I learned about The Echo Nest through their developer API in 2012, almost two years ago to date. I thought it was one of the most awesome things I had ever worked with:

Echo Nest really took me by surprise. As a service, they gather a lot of interesting data on all music objects - tracks, albums, artists. I was astounded at the quality of data available for each track, and I was only scratching the surface of this rich and cavernous platform. Each song returned from Echo Nest had data on intrinsic musical properties like pitch, key, time signature, speechiness, danceability, a property called ‘hotttness’ and tempo which is ultimately what I used for this project. Where else do you find all that data about one song in one place? It’s like you think you know everything about your favorite song, but there are all these aspects that you can’t possibly know - how can you divine such deep analysis just by listening? This is definitely the coolest data I have ever come across in my entire life, and I’ve synthesized porphyrin.

I was overjoyed when the opportunity to work with them for a couple of days presented itself, because I'd been a fan for a very long time. I had a great time pairing with one of their engineers, and was very proud the work we did. I actually love pairing because working 1:1 means I'm not as afraid to ask questions or take risks, once I get comfortable.

The energy at The Echo Nest office was spirited and enthusiastic; less like an office and more like a hack day, which actually reminded me a lot of the atmosphere at Science Hack Day, where I left feeling similarly empowered. After the week wrapped up, while chatting with another engineer, the topic turned to music rediscovery and self-identity, something I am very obsessed with. Not only did we share the same ideas and values, but it turned out that we had both already built prototypes, and that there are others at The Echo Nest that would be interested in working on this as well. I left feeling super excited over what we're going to build together.

Please watch "Tasty Stacks!" on Vimeo →

Tasty Stacks started out as a humble blog post about lexical gustatory synesthesia. I adapted it to a sub-5 minute Pecha Kucha talk for my web dev chapter at work. For !!Con, I maintained a similar format but focused its scope to web development. I was shocked when I learned that my talk proposal was accepted, and spent that entire weekend swathed in blankets, overreacting.

I had a Chloe-amount of doubts as to whether it would be any success at all. I was nervous that it wasn't technical enough, and that the audience, comprised of people who are all much smarter than me, would realize that I am actually very bad at programming, that they would recognize syntax errors, or be hyper-aware of how inaccurate I am when I explain things. I listened to a lot of Moth podcasts and determined that I had no choice but to own my limitations and approach it as more of a visual essay than a talk talk. This helped me relax long enough to eke out a couple of sentences at a time over the course of several weeks while primarily sitting in coffee shops, eating my hair, and listening to Suedehead.

Another hurdle to public speaking, or even making friends, is that I am supremely uncomfortable being myself. Maybe you are too, but you're an adult and you can handle it. I can't. I've been struggling with this for a while, but it's gotten very bad this year. The nagging suspicion that people don't want to interact with me because I'm not worth talking to, that all my interactions are perfunctory because people spend our whole conversation wanting to exit it in order to talk to someone prettier, smarter, more positive, more relevant, more interesting, is my greatest insecurity. I felt an overwhelming guilt that I would be forcing people to pay attention to me when we both would prefer that I disappear, and that I couldn't do that to people, and that I'm in no shape to give this talk or even have any friends.

In order to mollify this terror, at least, for the scope of the talk, I decided to treat the whole thing as Acting! I performed in character, playing the role of someone who is very confident in their ability to give this talk; a person without problems, someone people want to listen to. It was liberating that the audience didn't know that I'm actually a broken person who regularly walks home alone over bridges and finds weekends difficult and isolating because of the unstructured time. I can't apply this to my personal life because everyone knows what I really am, and it would be weird if I were "on" all the time. Being in character helped tremendously with my nerves, and I did not fear losing control of any of my bodily functions. During my preparation, when I felt paralyzed by my inability to write my talk and assemble my slides, approaching the content as a script for a character who isn't me and the slides as set design helped me move forward as well.

As for !!Con, it was a great atmosphere, there was a lot of brilliant content, and I was proud to be a part of it. Chris Martens even did sketch notes. Nobody has ever sketch noted me before until now. I am grateful to the organizers: Lindsey Kuper, Alex Clemmer, Julia Evans, Erty Seidel, Maggie Zhou, and Leo Franchi for giving me this opportunity and for making me feel comfortable and accommodated. I would also like to extend thanks to Danielle Sucher; I wouldn't have known about the event without seeing her tweets. And I would also like to thank Vince Allen, for presenting the opportunity for me to turn my blog post into a Pecha Kucha talk in the first place, and for encouraging me to practice my talk in front of our web dev chapter, even though I was scared.

Please oh please watch "Tasty Stacks!" on Vimeo →

Visit Uptight on GitHub →

In the good aul' days, you were able to add whatever CSS you desired to ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/User StyleSheets/Custom.css, and Chrome would obey those CSS rules. You just needed to know a little bit of CSS, and not even good CSS, because this is a unique case where specificity is !important. You were able to customize your browsing experience with the degree of control you desired. This wasn't an advertised or even easily accessible feature, but I wrote a bash alias to handle the mess of accessing the cumbersome file path.

User stylesheets are popularly used to theme developer tools so that they match settings of one's text editor for a more comfortable debugging experience. A workaround for adding this back to Chrome exists, but it only targets the developer tools, and I'm a control freak and I use my user stylesheet to hide everything. "There's nothing that can't be solved with a user stylesheet!" I would think to myself when people complained about ads or promoted tweets (another form of ads), but I never say it out loud because it actually can't solve the problem of Javascript-injected CSS that is added after the user stylesheet is loaded.

When I was on Facebook I used my user stylesheet to hide the left and right columns on the home page, leaving only the activity feed. I'm not on Facebook anymore because freedom fighters don't use Facebook, so I can't show you how much more focused it looked. I tried to make Facebook responsive, but, if I recall correctly, I wasn't able to target widths on the container selectors because they inject those CSS values with Javascript.

On Twitter, I use my user stylesheet to hide promoted tweets, the discover tab, the mostly useless sidebar, and most importantly, to make it roughly responsive enough:

My user stylesheet also removes that nosy grid of most-visited sites on the Chrome home page.

My favorite use case of my user stylesheets is that I hide every Buzzfeed, Gawker, Huffington Post, and Cracked URL from my browser. Its benefit is especially surreal with the Huffington Post Twitter feed. Without URL context, you can see it for the garbage that it is:

I understand that vendors can do whatever they want to control how you experience the web, because it is their software, their product, but removing user stylesheets feels sooo un-web to me, which is irony. A browser's largest responsibility is to give people access to the web. It's like the web is this open hand, but software is this closed fist. If I wanted to hide the mostly useless sidebar on twitter.com or the shitty everything on facebook.com, I can do that on the web by editing my user stylesheet, regardless of how these providers want me to use their products. I don’t have that level of control with traditional desktop software or a so-called native mobile app.

It was already convoluted and poorly-documented enough to access Chrome’s user stylesheets, but I’m nervous that by removing them entirely, people will forget that it's an option. It provides another hurdle to customization, and I worry that when a browser takes these things away, people won’t know how easily the web can be customized, and it will become another closed fist.

Before I get to the granola recipe, I just want to mention that I did start quietly keeping track of things I like this year. I was only tracking songs initially, but the web is a rich medium, so why hold back? I suppose it does describe the time period for which it's relevant. So there's your (my) zeitgeist.

Anyway, granola. It is so natural and good for you, so why not do it up right and make your own. I adapted this recipe from Passionate About Baking. I'm sorry there are no photos, but I'm at an inflection point and I don't own anything right now.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon unsalted butter or coconut oil if vegan
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
1/3 cup honey or maple syrup if vegan
1/3 cup water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups rolled oats
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
at least 1 cup unsweetened dessicated coconut (go crazy)
1/4 cup flax seed

Oregon Blast Variation

1/2 cup hazelnuts, crushed
1/2 cup dried sour cherries, minced

Hawaiian Extravaganza Variation

1/2 cup macadamia nuts, crushed
1/2 cup dried goji berries

Holiday Cheer Variation

1/2 cup pecans, crushed
1/2 cup dried cranberries, minced

Preheat the oven to 300°F/150°C and cover a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

In a small saucepan, combine the water, honey, sugar, butter, salt and vanilla. Bring to a simmer and stir until homogenized.

In a large bowl, combine the oats and sunflower seeds. Add the liquid to the dry ingredients and fold until evenly coated. Fold in shredded coconut and the specified nuts from your selected variation.

Spread the mixture evenly over the baking sheet. I like to tamp it down real hard because I get better clusters that way, but being consistent is the key for even baking. Bake for, depending on the fidelity of your oven, 25 to 45 minutes (lol), until fragrant and golden brown. As a former student of chemistry, I must remind you that things continue to cook even after they're removed from a heat source, so don't try to be a hero. Sprinkle the flax seeds and the dried fruit from your selected variation over the granola and fold in, breaking up the granola sheet into clusters to your level of comfort. When cool, funnel into an upcycled container and reuse the parchment paper to line your pizza peel.

This is not a Best of 2013 list; it's just that this year was different. I don't listen to a lot of contemporary music because everything was better last century, and since music is not social for me, there's nothing to keep me current. I listened to a lot of college radio this year, and through it I discovered a lot of new music and new-to-me music. Crucially, I was able to support many of them on Bandcamp, and now I'm addicted to Bandcamp like people are addicted to Kickstarter.

I'm just sharing these, and not trying to convince you that they're the best because this is not that. So instead of reminding you again for the nth time this December that The National released an album this year that is a great name for a racehorse, I'm going to anachronistically mention that I heard some songs on the radio so I made a mixtape and, like, support your local scene.

Rearrange Me by Criminal Hygiene

I've written 101 words about how much I love this song. Key points: downtempo Replacements, Bruce Springsteen, sprezzatura.

Kibitzer by Tall for Jockeys

The song that yearns for the early-to-mid '90s as much as I do.

Puke by Mumblr

I was exposed to Mumblr through Josh Kelly's show Puppy Love. Even though I put their name on my list of words that make me feel old, they make me feel like I'm 17, which was the one year of my teendom that wasn't stolen from me.

Mayonnaise by Woolen Men

This song makes me wistful for the family vacations of families that are less neurotic than mine.

Derek's Song by The Coathangers

These ladies have a sense of humor and are from Atlanta like The Black Lips.

Wind Up by Pity Sex

It rocks as hard as it is catchy.

The World Fell by Vår

This is coldwave. Reminds me a little of Siglo XX, the Belgian Joy Division if you need a laugh.

Crush Em by Serengeti

I think this song qualifies as installation art. Serengeti raps in character as Kenny Davis, a 50 year old dude from Chicago.

Sister by Kate Nash

I'm not a fan of Kate Nash's music, but this song is so volatile, so unapologetically honest, that it makes me feel like Hole's "Violet" was undercutting me.

Shuggie by Foxygen

Foxygen are chimeric. They shift precipitously between their influences within their songs. I saw them in October, and while they were inconsistent, those inelegant seams in their tracks are heart-stopping.

There are several notable reasons why people would choose to own their data. Personally, I felt liberated by the broader idea that services like Twitter, Facebook and whatever comes along in the future would be representations of me, rather than "me, elsewhere." I hide in plain sight on web-based services by obfuscating my identity through a hilarious avatar, by using a different poorly-considered, rarely-duplicated handle for each account, and by avoiding amalgamating a community ("friends", followees, connections, basically). I'm a serial late adopter because the idea that these things are me makes me uneasy. I still haven't gotten to the root of this but I suppose it has to do with shame, as do all my issues.

Implementing POSSE to Twitter also has the promise of solving the problem of having neglected my personal space on the web — this domain — which has always been my greatest hobby, and what brought me here in the first place. But what most compelled me is that I somehow find the need to build completely bespoke solutions to all my technical problems. For instance, I don't use music subscription services because I have valuable personal metadata that is currently handled by iTunes, and the tool that I prototyped in Javascript to manage that data in the browser independent of the service, application or file is in development. I am very authentic yes.

I spent the past three months avoiding actually building this. An autumn of procrastination included migrating my blog over to Publify, a Rails-based CMS that offers built-in POSSE to Twitter features, only to realize my incumbent CMS, Kirby, suited my needs better. I ended up abandoning my work.

It only took a few moments to get POSSE to Twitter working. I found the action responsible for posting an item of content to my site in the code for Kirby's admin panel and wrote a function that posted the content to Twitter using the API. But I also wanted to populate my existing 1,800 tweets into the CMS, in addition to being able to support what is modeled as an average of 1.6 items of micro-content per day. I read that this wouldn't scale so well with Kirby, and, to my horror, it looked like I was going to have to go outside the file-based CMS and store my tweets in a database. The Kirby documentation itself recommended that databases are a better system to store large quantities of user-generated content, and fortunately, Kirby is built upon the Kirby Toolkit, which helped to subdue my nemesis, MySQL.

I'm going to mention here that it's important that I use tools built by people who share my values. Federic de Villamil, author of Publify, has written about data ownership and silos and Bastian Allgeier, author of Kirby, has written about and is working on a decentralized vision of the web. These are things that motivate me too. Because the authors care about the same things I do, their tools come with features that anticipate problems I'd need to solve, so I don't waste time and hair struggling against software.

What I ended up ultimately building, aided by a spec of sorts, is Web Design 101. It's a form. It lives at a URL on my domain, and has a textarea that accepts 140 characters for the tweet, a text field for a URL if my tweet is an @reply (to enable conversation associations on twitter.com), and a toggle that determines whether I want the tweet to appear on my list of tweets on this domain. I would prefer to have my @replies hidden unless they're really funny. The hidden tweets still get saved to the database and can be queried by their tweet ID, but they are excluded from the query that lists my tweets on my domain.

When I submit the form, the API posts to my Twitter account, and the result of that request is posted to my database, which contains the full history of my tweets. The data submitted by Twitter is formatted similarly to the csv output of my archive of tweets, which is how I based my database schema. This is why I send the content to Twitter first and use the response to post to my database.

This is the barest combination of elements hacked together in PHP, but it's better than what I was doing before, which was posting to Twitter. And, I'm not going to proselytize, but how many of us have built a form that posts to a database, or requested that an API do a thing? That's essentially all this is, and the details can be teased out in a couple dozen Google searches. Think about it.

Ideally, I would like for my URLs to have the format /note/tweet_id or custom slugs rather than the query string be obvious, but, predictably, I'm having some .htaccess challenges and I'd rather kill myself. There is also some unfinished code that saves a unique hash along with the tweet so that in the future I can append a permashortcitation (new favorite word) to the end of my tweets, but again, .htaccess, and I really would rather die than learn regular expressions. In fact, "Never Learn RegEx" is on my bucket list, so I have no choice. Also, speak about destruction, but apparently I'm having timezone issues with the timestamp.

I'm okay with all of this for now, because these are technical details (some of them glaring, yes), but I'm preoccupied by a shift in thinking. Ultimately, I would like to extend this model in order to write any length of content to my domain with the option to tweet 140 characters to Twitter, truly making Twitter an optional destination for anything, not just the micro-content originally intended for Twitter. This may help mend my mental dissociation between tweeting and blogging. But then I would be telling you all about how I built a CMS.

View Julius: The Cards →

The Julius Cards are our origin story. Jews are like Wolverine. We have been experimented on. We have egregious gaps in our history. We all secretly have bone claws. The Julius Cards began as a novelty, stemming from my dad’s love of sports, toys and trivia, but by making them, my dad has become The Archivist of our family’s history. My brother and I are too maladjusted to want families of our own, so we wouldn’t point to this digital record and say, “This is who we are. This is what we came from.” But we could, if this weren’t the end of the family line.

My family is ethnically Ashkenazi, and lived in Timisoara, Romania during the Holocaust. Many artifacts of ours were either destroyed by Nazis or left behind when my immediate family came to the States. Dozens of relatives with vivid, full lives were lost as a result of the Holocaust as well. In my family, we can’t recover that information through oral tradition. This is in part because most survivors have since died, and also because some survivors, like my grandmother, refuse to talk about the war. This is apparently not uncommon. In Jason Scott’s apposite dConstruct talk, The Save Button Ruined Everything: Backing Up Our Digital Heritage he revealed that he has seven great-cousins that he doesn’t know the names of because they were lost in The Holocaust. His family was unable to talk about the loss.

I’ve been ruminating on some themes I've been exposed to over the past few years: digital preservation, the IndieWeb and futurefriend.ly movements, progressive enhancement, storytelling. They contributed to how I approached The Cards: looking both forward and backward. Longevity was the guiding design principle that informed all of my technical decisions, whereas many of my design decisions were allegorical. For example, Spinoza, the typeface, was chosen because it shares a name with Baruch Spinoza, a Jewish-born philosopher who did some work in optics, particularly on instrumentation and the design of lenses for telescopes (can see far into the past) and microscopes (very introspective). Very heavy-handed, no?

I did everything right with The Julius Cards: I published the work to “my” server, as much as it can be mine because I’m actually leasing space on a shared server, which I try not to think about too much. I didn’t use jQuery because I’m embarrassed by it. I built it to function without Javascript. All blocking requests that rely on a third-party are at the end of the document. The flash of unstyled text, while wince-worthy (for some reason? Like I’m ashamed for people to know that resources are loading?), is collateral for knowing that my work isn’t beholden to the whims of the Typekit CDN. I used a flexible, em-based layout to be screen-size agnostic. My breakpoints are based around the measure of the type, not common contemporary device widths. I spent hours beating every unnecessary byte out of every image, 112 in total, because many are sized for different breakpoints.

However, I don’t know if longevity as an ultimate goal is practical. Is it fair for me to say, “I built this thing to live forever,” because I designed for it to live forever? The web feels fractally brittle. We grandstand about how much we care about the things we make and throw around words like “craft” and “heritage” and “love” like we make a difference, but how many smart people wile away their days building what Andy and I refer to as “dog social networks”? A “dog social network” is an umbrella term to describe anything on the web that has about as much gravitas as an actual dog social network.

This brittleness is exhibited in practice regarding how we develop web today. We balk when we have to provide an experience to a minority set of underrepresented browsers or cases where we can't rely on Javascript, and while it’s obnoxious to solve problems for a perceived set of invisible people, it’s our responsibility to make things robust if we’re proud of what we create so that people can actually experience them. There are things being built today that only function under a narrow set of constraints, and it could all be intentionally thrown away and celebrated for that. I’m referring to another unsustainable pattern where a thing is built to absorb as much of people as possible, gets sold, and decision-making power is relinquished to those who may not have the best interest of the thing or its fans in mind. This type of exchange, while seen as a success in one sense, is actually a big shame because the thing you built is dead, even if it was only a dog social network.

I don't have enough perspective to speculate on the nature of the web, so I’m going to be myopic on purpose: What if it’s nature is to be impermanent, and that is its strength, and what allows it to evolve rapidly? I’ve worked hard to ensure that The Julius Cards will be around for a long time, but what if that’s unnatural? Anecdotally, one of my favorite things ever written is only available through the mirror at archive.org because the author’s family allowed her domain to expire when she died. When I die in a plane crash (because that is how I want to die), who will keep the servers running? Who will keep this thing alive for the length of time I intended for it to be alive for?

The Girls Have Moved

This track off of “Send Me a Lullaby”, my favorite Go-Betweens album, was the one I found that summer, and the one that started it all. I’d only known them for their softer, more sensitive side, so it was a surprise to me that they could rock. I was thrilled that a lot of their earlier stuff sounded much this way. It could basically be Gang of Four, but good.

On My Block

My favorite song off of Before Hollywood, my second-favorite Go-Betweens album. I wasn’t a fan at first, but the chorus got me hooked, and I would listen to it on repeat trying to figure out why I loved it so much while walking through the engineering quad during my second year at UMass (are you choosing a college? Don’t choose one based on the title of a Pixies song).

Your Turn, My Turn

Another one off of Send Me A Lullaby. I always found it kind of a slog, but then I never really paid attention to the mood, and now it’s one of my favorite songs of this fall. This is a distinctly weird song. I can’t get over the piano, the abbreviated delivery of the lyrics or the strange pacing. The music video reminds me a little of the one for Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, maybe because Robert Forster (this one, not that one) looks a little like Stephen Morris.

You’ve Never Lived

Off of Spring Hill Fair. I’ve been familiar with this song for about a decade, but it only caught me now. The lyrics are Pure Forster: they seem to only tell part of a story, like it assumes you have some context. There’s also a Robert Smith quality to Forster’s voice here. I don't know what the lyrics are about, but judging by my deeply personal reaction I’m going to have to assume that this song is about me. Aren’t they all?

These are my parents. They met in the late ‘70s at Adam’s Apple on the Upper East Side, a disco that, unlike Disco Stu, did indeed advertise.

This photo is awesome, and you might think it’s because THEY CAME FROM THE SEVENTIES and that is definitely part of it but there’s this other thing. I’ve never ever seen my parents happy together. When they were married they tolerated each other. When they divorced, their exchanges were entirely hostile. This photo is awesome because it’s the only evidence I’ve ever seen of my parents enjoying being together and not being completely over it. I didn’t know they could do that.