See ya, September

Hey! The words are just not coming this week—it’s been a bit of a doozy. Some links, then:

• Glad to see the provincial government’s embrace of evidence-based decision-making when deciding to remove speed cameras. Ha!
• In a more optimistic turn, Montfort Hospital’s mental health waiting room sounds like a real win. Congratulations (and thank you, as a thankfully infrequent patient of Montfort) to all involved.
• A delightful parking cop tracker for San Francisco quickly lost access to its data after launching, but the technique for scraping the data remains available for others to learn from. (via Andy Baio)
• I haven’t quite the confidence to leave behind smartphones (mostly because I prefer my text-based communication to occur via WhatsApp / Signal, and enjoy having an excellent camera with me), but this account of one week with the Light Phone does have me wondering how deeply suffering I am as a result.
• Allan Downey’s approach of using code to teach math (in this case, linear algebra) feels like it would’ve helped me immensely in school. Oh, where might I have gone if I hadn’t tracked myself away from math! (But history was great, too—no regrets, truly.)
• Waldo describes an elegant model for managing outsourced software development via GitHub (or any other issues-integrated branching version control system). What I appreciate is it forces the code to be in an actual repository (not the case with shocking frequency), and makes crystal clear what the vendor has done (and how that work has been overseen).
• Simon Collison shared his reflections on a grant-funded summer of sound. (Delightful, as always, to see the tangible and intangible impacts of grants.)
• A newsletter pointing to another newsletter is maybe a condition of the modern indie web, but the latest UofWinds by Mita Williams is well worth your time. Each player in this week’s main trio of links was a good read.

Not so bad after all. This newsletter was brought to you by a great decaf coffee, made by T with equipment and beans from T+D. Thanks all. All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas