🌊 Liquid Tension, Signing In, and Folders
Three things I enjoyed this week
🎼 One song
Liquid Tension Experiment’s Acid Rain – Dream Theater has some of the most proficient virtuosos in progressive rock, and this track from their side project is a perfect example. John Petrucci on guitar. Mike Portnoy on drums. Jordan Rudess on piano. Tony Levin on the chapman stick. This absolute monolith of a song gives each of them space to breathe and strut.
📹 One video
Nate Barbettini’s OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect (in plain English) – in this presentation Barbettini breaks down a seemingly innocuous feature we use almost every day: signing in into a service using an account from Google, Facebook, or many others. I’ll definitely be bookmarking this video for further replays.
📖 One article
Monica Chin writing for The Verge,  File Not Found – this was a fascinating read for me. I grew up nesting folders into folders and still do just that on my machine, but the concept that more modern students not only eschew that but don’t understand the concept is quite a realization.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
It’s possible that the analogy multiple professors pointed to — filing cabinets — is no longer useful since many students Drossman’s age spent their high school years storing documents in the likes of OneDrive and Dropbox rather than in physical spaces. It could also have to do with the other software they’re accustomed to — dominant smartphone apps like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube all involve pulling content from a vast online sea rather than locating it within a nested hierarchy.