Public Domain Image Archive

Explore our hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.

Design Systems Database: Surf among top‑notch Design Systems

A collection of collections, this is a directory of design systems, with the handy option to browse by component type. The blueprints section is still a bit thin on the ground, but likes the most useful bit—an in-depth dissection of individual compenent types.

Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Incident Database

The AI Incident Database is dedicated to indexing the collective history of harms or near harms realized in the real world by the deployment of artificial intelligence systems.

The lost thread

The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.

Demystifying Public Speaking by Lara Callender Hogan

Lara’s superb book on public speaking is now available in its entirity for free as a web book!

And a very beautiful web book it is too! All it needs is a service worker so it works offline.

Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data

I like the way that Simon is liberating his data from silos and making it work for him.

‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth | WIRED

The title says it all, really. This is another great piece of writing from Paul Ford.

I’ve noticed that when software lets nonprogrammers do programmer things, it makes the programmers nervous. Suddenly they stop smiling indulgently and start talking about what “real programming” is. This has been the history of the World Wide Web, for example. Go ahead and tweet “HTML is real programming,” and watch programmers show up in your mentions to go, “As if.” Except when you write a web page in HTML, you are creating a data model that will be interpreted by the browser. This is what programming is.

SofaConf 2020 - a technical write-up | Trys Mudford

Trys describes the backend architecture of the excellent Sofa Conf website. In short, it’s a Jamstack dream: all of the convenience and familiarity of using a database-driven CMS (Craft), combined with all the speed and resilience of using a static site generator (Eleventy).

I love the fact that anyone on the Clearleft events team can push to production with a Slack message.

I also love that the site is Lighthousetastically fast.

Resilient Management | A book for new managers in tech

I got a preview copy of this book and, my oh my, it is superb!

If your job involves dealing with humans (or if it might involve dealing with humans in the future), you’ll definitely want to read this.

Ways to think about machine learning — Benedict Evans

This strikes me as a sensible way of thinking about machine learning: it’s like when we got relational databases—suddenly we could do more, quicker, and easier …but it doesn’t require us to treat the technology like it’s magic.

An important parallel here is that though relational databases had economy of scale effects, there were limited network or ‘winner takes all’ effects. The database being used by company A doesn’t get better if company B buys the same database software from the same vendor: Safeway’s database doesn’t get better if Caterpillar buys the same one. Much the same actually applies to machine learning: machine learning is all about data, but data is highly specific to particular applications. More handwriting data will make a handwriting recognizer better, and more gas turbine data will make a system that predicts failures in gas turbines better, but the one doesn’t help with the other. Data isn’t fungible.

Metaballs

Metaballs, not to be confused with meatballs, are organic looking squishy gooey blobs.

Here’s the maths behind the metaballs (implemented in SVG).

Let’s talk about usernames

This post goes into specifics on Django, but the broader points apply no matter what your tech stack. I’m relieved to find out that The Session is using the tripartite identity pattern (although Huffduffer, alas, isn’t):

What we really want in terms of identifying users is some combination of:

1. System-level identifier, suitable for use as a target of foreign keys in our database
2. Login identifier, suitable for use in performing a credential check
3. Public identity, suitable for displaying to other users

Many systems ask the username to fulfill all three of these roles, which is probably wrong.

Approximate Text Search Made Easy

A step-by-step explanation by Henrik on how he implemented fuzzy search on his music site—something I could do on The Session. He even talks about expanding this to work with ABC notation.

PURL: A Portable Content Store - Not Enough Neon

I need to wrap my head around the details of this approach, but it sounds like it might be something I could do here on my site (where I feel nervous about my current dependency on a database).

I Dreamed of a Perfect Database | New Republic

A really nice piece by Paul Ford on the history of databases and the dream of the Semantic Web.

Sometimes I get a little wistful. The vision of a world of connected facts, one big, living library, remains beautiful, and unfulfilled.

One thing though: the scrolling on this page is sooooo janky that I had to switch off JavaScript just to read these words comfortably.

Paris Review – “One Murder Is Statistically Utterly Unimportant”: A Conversation with Warren Ellis, Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple interviews Warren Ellis. Fun and interesting …much like Molly Crabapple and Warren Ellis.

Abandonedography

Armchair travelling to Ballardian locations.

How to support full Unicode in MySQL databases · Mathias Bynens

Some good database character-encoding advice from Mathias.

ID card database destroyed - a set on Flickr

For once, I’m happy to see data being destroyed.

Akihabara

A framework for creating old-school arcade games in the browser, using HTML5.