be different. And it worked. It looked nice. But seeing as how I don't have a lot of that content even made yet... I axed all of those pages. I axed an Apps Page, Tutorials page, Courses Page. I axed a lot.

I had never done really well in adding illustrations to my posts, but wanted to try to do so easily, with little effort. I found that a square illustration style, with simple background colors would work well.

Illustration style for this website your reading now.

This opened up an opportunity to explore what Titles would look like with an illustration behind them, next to them, around them. I decided on a simple CSS blend effect of a title over the image. Having Really bright, or just plain solid colors in the illustrations gave posts a really great firm foundation, at least at the top of the page.

I want to illustrate some more possibilities with this approach using the primary colors that we chose earlier.

Afterwards I started to experiment with the menu. I had already made a pretty ostentatious menu, but threw that thing out. It depended on too much javascript, and was a bit slow on my old laptop. I needed something simple, bold, and clear. I iterated on the highlighted link idea and made something that felt really bold.

Iterations and tests of the menu for this website.

I really really really like how it came together. A simple top navigation, that turns into a hamburger when it's on a mobile device. After removing a lot of the derelict pages and focusing on the core content, it looks even better. Now It's very clear to site visitors where I would like them to go, and how to find content on the site. You'll also see a redesigned prologue logo in there. It never felt right to me, reusing the prologue logo on my personal site, hopefully this new mark can connect me to prologue in a small way.

I became frustrated animating the transition of the hamburger symbol, into an X symbol. It's really common and everyone does this, but I was trying to animate the SVG it's self. I haven't done much of that yet. So as a stroke of experimentation I wondered if I could just rotate the X from the backside of the Hamburger. Then I thought why not make it a cube? Like why not? I want to do more 3D stuff on this site in the future anyway, maybe I can signal my intentions. Making a cube in pure CSS was not difficult, then animating that cube also wasn't difficult. The result is a playful, moving element that I didn't plan or expect.

The animated CSS Cube thingy on this website.

Animating the cube is pretty simple. We're transitioning between two states with different rotations. I'll go into that later. The sides of the cube that don't have symbols are filled with our accent colors from earlier. Thankfully investing in some playful colors has given the menu cube an even greater sense of fun.

Future Elements

I'm not yet complete with the site, but it's very close. I think I just need to redo the footer a bit and then focus all of my efforts on the book. In the future I want to bring back unique app elements. Rather than design something completely unique, I thought it wise to reuse as many components as I could. I came up with simple Cards that could have content dropped into them, just like a page.

The old app cards were cute, but most of those apps aren't even close to being complete. I'd rather keep my intentions secret until just before launch.

That's it for now.

I'll hopefully have this thing wrapped up before halloween.

Stay safe. If you're in the USA, vote. Preferrably not for the people sympathetic to neo n*zis and fascists.

Karl Oscar Weber September 05, 2023

I started writing a programming language

Hi friends,

I started writing a programming language in Lua. Lua is fast, small, embeddable, extendable, and has a Garbage Collector. I want to write something that is simple to parse, extensible, and purpose built for writing and working with UI on the web.

Originally I wanted to dig deep into coffeescript to figure this out, I still might do that, but CoffeeScript has a syntax that irks me. I wondered if it would be easy enough to write an interpreter that compiles to another language. Like CoffeeScript to Javascript. I figured that it's gotta be possible, Right? I mean, people have DONE this before. But the issues I have is that CoffeeScript IS Javascript with a mask on and some bits hidden/removed. I want to make something that kinda starts from scratch, Fresh and new with some lessons.

WASM is a thing. So why not write a language that's embedded in your browser? That could be cool right? I'd love to just ship my programming languages files like javascript files, or write it directly on my website, and see it just work. Try to bring some of that magic back. With a stable WASM interpreter I could push that to a CDN and then folks hitting the pages with this language would only need to download the interpreter once.

What's next?

Well, I guess I need to get the basics of the thing working. An interpreter, some Variables, math, and a REPL. Follow along here: https://github.com/karloscarweber/stim

Karl Oscar Weber March 07, 2023

So you want Ruby to grow?

So you like Ruby, and the Ruby community, and you want it to grow? What should you do?

1. Write stuff for beginners.

Always, and first, and primarily, and when you think you've done enough, write more for beginners. I cannot tell you how important it is to write for beginners. The stagnation of new Ruby developers, junior developers, can be attributed to a lot of factors, but the primary factor is that the moment a beginner makes it out of the getting-started page, everything else is for Computer Science Majors/Ruby lovers/Expert Developers. Basic concepts are ASSUMED, which I guess makes sense, but also mildly complex concepts are also ASSUMED. All of this assumption means that practically any tool that Rubyists write for one another is not user friendly.

"But I understand this KOW! This stuff is easy for me."

Right Right Right, but you're not a beginner. If you've been in the Ruby game for about 2 years things start to make a lot more sense. But if you haven't been doing it for that long it's just still a little magical and hand wavey. A lot of Ruby's utility comes from it's metaprogramming abilities, but those take some time to truly grasp.

So please, write stuff for beginners, write more than just "Documentation". Write Getting-started guides, How-to guides, Common use cases documentation, plus examples in standard ruby and with at least 2 frameworks. Bonus points if neither are Rails.

Also please review some basic Ruby stuff when talking about your framework. Dig in a little. Don't assume that we know how this works. We don't. Make it easy to be successful with your code.

2. Focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

I know that some folx don't think it's important. Those folx are wrong. and Stupid. Expanding Ruby means finding people that are overlooked, under-appreciated, and then supporting them. I don't know if ya'll have noticed but almost all tech people are hella white. Just whitey tighties all up in here. Me too. Male, White, Heterosexual, Cis-Gendered, Heck I'm even Christian. I know across the pond and out East it looks a lot different.

Growing Ruby requires building strong community outreach, training, retention, and promotion of folx that don't look like, think like, or talk like the majority of Ruby developers today. I'm serious. If you look around at the current "tech" landscape today. What people are using to make their websites and apps. You won't notice that folx are making these decions based purely on the merits of a technology. It's based on Culture and perception. A whiteness centered culture has driven folx to widely adopt some bad tech. This is a direct result of prioritizing the needs of young, childless, single, white men. People who can work for hours or days on a problem because they hav nothing else to do.

Getting more folx to use Ruby, means going against the grain of tech culture itself.

Give these folx raises, a seat at the table, Hell a piece of the table. Bringing people in to Ruby that aren't already there means accomodating them. Increasing the realm of what's possible. What does that mean? fewer hours? more flexible work schedules? More mentorship? It means doing whatever it takes to bring these folks into the community. Including financial help. Drop a couple of Ks a year, at least, to sponsor, promote, or support under-represented folks coming into the Ruby community.

Forge strong connections with beginners, help them to build their professional networks. We're not getting hired based on our resumes, that almost never really happens. And if that's not the case then we ought to be helping, maybe even focusing on building these relationships with newcomers.

Also NEVER dictate what a donation or support should be used for. People know what to use their money on. Once you give them money, it's theirs.

There is this really silly... assumption? phrase? The best person for the job. The best person for the job doesn't exist, also who cares. We need to find people who are motivated, and kind. Folx that want to grow and improve. The junior developers of today, are the staff engineers of tomorrow. A beginners perspective sheds light on the spaces infrequently seen by an expert. The entrance.

Don't take my word for it. Read Kim Crayton.

3. Promote Framework diversity.

I am biased because I've been performing Necromancy on Camping for over a year. But sincerely, do your best, BEST, to promote framework diversity. A mono culture breeds in weakness. Everyone using Rails when they use Ruby means that only a certain narrow band of problems are easily addressed. It means that different perspectives or priorities are ignored.

Like Motoko Kutsanagi says: "If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation...It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death."

So too goes the Ruby way. Overspecialized in a single monolithic framework, All Roads, well rails, lead to… well rails.

Some Great alternative frameworks and tools:

Hanami
Sinatra
Bridgetown
Roda
Camping (Maybe it'll be ready by the summer)

The monoculture is really bad, but there are great signs of this changing. The rise of Hanami and Roda as framework alternatives. The steady march of progress with RACK and it's associated projects. Sinatra just got a brand new release. Phlex, a new templating and component library, seemingly brought to life from nothing in about six months by Joel Drapper, and it's fast as hell. The joy around writing with ruby hasn't abated, and genuinely feels like it's accelerating.

4. Teach more than just Ruby!

This is a big one! Most of what we're doing is making websites. There is no ruby on a webpage. I bet you didn't know that it was just a bunch of HTML,CSS, and Javascript. But it is. Like for reals.

Recently I had the necessity to make a mostly static website, I tried out Bridgetown for the first time, and it was great. Almost no hickups, and I used just regular old HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Almost no JavaScript also. Kids these days think that you need complicated build processes to get a site online. Every "Hello World" or "Crud App" looks so bad because they are devoid of styles. Exceptions to this are few.

If you want to get folks to adopt Ruby, make it easy for them to understand the problem they have, and to find the solutions to the problem they have. Teach the whole enchilada. Top to bottom. Give examples and use cases. I know ya'll know how to do this stuff.

Teach around the problem. Keep folx in your documentation and solve as much of the problem as you can. Hell it will be reference for yourself in a few weeks when you forget something basic anyways.

5. Excise harmful folx

Kick em out. Are they being Racist DumbHasHasses? Show them the door. Are they taking credit for other folx work? Get outta here. Genius is a myth, aint nobody got it.

Harmful, bigotted, and prejudiced folx drive away the exact people you want to bring into the community. They gatekeep and centralize power and influence. Centralized systems have a single point of failure. When it comes to people, it makes a community brittle, poised to either break and fracture, or pull the whole lot down a darker path. Harmful folx narrow perspective, and thus, awareness of what's possible or important.

This may not be a completely bad thing though. The majority of the reason I'm working on Camping, and focusing on this community, is sheer rage at the idiocy of some folks here. A combination of Rage and Sunk Cost Fallacy.

My dad always said that sometimes anger can be a great motivator. Something won't get fixed until you get angry enough to go fix it yourself. That's why I'm here folks. I'm hella Angry.

Karl Oscar Weber February 21, 2023

Isolated

I feel socially isolated by the structure of the place I live in. I like Art, Design, and Culture. Outside of the black mirrors I have, I don't see it, hear it, or experience it.

The physical structure of Western America is shit. Everything requires a car. A car to here, a car to there. The cars are expensive, and dirty, and fucking suck. We live in houses, single family homes. With a nice big buffer between each house. I never see my neighbors except when i glimpse them moving to or from their cars and their homes.

Society is designed to keep us poor, tired, stupid, isolated. To wring out the creativity from our souls, to leave us empty and dross. It is designed to be this way.

We can design something better, but it will take intention. We can improve our lives, and the lives of our neighbhors, but it will require a fuck ton of work. I wnat to do that work but I'm not sure how to start. Maybe I'll write my name on every wall I find. See if that helps.