On Our Radar: A Nation of Makers

You’ve likely heard about the arrest of 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed for building a homemade clock. This shameful and reactionary response to Ahmed’s creativity has been met with a well-deserved outcry—and a wonderful show of support from the online maker community, which understands the importance of stoking curiosity in young people.

Visit Anil’s form to extend your support in any capacity. He’ll share the feedback with the Mohamed family to “connect Ahmed to any Maker event or hardware hacking community he wants to join.” —Lisa Maria Martin, issues editor

Your weekend reading

1. Last week, the Coral Project shared the Trello board where they’re tracking stakeholder needs for the news-commenting platform they’re developing in collaboration with Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. I’m a firm believer that comments can be community; it’s refreshing to see folks investing in making comments sections better, instead of just turning them off entirely. As a community nerd, I love that the Coral Project is making their process public and sharing their research findings with the rest of us—there’s a lot here for anyone looking to improve the way people interact on the web. —Marie Connelly, blog editor
2. Many of us build sites and projects on top of Amazon’s platform, and they have over 50 great services to choose from—that is, if you can figure out what they are. Here’s a list of all of Amazon’s services, and what they should have been called, based on what they actually do. —Tim Murtaugh, technical director
3. I was saddened this week to hear that Adrian Frutiger, the talented type designer who brought us so many classic typefaces, died this week at 87. His legacy will thankfully live on through the myriad contributions he made to the type and design communities. This excellent Dezeen piece on his life and contributions is worth a read. —Erin Lynch, production manager
4. A while back, the indefatigable Chris Coyier put together the end-all, be-all inline SVG vs. @font-face icon grudgematch, weighing the two approaches in terms of workflow, aliasing, accessibility, browser support, and more. Every so often the “icon fonts vs. SVG” debate comes up on a project, and I just as often find myself reaching for the URL to this page. Not to take sides or anything, but I did bet my lunch money on seeing a lot of green in the SVG column the first time I clicked on through. —Mat Marquis, technical editor
5. “I came into the discussion looking to prove something, not learn something.” Jason Fried of Basecamp looks back in embarrassment at his hotheaded youthful self, and shares a life lesson that changed him as a thinker and maker, in “Give it five minutes” on Medium. —Jeffrey Zeldman, founder and publisher

Your must-see hashtag

#IStandWithAhmed

Overheard in ALA Slack

Your Thursday gif