TWH is back !

Sun, 14 Apr 2019 07:34:35 -0500

Twitter Writes Hamlet is back !

See it live http://twitter-writes-hamlet.com

Having learned from the first version of TWH, I decided to completely rewrite it. Here’s what changed:

Code rewrite

My initial approach was somewhat misguided. TWH would actually listen to 2 realtime Twitter streams: statuses/sample and statuses/filter.

statuses/sample gives a bunch of random tweets. statuses/filer was used to track some recurring words, mostly characters names (as they do occur a lot). The idea was that between these 2, I would get enough tweets to find the words.

In parallel to that, TWH...

Twitter Poem

Sun, 02 Sep 2018 07:34:34 -0500

Try it here!

The twitter random API is a wonderful source of randomness. Except it’s all but random: it’s a stream of human consciousness. This stream won’t be the same today as it will tomorrow. But what does it say ?

Since the first day I saw an endless stream of tweets in my terminal, I’ve wanted to capture the essence of what was said. But there is just too much, you can’t read it all.

What if I could get the most tweeted words and...

Captioning memes in Python

Sat, 22 Jul 2017 07:34:33 -0500

As a meme enthusiast, I’ve been using a lot of meme generators. Recently my meme workflow is something like:

Google the image macro name + “generator”
Click the first hit
Use the online generator
paste the image link to Slack

This is obviously not optimal.

So I got excited with the idea of making my own tool. Something that would allow me to type a sentence and get it rendered as a meme !

I didn’t find anything good enough on Github but it...

Twitter 8-Ball

Thu, 08 Jun 2017 12:34:33 -0500

Here’s a quick experiment:

You know the Magic 8-Ball ? That thing that you shake and it gives you a random answer:

It’s a random device. It will only give you 3 types of answers:

yes
no
non-committal

I’ve made this: Twitter 8-Ball

It’s the same thing but using Twitter as the random generator. Ask your question and click on the ball. It will then start listening to Twitter for anyone tweeting a short phrase that can be interpreted as Magic 8-Ball answer.

And then you’ll get your answer, from...

Twitter writes Hamlet

Sun, 05 Jun 2016 09:34:33 -0500

If you put 100 monkeys with typewriters in a room long enough, eventually you’ll get Hamlet.

This is an expression I’ve heard many times. It means anything can come out of random; that always fascinated me.

A monkey on a typewriter would produce random letters. 6 random letters could be dhsllr or hamlet or klefim. Sometimes randomness produces sequences that seem not random. But the fact that snake has meaning but uvzmp has not is pretty much arbitrary. Some sequence of letters have meaning, some don’t.

Out of...

I'm Google: Couch mode

Thu, 21 Apr 2016 06:15:37 -0500

The project I’m Google by Dina Kelberman is amazing. It’s an almost infinite collection of photos, hand picked by the artist.

The collection is so large that it’s hard to reach the end by using the tumblr site. Also, you do need to scroll. As a couch potato myself, I did the only thing that seemed to make sense: a couch mode version.

The main difference is that you don’t need to scroll and it starts at a random image. Perfect for a screensaver !

I wrote a script to fetch all images from the original tumblr...

Add content elements more easily in TYPO3

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 12:46:16 -0500

What TYPO3 is good for, it lacks in general UX. One thing I find particularly painful is the edition workflow when you compose pages. Adding content, especially when you use grids (with grid elements in this case), is not a great experience.

Case in point: the content element selector:

First of all, the page reloads completely after you click the “I want to add something here” button. This forces the user to switch context, something that should probably be avoided when composing a page.

Then comes the selector itself, layout in tabs....

My Plan for a Design System Framework

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 22:21:35 -0500

I love design systems (aka styleguides).

Combined with the idea of atomic design, they make a lot of sense. Unfortunately they’re hard to do right and keep up to date, especially in small projects.

Patternlab.io is a great base for an online styleguide. However, I feel it lacks a key thing to be a “living styleguide”: integrate into developers workflow.

I believe once a component has been described, integrated and tested it should become easy to re-use and update, across the whole application.

Web Components are great, but won’t help you much...