Cleanse your palette with a collection of Abandoned Blogs, curated by Lucy Pham. I truly don’t remember where I stumbled on this anymore, which I suppose is fitting. But it’s an incredible testament to the vastness and peculiarities of the web. Fight back. Build a blog. Make it awesome (but don’t abandon it).

Samuel Arbesman is publishing a new book about code, but with a different slant than what you’ll usually see. He once said this about code:

I like to think of code as a sort of reverse centrifuge, spinning huge numbers of topics together and intimately connecting them. These topics range from our attempts to model the world, the nature of history, how we think and use language (both natural and computational), to even biology, philosophy, and serendipity.

This book is an attempt to peel back that curtain and lay bare the artifice that’s been constructed around computing. And to have some fun. And those are some very lofty goals, and sorely needed right now, as the programming world spends much of its time trying to abstract away the best bits of itself.

This one is shooting to the top of my list.

Season two of Computer Freaks is an insightful and sharp look at how commerce on the web forever transformed it. Chritine Haughney Dare-Bryan expands on the story she told about the Internet in the podcast’s first season. But a story that begins with detailed discussions of protocols and capabilities of a newly commercial web quickly becomes a story about viewpoints, and ideology, and the way that personalities clashed on the most exciting technology of modern history.

One of the players in all of this was Kevin Hughes. It’s a name that hasn’t been associated with the web’s history too often, but who’s contribution to the early web was massive. Hughes was fundamnetal in the design of early ecommerce systems, and he created the design language that’s second nature to us all these days: the green security lock to mark a page as secure, the early interactions with forms.

But Hughes worked alongside giants that would build the second iteration of the web, most notably Marc Andreessen and the team he built at Netscape. A team that would take on and ultimately supplant the work being done at EIT. In the shuffle, Hughes story was mostly forgotten except in old recordings and transcripts. This podcast is at least, in part, an attempt to shift that.

Near the end of series, and without giving too much away, Haughney surfaces the greatest fissure that happened during this commercial boom. The web’s innovators self-sorted.

One the one side were the perceived “winners,” the capitalists that seized control of the moment, turned the web mainstream, and gave it a commercial purpose.. This is not meant to be a purely cynical take. Some of this path was laid with the best of intentions, and it’s difficult to imagine a web as broad and accessible as it is today without these contributions.

It’s the other side that get’s forgotten. The idealists. The tinkerers. They imagined a future web about access and openness. They came to the web to do things that they loved, and they imbued their work with a little bit of themselves.

Hughes belonged to that latter group, and there’s a line towards the end of the podcast that brought me to tears (a bit of emphasis mine).

You know, I met so many millionaires and people that went on to become billionaires…

When you live in this world, it was easy to see people change a bit and get caught up in things that brought them far from where they started. And I made it a point to just not think that way. So by the time I moved into the small room in my friend’s house after all this in Oahu, I just kept on doing what I knew how to do the best way I could. And I remember a friend commenting to me about this. He said, I can’t believe you just went through all of that, but you’re still you. You haven’t really changed. And I thought that was really nice of him to say that

Hughes went through tremendous tragedy during the collapse of the dot-com era. He eventually turned away from it to hang up his hat in Oahu and work on fostering arts and technology in his local community in Hawaii.

We forget sometimes that the web was created by idealists. It broadened minds. It showcased learning and culture for its own sake. It was made by and for people that remained themselves, even when it was convenient not too. That’s the web that Kevin Hughes wanted. And maybe, just maybe, we’ve let too many people in the room that represent product and not enough that represent ideals. But it’s not too late to still build it.