Frank Harmon’s Native Places blog is one of my greatest inspirations for this project. The formula is simple: pair a sketch with a mini-essay, share it online, and repeat.

I send this newsletter once a week, but I sketch and write every single day.

Every year, I have a different feeling about what I do here.

I’m figuring it out. But I enjoy every bit of it and will continue writing, drawing, and publishing for years. (I encourage you to discover the power of writing: start with one word per day.)

I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback, comments, and suggestions, and invite you to write a comment, reply, send me a voice note, or send me a private message.

Thank you, as always, for pushing me to keep going.

Happy newsletterversary.

Listen to "From 9-to-5 to Freedom, A Journey to A Portfolio Career"

In this guest lecture, Nono Martínez Alonso discusses his work on developing intuitive interfaces for creative communities, and how the collaboration between human and artificial intelligences can enhance the design process like, for example, with suggestive drawing. Recorded on 2019.10.30.

Intuitive is an overused term but it simply means that with the average prior knowledge you have you can, more or less, guess the effects of certain actions. In that case, you don't need a lot of trial and error to figure out the logic of the system. […] I don't think it's a deliberate process, but the trivial thing to say is that "People with similar experience have similar ways of responding to the world and similar ways of interacting with the world." —Panagiotis Michalatos

Previous talks

• 2019.09 Machine Learning for Designers at Fresh Eyes Berlin
• 2019.04 Inteligencia artificial aplicada al BIM
• 2018.10 Conoce, Mejora, Explora, Optimiza tus diseños con Refinery

I'm excited to be preparing a newsletter to share my sketches with you on a weekly basis. Each week, subscribers will receive a sketch paired with a short essay. The drive of this project is to sketch and write daily, and to have a medium to share my drawings independent from social media. 👨🏻‍🎨

Curious about the format? Here's a sample email.

If you feel this is your kind of thing, here's how to join.

To improve your experience with Apple Podcasts, we want to share the following information and updates.

iOS 12.2
In addition to bug fixes and feature enhancements, we'd like to call your attention to these improvements to the Podcasts app on iOS 12.2:

• Browse. Featured collections and categories, as well as the Top Episodes and Top Shows charts, are now presented on the Browse tab for easier discovery.
• Episode numbers. Now, both show types, episodic and serial, will display episode numbers for subscribed users as dictated by the itunes:episode tag.
• Mark as Played. With 3D Touch or by tapping …, listeners can now mark episodes as played for their subscribed shows.

Apple Podcasts Preview

Apple Podcasts Preview pages on the web have been updated. For the first time, we are introducing a dedicated episode page that includes the ability to play directly on the web. The design is also mobile responsive and provides a better experience for Android users.

Podcasts Connect Help

We've updated the RSS tags section to explain the different supported tags more clearly and show how they are displayed on Apple Podcasts on iOS 12.2. Also, the relevant section now distinguishes between required, recommended, and situational tags. Previous tags and values will continue to be supported unless otherwise communicated.

Being able to play podcast episodes in a web browser (and even have an individual page per episode) is huge.

They've also updated the example of a well-formed RSS feed.

It’s not a better UI — it’s the facade of a better UI built on top of the same old crap, which was in turn a facade on top of older crap.

[…]

I’d rather retire from using computers than use Windows 10. What a mess.

"I had a chance to reminisce with Nono about what it means to get simple and embody a growth mindset on his very special podcast. Mixed in are bits about my childhood, my artistic pursuits, and my current love and passion, NuVu Studio." —Saba Ghole, Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of NuVu Studio

If you're intrigued about how growth mindset can be taken to reality, listen to this episode and learn about how NuVu, an innovation school for middle and high school students, helps students build long-lasting core competencies and creative skills.

🎙 Listen on iTunes · Spotify · Overcast · Stitcher

Take a look at the talk links.

• Talk audio
• Talk video
• Suggestive Drawing
• RefineryBeta
• Dynamo
• The Living
• pix2pix
• pix2pix-tensorflow
• TensorFlow
• Runway
• Nono on Twitter
• Podcast · Getting Simple
• Mailing list · Getting Simple

? Matt talks about his rituals to slow down and stay afloat amongst all the things competing for your attention; embracing change and automation; techniques to be more creative; the rationale behind his ten-year life cycles; why he just transitioned from Autodesk to Tesla; and a lot more.

Take a look at the show notes and where to listen.

Hi, I'm artist and coder James Paterson.

Norman is the animation tool that I’ve always wanted. I built it in JavaScript, it runs in a web browser and lets me animate naturally in 3D using VR controllers. Here’s the source code.

To use the tool you’ll need some rather fancy VR gear, but you can also play with my animations below and enjoy the animated short, made entirely with Norman.

"Inter is a typeface specially designed for user interfaces with focus on high legibility of small-to-medium sized text on computer screens." It's the most similar typeface I've found to Apple's San Francisco. The best part? It's open source and free. You can find it on GitHub.

Take a look at the samples.

Browse the image here.

We present a system that transforms a monocular video of a soccer game into a moving 3D reconstruction, in which the players and field can be rendered interactively with a 3D viewer or through an Augmented Reality device. At the heart of our paper is an approach to estimate the depth map of each player, using a CNN that is trained on 3D player data extracted from soccer video games. We compare with state of the art body pose and depth estimation techniques, and show results on both synthetic ground truth benchmarks, and real YouTube soccer footage.

This is a paper from Konstantinos Rematas², Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman²³, Brian Curless², and Steve Seitz²⁴.

Open the PDF.

A while ago, I added a list of books I've read (and highly recommend) to my Library. Today I'm starting a list of books I'd like to read next.

• Farsighted by Steven Johnson
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• The Coddling of the American Mind¹ by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
• The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda

Let me know of any other good reads you know of.

Listen to this episode.

Tell Git to assume a file is unchanged

git update-index --assume-unchanged file

Tell Git not to assume a file is unchanged anymore

After this command is run, the repository continues tracking the file. It might have changes that git will want to commit.

git update-index --no-assume-unchanged file

Roll back the changes you made while the file was --assume-unchanged

In case you made changes while --assume-unchanged was on and don't want to keep the changes on the file: Roll-back to where the repository is when you want to pull or push changes.

git checkout -- file

const numbers = [1, 3, 100, 24];
for (const item of numbers) {
  console.log(item); // 1, 3, 100, 24
}

Before you go

If you found this useful, you might want to join my newsletter; or take a look at other posts about code, TypeScript, and React.

let numbers = [-34, 100, 20, 2, 3, 5, 6];
numbers.sort( (a, b) => a - b ); // Ascending sort
// [ -34, 2, 3, 5, 6, 20, 100 ]
numbers.sort( (a, b) => b - a ); // Descending sort
// [ 100, 20, 6, 5, 3, 2, -34 ]

Focus on what matters: code

Here are some comments by Sarah Drasner on CSS-Tricks:

Previously, there were only few options here that could help with that. You could piece together other services, set them up, and integrate them with GitHub. You could also write post-commit hooks, which also help.

[...]

Actions are small bits of code that can be run off of various GitHub events, the most common of which is pushing to master. But it's not necessarily limited to that. They’re all directly integrated with GitHub, meaning you no longer need a middleware service or have to write a solution yourself. And they already have many options for you to choose from. For example, you can publish straight to npm and deploy to a variety of cloud services, (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Zeit... you name it) just to name a couple.

But actions are more than deploy and publish. That’s what’s so cool about them. They’re containers all the way down, so you could quite literally do pretty much anything — the possibilities are endless! You could use them to minify and concatenate CSS and JavaScript, send you information when people create issues in your repo, and more... the sky's the limit.

You also don’t need to configure/create the containers yourself, either. Actions let you point to someone else’s repo, an existing Dockerfile, or a path, and the action will behave accordingly. This is a whole new can of worms for open source possibilities, and ecosystems.

Curious about how this all works? Take a look at CSS-Tricks tutorials:

• Setting up your first action
• Writing an action in code
• Creating a custom action

Visit GitHub Actions.

Organizations worldwide are incorporating open source methodologies into the way they build and ship their own software.

[…]

Many companies use the word “innersource” to describe how their engineering teams work together on code. Innersource is a development methodology where engineers build proprietary software using best practices.

[…]

[I]nnersource code helps your team discover, customize, and reuse existing internal projects. They can also establish and build on a shared set of documented processes to optimize the way your company deploys and uses software. This can lead to lower cost, greater flexibility, and an end to vendor lock-in.

[…]

Within an enterprise, individual developers can pursue their interests, share ideas on a level playing field, and more easily learn from their peers. However, innersource also requires a cultural shift. Your team’s culture will need to encourage knowledge sharing and welcome contributions from across your organization. […] For innersource projects, distributing control across a smaller group of participants frequently makes approvals and reviews more effective. Creating a small, cross-functional team of decision makers can also help teams stick to quality standards and gain executive support.
Adopting innersource practices is like starting an open source community within your organization. As with open source, transparent collaboration mobilizes a community’s collective knowledge and skills to create better software. An innersource community, in contrast, contains the knowledge, skills, and abilities of people and tools within a single enterprise.

Why do companies adopt it?

As businesses evolve and differentiate their products and services with software and data—or recognize software and data is their product or service—they quickly realize that traditional development methods and tooling don’t quite work. The slow, systematic practice of gathering requirements, holding meetings, and developing in silos is not in step with the pace of technology today—or even the pace of customer demands.
Innersource helps teams build software faster and work better together—resulting in higher-quality development and better documentation. It also can help companies become more efficient by:

• Making it easy to find and reuse code on a broad scale, avoiding wasted resources and duplication
• Driving rapid development, regardless of company size

• Reducing silos and simplifying collaboration throughout the entire organization—inside and between teams and functions, as well as across teams and business lines
• Increasing clarity between engineers and management, as well as anyone else who’s interested
• Creating a culture of openness, a precursor to open source participation
• Reinforcing the pride, growth, and job satisfaction felt by team members who help wherever there is a need

It is a safe bet that the highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. —Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable

Listen to artist, designer, and educator Jiyoo Jye on the struggles of making art and choosing your projects; education at an innovation school as a creative; when to share your work and the role of feedback; media consumption and technology; and her approach to simple living and daily routines.

And hey! You can now listen on iTunes, Spotify, Overcast, and Stitcher!

Along his definition of artificial intelligence, "[The] simulation of intelligent behavior in computers," he shared the following quotes of some of the most relevant researchers of artificial intelligence over the last years.

Models for Thinking, Perception, Action.

—Patrick H. Winston, MIT

Many things can be AI, including simple programming. AI is the automation of thought.

—François Chollet, researcher and author of Keras

A field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.

—Arthur Samuel, MIT. Samuel Checkers, 1957

If you're interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning, you should definitely follow @c_valenzuelab, @ml5js, and @runwayml.

Last week, I had a really good time at Generative Design Day, in Barcelona. I recently relocated from the US to Spain. This was a great opportunity to meet some Autodesk colleagues in person (among which were Raquel Bascones Recio, Kean Walmsley, Jacob Small, Paolo Serra, Safi Hage, and Reginald de Visscher); to talk about the next-generation AEC tools I'm working on at the Autodesk Generative Design team; and to meet some of our European customers.

You can head over to Kean Walmsley's blog to read more about the event — these are my highlights from his post:

[Autodesk] had invited our larger customers from all over Europe to come and hear about the use of generative design technologies in the AEC space, both present and future.

[...]

For those of you who aren’t familiar with The Living, they’re an architectural practice that Autodesk acquired back in 2014. [...] Over the last few years The Living has done pioneering work applying generative design in the AEC space. They’re the ones responsible for the generative design of the A320 Bionic Partition (admittedly more of an engineering project), the generative space planning of Autodesk Toronto’s new office in the MaRS district based on employee data, and the generative layout of the AU 2017 Exhibit Hall to maximize buzz and access. Oh, and the generative urban planning tool that Van Wijnen are now using, of course.

[...]

Raquel Báscones Recio was our master of ceremonies, introducing the subject of the event and its various speakers. She also put in a great deal of work to make the event happen, in the first place. Jacob Small is a legend on the Dynamo forum. He works in our support team in Boston and gave a presentation on Dynamo.

[...]

People seemed to respond well to the vision for generative design, and I had some really good discussions with a few attendees who were particularly motivated by the position my team is taking on this: there’s a huge opportunity to create designs based on data.

Next week: ACADIA 2018, Mexico City.

Every requirement is an opportunity for delight, even the ugly ones. Sometimes the creative treatment of these warts are the most enjoyable parts of a design.

—Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design