Posts

A while ago I selected a bunch of articles that have impressed or inspired me and I thought would be useful sharing. At that time I figured I could regularly post an article with resourceful or inspiring articles but I didn’t realise I needed the time to read them all myself and let them sink in so I could think about the actual value. Starting with this post I want to theme this series with a certain topic, which helps me to maintain the quality of this series but also enables me to create a valuable resource of knowledge and learnings that will hopefully be useful for you as well.

When working in a great team you work with great people. Folks like Jami, who escalated his music hobby to a serious career next to his dayjob as product manager at SoundCloud. He recently released his first full length album called Quarters, which is a great listen. Check out the music video for ‘Rilo’ here: And listen to the full album here: If you buy the full album at Bleep.com you’ll get an exclusive set of postcards showcasing the 4 locations where the album was made. I think it’s incredibly inspiring but also comforting to see Jami release his music. He has done quite some shows and has kept steadily working on this, while also embracing the internet as a platform to distribute his work and engage with fans. His album was released via an exclusive feature over at HypeMachine, he has been posting updates on his Tumblr and Facebook fanpage about the progress and when you buy the record you’ll get an exclusive addition which tells you a bit more about the back story of his work. Not all musicians are this internet-savvy but it shows me that if you have the drive and can find the fans to feed that drive you can enable yourself to create great things. I’m sure this won’t be the last the internet will be seeing of Jami.

My good friends Mighty Oaks have been working incredibly hard and it’s paying off. They’ve been playing at some festivals, touring together with CHVRCHES, The Lumineers and played a support act for Kings of Leon this summer. Here’s a video of a recording they did together with Cardinal Sessions. Enjoy.

Noortje pointed me to Halls. Quoted from Last.fm:

Halls is the solo project of 21 year old South London musician Sam Howard. Formed in London, UK in early 2010, Halls worked on material that would appear on the debut EP “Halls EP”, released in January 2011, which was described as having ‘ambient soundscapes buttressed by skitter-step beats.’

There is something incredibly mesmerizing about long slow harmonics in big spaceous buildings, especially when performed in a church, so here’s Halls performing in a church. Enjoy: https://vimeo.com/62278754

This is a story about the coolest astronaut in human history. If you haven’t heard of this man yet, his name is commander Chris Hadfield (53), who was the first Canadian to walk in space. Helped by his two sons, he harnessed the power of social media to give millions of people access to space, to the incredible views he was seeing and share basic scientific experiments like showing that you can’t cry in space. He slowly turned into something like a space celebrity, amassing a huge crowd on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit while doing an IAmA.

I have been reading and writing a lot the past 8 months when I came across Noah Stokes’ birthday lists. Inspired by these I figured I could highlight some learnings myself. Scanning through my scribblings I tried looking for the ones that appear to me as important or beautiful. These are probably lessons that have shaped me into who I am, it will be interesting to see how this will look a year from now.

Disney Animation recently published a short film called Paperman. They put the whole thing on Youtube for us all to watch Update: the original video is gone, here’s a trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM6cLnscmO8 Apart from the incredible technicalities & overall mood it gives you, I’m really amazed how they manage to capture the “Disney feeling” in such a short film. Check out more artwork and background information on the Disney Animation website.

Lately my (online) reading experience has been improved a lot, partly because of Quote.fm. I noticed I was storing a lot of good articles for later use, but wanted to share these with people but at the same time keep a log of what I’ve been reading and what good stuff I came across. To keep track of what inspired me or what I simply marked as “awesome”, I’m going to keep a log of interesting articles. I’m not set yet on a rythm for this, but here’s a first attempt.

The answer turned out to be a bit tedious so I tried fixing that. Say hello to Viewportmarklet:

Example of the Viewportmarklet

How does it work?

The tool is build around the assumption that you need an actual letter m on your canvas in the base font size. The width of that letter m is what the browser will use as 1 em. When working on a frontend project I found myself struggling with the sites current viewport width in em and in pixels. To save myself and others from demotivation problems I build a small tool that helps you to wrap your head around em usage. Check out the repository on Github.

I like music a lot. I enjoy listening to it, let it grow on me, let it define me for that moment. Maybe I build up a connection to a certain song because of my mood, or because of the memories I’ve attached to it over time. Discovering music has changed a lot the last years. There are great online services helping you find amazing gems from all over the globe. But I realized one thing: this whole thing around timing and newness of music is slowly fading away. It’s not important anymore if you discover this band right after they released their new EP, or if you heard that song on the radio the first day it aired. Here are a bunch of music discovery services I use myself in no particular order: