Awesome finds - April/May 2025

Lotta books, some curiosities and web dev related things, which I think was lacking lately.

Books

[Ireland 🇮🇪] A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce: Joyce is notoriously difficult, but this book is surprisingly not! In fact, it's quite sweet and nostalgic, making you long for a childhood you never had, like the one spent at boys' schools and growing up in a completely different world.

[Denmark 🇩🇰] Babette's Feast and Sorrow-Acre by Isak Dinesen: a very unusual and captivating read. As I remember it, both of these short stories are about characters who are described only by the situations and circumstances they find themselves in. There are so few descriptions and emotions, and only what is necessary is said. Very scandinavian, if you ask me.

[Nigeria 🇳🇬] Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I loved it; it's one of the best books I've read in a while. I knew almost nothing about the American/European dream that some Nigerian young people might have, and that was a little close to heart given how similar my own aspirations were during my childhood and teenage years in Russia. At the same time, as a migrant myself, even if not to the USA, it was also very interesting to read and even relate in some parts, though the experience is, ofc, drastically different.

Something I didn't like (was actually kind of angry about it): Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl [Austria 🇦🇹] I should have read Zweig instead. OK,the part about the concentration camps is important and very valid. It was interesting to reflect on the horrors of camp life from the perspective of the human psyche. But jesus christ why the part about logotherapy does not read as therapy, rather, it reads as "I am so clever, I thought of a nifty way to justify the terrible things that have happened to this person by saying that they are somehow justified by the cleansing suffering, rather than accepting that the world is a bad place where bad things sometimes happen to good people for no reason". I understand that people need meaning, but is this really therapy? Still angry.

Music

Lotta love in this selection:

• everyone, outside by Cassia: an incredible album released a little bit too early I'd say, but still: the same "tropical vibes by non-tropical guys". Very tender, anxious reflections on love, life and the world around us. Very pretty, comforting indie music that makes you want to dance to reframe and almost cry to forever. I saw them at a concert recently, it was very cool to catch this "new album" feeling!

• SABLE, fABLE by Bon Iver: I feel like this album is all over the place. I can't concentrate enough to understand what's going on, it's somehow overwhelming. I didn't feel this way about 22, A Million or i,i, so it's a strange new feeling. But it is beautiful, angelic and oh so tender at times. When I don't try so hard, it is very soothing, and Justin Vernon is still the best.

• And the Adjacent Possible by OK Go: it is curious how everything OK Go make is a hit or miss for me, like on a song by song basis rather than for particular albums? Songs that I like, I love. Songs that I don't like, I've probably only listened to once or twice and then never again. This album is absolutely the same - for example, This Is How It Ends touches some very true and right corners of my soul, while I absolutely don't care about half of the album (looking at the song titles, they tell me nothing). But I still deeply care about OK Go and I'm very grateful that they are who they are: geniuses.

• The Seize by Jordan Rakei: I just can't, Rakei's music is too beautiful for this world.

• Sundown by LEISURE: I love LEISURE very much, ultimate chill for pretty much everything, from day drinking to love making. Seriously!

• My And Me by Everything Is Recorded feat. Sampha, Laura Groves, Rickey Washington and Alabaster DePlume: a very touching and intimate piece that I cannot stop listening to. There's something hypnotic about it, with flutes and angelic vocals. ain't it a lonely feeling, talking about "my" and "me" instead of "we" and "free"? So good!

YouTube and series

• Jet Lag: The Game: there are a few shows on YouTube that I like (or tolerate), because I generally don't like video content, unless it's a film or TV series. But Jet Lag is an awesome exception to the rule because it's had 15 seasons of silly, funny, wholesome and somewhat educational content. I don't want to give too much away, but there have actually been quite a few different games and formats over the course of the 15 seasons. It's sort of a travelling game show based on commuting and completing challenges. If that doesn't sound interesting enough, Tom Scott was a team member in one of the seasons and nerded even harder than usual about pretty much everything.

• Black Mirror: Common People: jesus fcking christ, this is the most heart and stomach wrenching episode of any show I've seen. thanks I hate it, 10/10, still trying to erase it from my mind.

• Perfect Days: From the vibes alone, I knew I was going to like it very much, and I did! It's a tender, beautiful and sweet little film about everything and nothing all at once, and I think that's exactly what's missing in the fast pacing world of reels and tiks and toks.

Dev stuff

• Without this survey, we'd prolly never know that 62% of devs are actually happy with their jobs AND looks like it matches allllmost perfectly with 57% NOT stating that the compensation is the biggest problem in their workspace. Surprise-surprise. I am kind of surprised and cannot express the full range of my feelings upon seeing that only 16% of respondents are worried about AI, but I totally agree with the 212 people who want to move to Iceland. See you there, ma dudes.

• I am absolutely fascinated over the endless possibilities of tracking and/or fingerprinting you via visited links browser functionality aka links turning purple, something like this nifty trick:

The page simply assigns a common English word for each of the top 50 most visited sites in the US, and colors them black if the link is :visited. Unvisited links are white and therefore invisible, and a few decoy words are thrown in to make it less obvious how it works. Then we just put an invisible div over the whole thing to prevent the user from clicking or selecting the links, which would give away the trick. (Source)

It was nice to hear that some work actually has been done to prevent this kind of SHAMELESS BEHAVIOUR 😡. But still, this kind of ingenuity is... fun?

• It's absolutely worth reading if you're interested in optimising the performance of your React apps. If you're not, well, tough luck - AI isn't going to do it, so someone (ahem!) has to!

• Moving on to another unsexy topic in web development: accessibility. But this time, we might actually be getting something good, rather than just being SHAMED for not complying with something that is good enough. WCAG is changing for better, and instead of saying that something is inaccessible due to certain criteria, we should recognise (gasp!) the levels and nuances!

• &&=, >>>= || ^= ???. Just click here to learn what is going on, if it all sounds alien to you. All I know is that this bad boy is certainly going to help me during next Advent of Code, for sure.

Serious stuff

📘 I love Lolita a lot. I've read it in English at least twice. I read it in Russian once (and was absolutely repulsed, but that's a completely different story!) Whenever I consider sharing this with someone, I'm very cautious about how it will be perceived because some people react very strongly even to the mention of it (especially those who haven't read it). Anyway, this essay is a great summary of what Lolita meant to Nabokov, and of the conflict between so-called 'problematic' art and people's uncertainty in the face of it.

🏢 First, I fell down a rabbit hole about The Illinois (a bonkers building but that's exactly why it was so fascinating to read everything about it). Then I've spent an hour browsing /r/Unbuilt_Architecture, because a) there's something so uniquely tragic about it b) genuinely disappointed we never saw all (ok maybe not all but most) of them built. To polish it all, this gem of an article found me, and I learned that fluorescent lighting actually led to a huge increase in usable space inside buildings, meaning it's no longer necessary to sit by a window - which makes total sense, but is also such a cool fact!

The Eiffel Tower with added wings during the original design competition. Paris. Stephen Sauvestre. 1880's.
byu/MCofPort inUnbuilt_Architecture

💿 It is hard to imagine the musical world without album covers. In the light of the Grammy Awards introducing a new award for the Best Album Cover, it is only appropriate to take a deeper look at who we have to thank for making music visible. I was extremely pleased to learn that jazz LPs played a significant part in the history of album covers, because that is very fitting (and jazz album covers are sorta cool). What's my favourite album cover? Glad you've asked! I've no idea!

✝️ I had no clue that Conclave the movie was based on a real story (but maybe not because we’re not entiiiirely sure it really happened but I'm going to decide for all of us that it did).

Silly things

🔡 I work in a 50/50 Polish/English-speaking environment, and my Polish team is absolutely great at tolerating my shakey B1–B2 level. So, when speaking two foreign languages daily, my accent and pronunciation are actually the last things on my mind. BUT STILL, I often think that I'll probably never sound like a local with Polish-specific sounding letters. Shibbolets is the idea of using this as a way to "differentiate members of ingroups from those of outgroups", or to identify foreigners (or even spies). There are a lot of curious examples, such as the different pronunciation of city names or hand gestures.

♟️ Don't know shit about chess, but boy I do appreciate the amount of different formats you can play one game in. This is just one of them, but that's also a fun enough application of collective intelligence and crowd decision-making. Curious that it actually worked (ish?)!

Apparently, there was also a merch????

To celebrate Magnus Carlsen’s battle against 115,000+ players in the biggest chess game ever, we dropped a few super-limited pieces bearing one of Magnus’ most iconic quotes: over the chessboard “beating someone once is not revenge”. pic.twitter.com/EmZtfMQ86z

— Chess.com (@chesscom) April 24, 2025

💯 OK first of all, this is awful and lookism and non-ethical and what not BUT: I enjoy the concept of using AI for frivolous purposes rather than for SERIOUS tasks like writing school essays or creating terrible art. It also makes you think again about how many pictures of you are out there just because you happened to be in the way of someone's shot at a tourist location.

🧮 Sometimes it helps to understand a situation better if you turn it into a set of variables, a simplified version of the real thing. Often, your brain isn't braining to understand probability immediately, and/or isn't able to think abstractly enough to not concentrate on the details. The Unsure Calculator is a nice tool if you are struggling to work with probabilities.

💬 Do you ever speak so quickly that you end up thinking in the background and talking gibberish, like spork and foon? Well apparently it is called spoonerism! Now you know, but don't fret: pobody's nerfect and better nate than lever.

To finish this edition, here's a snowy landscape. I don't know about you, but I find winter-themed art incredibly comforting.

Wishing you all the best!