Tootfinder

What academics say and what they mean
Various sources - I forgot the name and author of that one paper
A promising area for an initial study - I have to do this to get funding
An extensive literature review - A quick Google search
Is impossible to summarise simply - I still don’t understand
Approaching the traditional threshold for statistical significance - Not significant
More research is required - I need funding
Academia Obscura

"Technical communities provide software businesses with an audience, a test bed, and eventually, a customer pool for their products and services, but this only works if the products are good enough to begin with. This insight was clearly defined by Guy Kawasaki, arguably the person who invented the field of Developer Relations, during his tenure as Chief Evangelist at Apple from 1983 to 1987."

Guy Kawasaki
There is a website out there providing an answer to the question "What is Developer Relations?," a question that this author, whose job title is precisely that one, gets a lot. According to this resource, Developer Relations is an umbrella term encompassing three major areas of activity: "Community," "Content," and "Product;" a perfect description of a job role, at least as far as this author is concerned.

I love what Tauri has done, a lightweight version of Electron, where you author the backend code in Rust.
But while I love Rust, I do not love it for app building, and I wanted to have that HTML-model for programming but available in Swift.
I used assorted AI tools to port Tauri to Swift (it still reuses the big chunks of code from Tauri), but now you can write HTML desktop apps in Swift:

GitHub - velox-apps/velox: Velox is a port of Tauri to Swift.
Velox is a port of Tauri to Swift. Contribute to velox-apps/velox development by creating an account on GitHub.

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-future-2026.html?m=1
I found this blog interesting despite (or maybe because) of the author having different game preferences from me
An overly simplistic reading that misses the point is "OSR …

The Future - 2026
A Dyson Logos Classic This post was written as a "Secret Santicore" response to the Dododecahedron's request : " What are your hopes for t...

Day 28: Samira Ahmed
As foreshadowed, we're back to YA land, which represents a lot of what I've been enjoying from the library lately.
I've read "Hollow Fires", "This Book Won't Burn", and "Love, Hate, and other Filters" by Ahmed, along with "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know" which is quite different. All four are teen ~romances with interesting things to say about racism & growing up as a South Asian Muslim, but whereas the first three are set in small-town Indiana, the third is set in France and includes a historical fiction angle involving Dumas and a hypothetical Muslim woman who was (in this telling) the inspiration for several Lord Byron poems.
Ahmed's novels all include a strong and overt theme of social justice, and it's refreshing to see an author not try to wade around the topic or ignore it. Her romances are complex, with imperfect protagonists and endings that aren't always "happily ever after" although they're satisfying and believable.
My library has a plethora of similar authors I've been enjoying, including Adiba Jaigirdar (who appeared earlier in this list), Sabaa Tahir ("All my Rage" is fantastic but I'm less of a fan of her fantasy stuff), Sabina Khan ("The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali"), and Randa Abdel-Fattah ("Does My Head Look Big In This?"; from an earlier era). Ahmed gets the spot here because I really like her politics and the way she works them into her writing. Her characters are unapologetic advocates against things like book bans, and Ahmed doesn't second-guess them or try to make things more palatable for those who want to ban books (or whatever). Her historical fiction in "Mad..." is also really cool in terms of "huh that could actually totally be true" and grappling with literary sexism from ages past.
#30AuthorsNoMen

"Did Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (1915-1990) read “An Experiment in Time”? Could it be that he had a series of dreams between 1960 and 1968, and that he quickly wrote them down in his diary before breakfast? We can only speculate. But we do know for a fact that those dreams begat a nothing short of extraordinary sequence of writings."

J. C. R. Licklider & M. Mitchell Waldrop
The writings of Jorge Luis Borges twist our perception of time and space. In between articles about Shaw, Chesterton, Wilde, and Coleridge, his 1952 book "Otras Inquisiciones" included an unexpected gem: a short story called "El Tiempo y J. W. Dunne". The question is, who was this John William Dunne and what does he have to do with time? Well, his name might be forgotten by contemporary audiences, but Dunne was the author of one of the biggest bestsellers of the first half of the twentieth cent…