Hello dear readers. I wish I could say I’ve got a restful weekend in front of me, but today we’re driving to New Orleans to pick up our eldest who has been in Germany for a year, and tomorrow we fly to Las Vegas for the Adobe ColdFusion Summit. Both are things I’m quite happy about, but it’s going to be a lot. I’m currently sitting, drinking coffee, and watching "Grey’s Anatomy", a good guilty-pleasure show.

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Alright, let’s get to it!

A Look at Japanese Web Design

This is an absolutely fascinating look at how different countries culture’s impact their web design, in this case, Japan. I’ve seen web sites from Japan before and absolutely noticed the differences, but Phoebe Yu does an incredibly deep dive into the why of those differences.

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Free APIs

Next up is a giant list of free APIs: https://github.com/public-apis/public-apis. Maybe I’m weird, but I love playing with random APIs, and free APIs make that play even easier. This repository contains a huge list of APIs categorized into things like Business (that’s me, I’m all business), Dictionaries, Geocoding, and more. And since I pitched my newsletter above, I’ll point out I discovered this gem via the excellent weird wide web hole newsletter run by Salma Alam-Maylor. I definitely recommend subscribing.

In the Beginning There Was… BASIC

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that, probably, I’m older than many of my readers. I got my start with computers in the early 80s on an Apple 2e (or Plus, I can’t remember which we had) my mom had gotten from her employer. I played a lot of games on that machine, but at some point, I wanted to actually do things with the hardware, and that meant coding. BASIC was incredibly approachable, something I greatly appreciate now as a developer advocate. I wrote, probably, thousands of programs on that Apple, many of which were copied by hand from magazines like Family Computing.

"Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing" by Clive Thompson does a great job capturing my feelings about the language and the impact it had on my life.

While I don’t want to go back to BASIC (ignoring that silly experiment from earlier this year), the language will always have a special place in my heart.

And now for something interesting…

This video was shared with me by my friend Todd Sharp and the subject manner may not be something you think is interesting – refrigeration. But in thirty minutes, the presenter (sorry, I can’t seem to find their name and if they aren’t being obvious about it, I won’t hunt), talks about refrigeration and specifically thermoelectric cooling. This is absolutely not something I’d watch if Todd had not shared with me, but honestly, this is a master class in how to make a technical topic interesting. It’s informative and fun at the same time. Enjoy.

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Raymond Camden