02022: Today I Learned

Periodically, we see TIL (Today I Learned) posts with some interesting fun facts. Starting six months ago, on Jan 1st, we saved interesting and important headlines for each day. We'd browse a handleful of news sites throughout the day and if we thought the headline would be of interest at the end of the year, we'd add it to the daily list. The original idea was to be able to create an end-of-year wrap-up with maybe 12 This Month I Learned, or 52 This Week I Learned bullet points.

We have over 180 days' worth of headlines so far and on many days, there are several. We're not exactly sure what we'll do with this at the end of a full year's worth of headlines. Things that seem important on the day are less important when you zoom out a full year.

No matter what, we'll keep collecting headlines from a variety of different news sources and we encourage you to do the same. Then, in six months, we'll see what we can do with the data.

Q2 Writing

We’re roughly sticking to our publishing plan. We designed a cadence: a quarterly newsletter (like what you’re reading right now), a monthly newsletter (you can join if you’re not already following), weeknotes and articles, as well as regular posts on social media (Twitter and LinkedIn).

Here are all 4 articles we published in Q2 in case you missed them:

PIN Security Schemes:
https://optional.is/required/2022/05/11/pin-security-scheme/

Apple Remotes:
https://optional.is/required/2022/04/26/apple-remotes/

Backups:
https://optional.is/required/2022/05/31/backups/

Jomon Pottery:
https://optional.is/required/2022/06/30/jomon-pottery/

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🗓 All Weeknotes are collected together here:
https://optional.is/required/category/weeknotes

📰 The newsletters are also archived online. If you ever miss something, you can read about it here:
https://optional.is/newsletter/

Project Updates

Iceland accepts 🇺🇦 Ukrainian refugees. As part of that effort, we are translating our student survey into 🇺🇦 Ukrainian. That will bring us up to 8 languages. It is important to let everyone contribute to their growth and well-being as much as possible.

Project Hyperion continues to develop. We have monthly milestones and deliverables. Things are on track for an early 02023 launch. As it gets closer, we can say more.

The web-based spin-off WwB is also going well. A small team of people are testing it. We're always finding small bugs, but that's the point. We're pushing the limits of what's possible with HTML input forms and the DOM. For performance reasons, we're going to need to change the structure soon.

We always have a few VR projects on the back burner. We're not directly involved in the VR app development, but support the software via web-based APIs, backend software and utilities.

Links Newsletter

We're slowly migrating this newsletter to be interesting, internal, company news. That might not be your thing.

On the other end of the spectrum, we started another newsletter ⪮ Good Morning. There is no self-promotion or company news, just interesting links delivered monthly.

Obviously, we want you to stick around here and subscribe to both. If you really want to impress your friends and colleagues with interesting news and links, be sure you subscribe to ⪮ Good Morning.

Subscribe: https://optional.is/newsletter/subscribe/

Merch