The word you’re looking for is ‘fun’

That’s what the guy at the merch table said when I was trying to express what I felt about the performance that had just ended. He’s right — that was downright plain fun. Don’t stop at the name.

I had no idea who these guys were before entering Bottom of the Hill last night – the kind of place I go to without even checking who’s playing. It’s cheap, it’s small and the line-up is usually pretty good. On occasions, it has been stellar. A couple of years ago, Art vs. Science took the stage and spent 45 minutes delivering one of the best shows I’ve ever seen – it was dance-y, powerful, joyful. They won the crowd over even though no one knew them.

Yesterday, that was Fartbarf. This time around, it looked like everyone in the audience knew them except for me. I’m gonna leave it at ‘fun’ but it was so much more than that.

For quite a while now, I’ve been lurking on blink-dev, the mailing list on which the development of Blink takes place.

There are many good things to be said about the project itself and its development process. The forum has seen its share of heated and very interesting discussions, from the deprecation of SHA-1 certificates –where the position of the CAs essentially boils down to “work is hard”– to that of the showModalDialog API. The list is generally exemplary of a well-managed, large open-source project.

Just today, this post was published and I personally find it mind-blowing, regardless of the interest you may have in the subject in question. The email is succinct, documented, tells a story and just drives the point home. It’s truly rare to see technical people lacking enough in ego that they’re publicly announcing not that they failed, but that incorporating their work would not be in the best interest of the project. They had an idea, spent months working on it, ran precise, repeatable and favorable benchmarks, and then decided to just scrap their work.

A stellar example of engineering.

In case you’re curious about internationalization and/or localization, I wrote a high-level summary of the work I have been doing in the past year.