Chapter 9 - ‘The Rest’ #

English #

I’m monolingual. I got just enough Spanish in high school to graduate and never looked back. Unfortunately for those that don’t speak English as a first language, the internet has developed in such a way that English is basically the go-to language online.

Okay, so, some context is necessary here. Historically, England sorta gave the whole “World Domination” thing a shot as colonialism and in the process spread English to, well, everywhere? This has also had the side effect of quite a few languages becoming endangered. So, you might want to balance in what languages you write online for the sake of preserving your culture. Regardless, the internet will still expect you to communicate in English in most places, and this will often be enforced by moderation only allowing languages that they can easily read- Often strictly English. For better or worse, English is becoming the world’s universal language.

[TODO]

https://www.marginchronicles.com/site/style/index.html

What if English were Phonetically Consistent? (YouTube - Aaron Alon)

The importance of proper italicized word placement. pic.twitter.com/fQT5AuYn5W

— C.S. Ratliff (@cs_ratliff) August 5, 2021

Finance #

[TODO] because making and engineering are expensive, and you probably want to make money, and spend less money.

Music #

Music? In a chapter on Engineering? Well, yeah. Hear me out, music is a combination of math and signals.

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EUCLID(m, k):
	if k = 0:
		return m
	else:
    	return EUCLID(k,m mod k)

As a really cool example, there’s also ORCΛ by 100 rabbits, which you can see in action in this video from EZBOT on YouTube:

If you get into Modular music systems, like eurorack, it’s really similar to programming too- as you connect modules as if they’re functions and operations- to make a complex musical system. Here’s an example of a Eurorack setup in action from Lightbath on YouTube:

Health #

World Studies #

[TODO] To help with tolerance and looking at things from new perspectives.

History #

[TODO] inspiration from history and remembering past mistakes

Art, Design, UI & UX #

I know what you’re thinking “Vega, this guide is about engineering- why should I give a damn about art?”

Because you’ll still probably need to design enclosures, make easy to read documentation, and probably make a user interface or two, and bad design usually leads to both users not being interest in the first place and a poor user experience.

So, even if you’re not super into it, give the Design Chapters a quick skim and look at the parts that seem relevant to you, you’ll want to look at Section 4 - UI/UX for sure.

If you’d like a good laugh, check out this video from Tantacrul roasting the poor design of Sibelius, a popular program for music notation

There’s also this gallery of bad volume controls:

Volume "control".