MapToPoster is a fun little project that takes open street map data and creates beautiful posters of different cities/locations. More geo projects like this, please.
iamcal.com Since May 2000
Jan 30th: I've been thinking about Logo/Turtle recently and was looking for some good Scratch-like environments for kids to get started in (besides Scratch's own Pen extension). Trinket looks interesting (as an intro to Python), but Turtle Blocks is just what I was looking for. The official hosted version is extremely slow to load for some reason, but it's open source - you can host your own copy and add extensions.
Jan 21st: Nikita's critique of the Mac OS Tahoe icons is accurate and awful. The slow enshittification of everything.
MapToPoster Jan 21st
2025 Reading List Jan 6th
Another year, another 121 books completed, or about 1 every 3 days. My 2025 reading list has a very brief review/summary of each one.
Highlights were The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball and Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin.
While I strive not to be, I can be pretty inconsistent in my reading pace. More books take 1 day to read than any other length of time, with 72% in 3 days or less and 93% within a week. The longest took a full 23 days (because I was on a vacation where I didn't read much).
I read much less on vacation than when I'm at home, and I read the most when I get really dug into a series I love - October was 13 books from Mick Herron's Slough House.
With ~20 years of my reading history tracked, my biggest take away is that there are still so many great books to find :)
Dec 22nd: Jeff & Sanjay recently published a bunch of performance hints, many (most? all?) of which are universally useful approaches for software engineering in general
Dec 22nd: Text editing is just much more complex than you might imagine.
Dec 9th: An interesting (hour long) video about the walk/pathing system from The Witness (and generally how difficult collision and pathing is in 3D games)
Devil Platforms Dec 4th
Level Devil a great little 'frustrating platformer'. I love this genre, mostly to watch, as playing is pretty frustrating [via Myles]
Nov 26th: It's not a long read, but How to not get away with murder is a fun read of extreme incompetence. I figure I would be a much better criminal
About
This is the personal website of Cal Henderson, Slack co-founder & CTO.
I give occasional talks, write code and sometimes articles.
Links
» Twitter
» GitHub
(more, moar)
» Flickr Photos
» Last.fm
» Flengbot (Group Linklog)
» Shakefeed (Best of Mlkshk)
» Building Scalable Wesites (My book)
» My Conference Talks
Games
» Glitch: Bees!
» Starcraft: Bees #187
» Diablo 3: Bees #1517
» Steam: iamcal
» XBox Live: iamcal
» EVE: Demitra
» Weewar: iamcal
» Kingdom of Loathing: bees (id #29410)
» My WoW theory blog
