Musings

Most any time we go to a new place, we are looking to find activities to do. It could be anything from hiking to finding a trendy coffee shop. When I first came to study at the University of Georgia, I found myself in this situation, particularly in respect to finding activities for groups of people to do and activities to do on dates. Over time I came to know a lot of local places and activities, but it took a lot of talking to people and didn’t always come when I wanted it to. It would have been great to have a way to find out about all of those activities quicker and more easily.

My sophomore year, I created a quick little prototype of an app to do just this. I called it Palm Date. It started as a project just so I could practice UI animations but turned into something I could actually use on dates to help us choose activities to do. A gif of how it worked is below.

I’ve had several friends come to me seeking advice for how to get started programming for the web. Most haven’t given too much thought to the idea, but are intrigued by code or websites and want to learn more. If you’re in that position or somewhere similar, this post is for you.

What follows is a collection of recommendations that I have for a person starting out. I’ll keep updating it as time goes on. If you feel like it’s missing something or have a question, don’t hesitate to contact me at hello@zachsaucier.com!

I love life. Relatedly, I love change (when it comes in appropriate ways), customization, and interacting with stuff. That’s a big reason why I really enjoy the work that I do, creating new and unique ways for people to interact with each other and with the content I am providing.

On a seemingly different note, I have warm memories of the screensavers from when I was kid. The brick 3D maze, the pipes, and the rainbow colored shape that kept morphing into a new shapes entranced (distracted) me as a ~7 year old in school.

Also, ever since I got into animating, I’ve wanted to include the things I make into more areas of my life. One area that has come into my mind several times was my desktop background.

If you want to follow along with the music without opening all of the pages, I created a YouTube playlist for this post that includes all but the first 3 songs.

I love music. Especially music that varies throughout the song (not all verses and choruses are the same), layered (multiple instruments are playing harmoniously), unique, the quality of the instruments (including singers) is high, and music that gives off an emotion or feeling (generally energetic and happy is my favorite). Regardless of the genre or creator of the song, if a song has these characteristics it’s likely that I will really enjoy it.

The genre that I’ve listened to that most often has these characteristics is electronic music. I was introduced to it as a kid by an older friend and I’ve been an avid listener for about 10 years now. Today I hope to help you better understand why I fell in love with the gigantic, diverse genre that is electronic music.

A spiral outlook of learning

Most of the little time I spend on Tumblr is spent looking at awesome pictures of nature, seeing how math is found in nature, or analyzing animations from pros, but every so often I come across something that has a larger and more direct effect on my life. The most recent was caused by this image:

The conventional way of looking at knowledge is very segmented and generally linear. Learn one thing, then add onto that, then continue to add on new pieces. While this may be helpful for looking at some types of knowledge, I feel like it’s not a very accurate way of at the learning process in general.