Links to cool websites

In the early days in the web, before search engines and centralised link repositories (think Reddit) took over everything, every personal web page would have links to the personal pages of other people. Personal web pages are nothing like what they used to be (most just use Twitter it seems), but there are still some cool ones around. Here’s a list of the ones I think are worth checking out.

• Anders Damsgaard’s website has a cool retro look (at least of this writing), and interesting information about his Unix-ish approach to writing scientific code.

• Bitreich is a radical splinter group from suckless.org. They focus on simple software and incomprehensible organisational politics (that I am pretty sure are at least partly a parody). If you followed the link, you’ll have discovered that the proper Bitreich website is not actually accessible over HTTP - instead, you are directed to use Gopher. I advice using the text mode Gopher client (and browser) sacc to explore Gopherspace, with Bitreich as the starting point. It’s a surprisingly pleasant retro experience, and feels a lot more personal and decentralised than the modern web.

• Dan Luu is a programmer and writes interesting and very well-researched articles. The one on computer input lag is particularly worth checking out.

• Drew DeVault is the hacker behind things like sway (an i3 clone for Wayland), sourcehut (a source code and CI hosting site), and more. I really like his style of program design and his blog is very interesting.

• John Regehr is a professor at the University of Utah, and while his web page is very boring, his blog is interesting. He tends to write about compilers and the horrors of undefined behaviour.

• Niels G. W. Serup is one of my friends and he writes about important matters such as why you should insert two spaces after a period.

• Ted Unangst is one of the motley crew making up the developers of the best operating system. He writes about when he is upset at the computer (most of the time) and when he is happy with the computer (less often).

• Claude Heiland-Allen has a wonderful site with snippets of numerical and graphics code (as well as larger programs). It’s very pleasant and interesting to browse.