homoiconic

This reminded me of The Evolution of Useful Things [1] by Henry Petroski, which in one chapter explores the incremental development of the paper clip from its origin as a straight pin that pierced the set of papers.

An aspect of paper clip design that’s easy to overlook is that you also need to be able to manufacture them at scale, so the machinery to produce them also needs to evolve with the overall form of the product.

[1] https://ia600104.us.archive.org/11/items/pdfy--rXmwRDB5uzq5M...

A few years ago, I was feeling a bit burnt out on a software project and decided to set aside some time to build something physical that I could accomplish in a weekend. I ended up using my dad’s workshop to build the Autoprogettazione EFFE table. [0]

It was such an empowering experience to be able to build a designer table with my own hands, and a breath of fresh air to be working with something tangible instead of the abstract realm of software.

[0]: https://www.casatigallery.com/products/enzo-mari-table-dite-...

(edit: added link)

From 2009 to 2015 I lived in exactly that. It was a high-rise former bank headquarters converted to residential. The conversion was done in the wake of the collapsing commercial real estate market after 9/11. Repurposing buildings is quite common in New York, and I expect to see more conversions like this in the future.

I built some things with Wiring back in the day (2005 through 2006-ish) and was very impressed with it. I had considered Arduino for the project, but I believe I decided against it because it didn't support USB at the time.

There seemed to be fundamentally different philosophies to the two projects. Arduino at the time was catering to the maker crowd--selecting only through-hole components so people could assemble their own boards without having to deal with SMD soldering. I think they didn't even sell pre-assembled boards back then. Wiring was definitely more polished, trading low cost and ease of assembly for additional features like USB.

Of course now you can buy fully assembled Arduino boards and a bunch of them even use SMD components, which may be evidence validating the Wiring philosophy...

I just started using Notion (https://notion.so) for organizing to-do lists, links, notes, and reminders. It's simple yet amazingly flexible. I highly recommend it.