The Covid Bump

With teachers scrambling to move to online teaching last March, Mandalagaba’s traffic saw a noticeable bump in use which then died off in with the Summer break. With schools now back in session it looks like the bump is back.

I’ve kind of given up on trying to do anything big with it, there’s just so much noise out there it’s really hard to get anything more than an occasional spotlight. Which means the site is completely free of all the perverse incentives which ruin the internet these days. In other words, perfect for educators teaching to kids. I was already happy to know that about a thousand people per day enjoyed doodling with absolutely no strings attached, but it’s a whole other layer of contentment to see teachers use it for teaching. You can tell there’s love, kindness and attention in the way they address their kids. I love finding their videos online.

I often get asked what restrictions there are on the material people produce, or what my privacy policy is. I respond that I don’t have any of either, but the questions bother me for they reflect that everything online comes with strings attached these days.

Fibonacci Assist

It’s been a while since I pushed a feature to Mandalagaba worthy of a post.

I just pushed a tool I call “Fibonacci Assist”. It’s meant to help you draw Fibonacci spirals by overlaying the proper framing based on the beginning of your penstroke.

I was reminded of the existence of this sequence and its ties to nature reading the most excellent children book: Swirl by Swirl. The book is simply magnificent and so I thought I’d do my part to help bring into the world more Fibonacci spirals.

I have yet to play with it using a stylus.

Insulted & Honored

Someone ripped an early version of Mandalagaba, removed any mention of it, translated it, and is hosting it as their own.

Feels like I somehow made it as a developer to have my work stolen :). And honestly I don’t really give a crap I don’t have too many qualms about using code myself.

Today’s Mandalagaba would be very hard to reverse engineer, it’s way more complex, has more server components, and the client code is more obfuscated. In my opinion that’s how you retain control over your work, at least as a coder.