Mirrored

A collection of remarkable articles and essays, saved here in case a source website disappears. Each page contains a header with a link to the source website.

• A Conversation with Arthur Whitney
  An interview with Arthur Whitney, the author of the K programming language, on the benefits and applications of APL-style languages.
• Against discipline
  An essay by Irina Dumitrescu on the difficulty of starting, and on the benefit of approaching a task not with discipline, but with play.
• all the roary night
  Advice from Michael John Harrison on writing a story, rejecting exhaustive planning and research in favour of writing from one’s own emotion and experience.
• Art of README
  A set of guidelines for structuring a clear and informative README file.
• The Candlemakers’ Petition
  A satirical petition by Claude-Frédéric Bastiat (1846) which advocates for the abolition of import restrictions which favour the interests of the producer over the consumer.
• The Cargo Cult of Game Mechanics
  An essay by Steven Wittens on the importance of agency and consequence in computer game design.
• Choice, Complicity, Consequence
  A talk by Alexis Kennedy about the importance of providing meaningful choices to the player when designing a game.
• The Courtship of Red Elsie
  A tale by Kathleen Jennings of old rites and old gods.
• The Cynic and the Boatbuilder
  An essay by Charles Eisenstein on the role of hope and individual action in changing the world.
• The Eternal Mainframe
  An essay by Rudolf Winestock on the centralisation of power enabled by the mainframe paradigm, and on the resurgence and dominance of mainframe computing in modern times.
• How to write a Git commit message
  A structured approach to writing clear and informative commit messages in Git.
• Implementing VisiCalc
  A retrospective by Bob Frankston on the design and development of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for personal computers, in 1978.
• The Internet Is Shit
  An essay on the downfall of the quality of the internet post-commercialisation, and of the importance of finding information in other places.
• Memberships work
  A retrospective by Craig Mod on the membership program he created, where his fans fund his creative endeavours.
• On the foolishness of “natural language programming”
  An essay by Edsgar Dijkstra on the fallacious belief that natural language interfaces make computers easier to use.
• Playing to Win
  A recount and a lesson in economics by Alice Maz, wherin a tiny clique of players achieve dizzying levels of wealth on a public Minecraft server.
• the rite of computing
  A poem celebrating the beauty at the essence of computation, and exploring the relationship between modern computation and extractive capitalism.
• Self-reliance
  An essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841) on non-conformance, self-determination, and the rejection of mediocrity.
• Silence is a Commons
  A speech by Ivan Illich (1983) on the enclosure of the commons, and on the vulnerability of the commons of speech to enclosure via computer-mediated communication.
• Situated Software
  An essay by Clay Shirky on the ability of non-scalable systems to exploit local contexts.
• Software disenchantment
  An essay by Niki Tonsky on the disappointing performance of modern software.
• Stages of denial
  An ode by John Earnest to APL-style languages.
• That which is unique, breaks
  An essay by Simon Sarris on the importance of old ways of thinking and being.
• Turns are Better than Radians
  An argument by Casey Muratori on the benefits of representing angles as turns (periodic over [0,1]) instead of radians (periodic over [0,2\pi]) in computer programs.
• What Colour are your bits?
  An essay by Matthew Skala on the issue of information provenance as it applies to the intersection of computer science and copyright law.
• Why it is important that software projects fail
  An essay by Anthony Berglas on the vital role played by failures to implement new software projects in keeping bureaucratic complexity in check.
• Writing for Engineers
  An article by Heinrich Hartmann on effective technical writing.
• very afraid
  A set of observations by Michael John Harrison on the dangers of worldbuilding.

• You have made your bedrock, now lie in it
• Permacomputing
• The Brutalist Programming Manifesto