I made a little website for the series of events I'm doing with SOFTER this spring. SOFTER is a feminist network for 3D design, code, arts and hardware by Ida Lissner and Nicole Jonasson. I have been a big fan of theirs ever since I stumbled over their pink, bubbly and inclusive universe a few years ago. So when they opened their new Lab here in cph, I was delighted to teach there.

Painting of programmer trying to hand code a website in html and css, while also tending to her two two-year-olds, by Filippino Lippi, 2025.

I made a creative coding workshop with p5.js for absolute beginners. The site is a very simple html and css project with a tutorial and lots of links for all the courses and educators that inspired me. I had fun adding a little p5.js sketch as a background to each page, and overall just loved the process of making this.

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I have been fascinated for a while now about how teaching/learning resources can be beautiful. I feel like have spent enough time looking at ugly tutorials or blogs. No offense, fellow nerds, but I need this to be beautiful! I need the information to be cute. I need to delight in the hand-coded and whimsical web. Making a site that gives me joy, is a way to keep finding delight in learning and teaching. And that in itself is enough! Seeing other people enjoy it, is icing on the cake. I love how low the stakes are. No one needs this website. No one asked for it. I'm making it simply because I want to, and because It feels good to add to the the convivial web.

Woman finding precious time for hand-coding a html and css website, while one of her babes are sleeping in her lap. By Jacopo Palma, 2025.

A few years ago, I made a book club session with the artist Natalia Tikhonova as part of the Calculation Art project online residency program, where we read the book ‘Tools for conviviality’ by Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich. In the book from (1973), Illich writes that the nature of modern ‘tools’, from machines to schools, has the effect of making people dependent and undermine their own natural abilities. He suggest that we instead create what he called “convivial tools”. These are tools that encourage people to think for themselves and be more socially engaged.

"Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision."

This book is one of those kinds of works that are quoted over and over. In a culture obsessed with the negative and dystopian sci-fi views on technology, it stands out because it proposes positive solutions to tech-problems, and encourages to look constructively at the mess we've made of our modern world.

The proposition is that we need to share and help each other create systems that are transparent and in return strengthen our ability to learn and build things. It also urges to rethink a system centers the idea that technology must advance, machines have to take over and that infinite growth and revenue increase is not only possible, but the main purpose of it all.

I did the book club with Tina Ryoon Andersen & Johanne way back in 2021. A quaint time before the internet was taken over by social media platforms that promote Stochastic Parrot content, and most of our monopoly-tech-infrastructure-providers decided we need more nuclear power plants to fuel the fascist Precrime surveilance machines. A simpler time!

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What does this have to do with a tiny p5.js tutorial website? At the book club, we all agreed that although convivial tools sound great, its difficult to think of what a truly convivial tool really is. Unlike in 2021, these days, the answer to that question seems much more intuitive to me. In my eyes, beautiful, accessible, free and community-based education in programming IS a convivial tool!

I love the movement towards the tiny, handmade web. Particularly the part that builds and shares tools that encourages other people to learn how to code and, in return continue to add to it. I'm deeply inspired by people who build a praxis around teaching and building learning resources, such as Laurel Schwulst, Chia Amisola, Mindy Seu, Taeyoon Choi, Rachel Uwa. And so this is something I will probably keep doing. Building little cute sites with learning material. Websites for Conviviality.

♡ Nynne

P.S. Thank you so much for writing in my guestbook! Speaking about the small web, reading messgaes in here makes me so incredibly happy. Thank you!

The sun is out, finally. I survived the toughest winter of my life (again?) and its the loveliest morning in a hundred years and I'm alive. I feel like I have done nothing but be stuck in survival mode all winter. But that's not quite true. Here are some of the things I wanted to share that I made / taught / thought about / pushed to Github recently:

I switched jobs last year, and have been a lecturer at the Computer Science degree at KEA - Copenhagen School of Design and Technology ever since. It has mainly been difficult because I have two two-year-olds. I love teaching, and feel like it makes me grow skills that are both 'soft' and 'hard', i.e. I am constantly having to become both a better person and programmer, because I teach.

I talked about Elon Musk (again?) with AK and Maia in Cybernormer podcast (in Danish). It's a nasty topic, but at least we had a lot of fun while rounding up the absurdities and compiling an insane amount of footnotes on all the evil shit.

Until recently my personal website was over-engineered to the Nth degree. I had somehow cornered myself into creating a site using Next, Express, React and deploying to AWS via Github Actions. The project built static HTML pages from Markdown files, that were then sent on every commit to an s3 bucket in a kind of scrappy and much too complicated CD pipeline. I had been dead set on hosting this thing on AWS, because I wanted to improve my skills there and so it didn't matter to me that the whole thing was overkill. The point of it all was to learn!

But early this year, I felt the need for a change and started questioning if the site really needed to exist inside this huge, heavy ecosystem. I talked to Benjamin about it and he repeated advice back to me that I had completely forgotten I gave to him years ago: do the simplest thing. Don't overdo it on the tech stack. If it can be solved with a static site, don't add any more bells and whistles just because you want it to impress technically. So I separated out all the parts of the project that were just the personal site pages and built a motherfucking website for myself with not much in it, except pretty colors, text and links. A site that gets an impressive 99 point on Googles PageSpeed Insights (it's a tool for looking up a how fast a site is to load). It looks like I only lost 1 point because the SEO of the site is not great. Dear reader, I care not about SEO.

Something I do care about are GIFs! a lot it turns out. I don't know how I'll turn it into a project just yet, but for now I just really enjoy collecting all the best ones I stumble across on the internet. Like a kid filling their pockets with stones and seachells they find the beach.

A fault line through a lot of my work, thoughts and conversations with friends have been the trouble with generative AI, as it keeps inserting itself into every facet of our digital lives without asking us for permission. I contributed to an article and made a podcast with Cybernauterne about it a while ago(also in Danish). I was by far the most AI-optimistic person in the room, which I'm really not used to. Usually I am seeing overall enthusiasm and very little critique among programming colleagues in the field. I tend to think that writing code is one of the least problematic things you may use it for, and I do use it for that sometimes.

I find the chat to be a manipulative, ego-flattering liar much of the time. But even if the chat often won't help me and instead will confidently serve the up the same wrong answer ad infinitum, it still manages to help me pull myself up by my own volition often enough. It can simulate just enough of a human conversation so as to function as a rubber ducky. It forces me to describe my issue with a level of detail, that more often than not will make me think of a direction to go that ends up putting me on the right track to fixing the thing. That is to say, I use it to talk about my technical problems. Yikes that sounds sad when I commit it to writing. But I am thankful for the way it, as a tool, can force me to think about my problem.

Generative AI is causing all sorts of issues for me in my role as a teacher. I feel much more unambivalently unenthusiastic about the whole thing within the field of education. It is my responsability to provide the best possible setting for learning how to code to a class of fresh-faced 1st semester students. ChatGPT is basically a homework cheating machine, and is known to make us dumber. I feel bad for the younger generation, whose brains have been deepfried by the dopamine hits of Social media since they were babes, are not used to reading paper books, poorly skills for analog anything and have all these easy options to cheat themselves out of learning the hard way. Or learning anything at all. It gets dark real quick when I start thinking about all the ramifications of AI, and I haven't even mentioned environmental impact or political consequences of it.

This month I made my attempt at broaching these things with positivity and curiosity, at the course module I co-taught called 'Social Software'. I made a site for it that is nothing but text, but she's pretty. The course is about both looking at the terrible ways our social lives online are being entshittified rapidly by all the for-profit corps that own them. But also a hopeful and curious look at open source solutions and decentral social media alternatives.

Lastly, but most definitely not least: I finally finished the guestbook. Please sign, please! I would be so delighted if you would prove my faith in humanity by leaving a cute message.

Happy spring!

♡ Nynne

I want add a guestbook on my website!

Like a lot of millennials, I am deeply nostalgic about the internet of yesteryear and love aesthetics that reminds me of discovering the web. I want to tap into the same curiosity and excitement I had about technology, when I was using the enormous Windows 10 machine in the living room to dial up the internet or play Kings Quest VII for hours on end.

And so I think my otherwise beautiful website needs a guestbook, in order to feel like one of the websites I created as a bored tween. I love the one computational designer and textile artist [Vera van de Seyp](Vera van de Seyp) has created as a beautiful letter type machine. I started an are.na guestbook mood board to try and research both the aesthetics and functionality I'm going for.

Did you roam free on the aol internet of guest books and visitor-counters? Can you remember if there were any you actually used, or think of contemporary examples of guest books you've seen in the wild that you liked? Please let me know!

Thanks for reading.

♡ Nynne

A common misnomer I remember hearing lots, way back when I worked at a university in Germany, is the use of the noun learning instead of teaching in a sentence. Like: "My favourite class is the one where the docent learned us (...)". Because in the German, its sort of the same word, just used differently to emphasize context. I really like this conceptual mixup! I have been thinking a lot about what it means to learn how to be a programmer recently. How teaching and learning is two sides of the same practise, for me. I get to think it over again while I'm preparing an intro class on programming for my new job as lecturer at the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology (KEA), while simultaneously learning a new programming language again myself - Java.

Programming is a set of instructions that specifies to a machine how to do something. The computer must be told in escrutiating detail how to do anything. Machines are dumb as rocks and don't understand hints or humor. They can't imagine what you mean unless you express it exactly right. When you knit a sweater, you are the computer and the recipe is the program you run.

Computers actually can't do much. Here's a list of the instructions that are acceptable:

• Input Get data from a keayboard, file, sensor or other device.
• Output Display data on a screen or send it to a file or other device.
• Math Perform basic mathematical operations.
• Secision Check for certain conditions and execute the appropriate code.
• Repetition Perform an action repeatedly, usually with some variation.

Every program you've ever used, regardless of how complex or sophisticated it appears, is made up of these small computational building blocks. Programming really is the process of breaking a large, complex task into smaller and smaller subtasks, until they are small and simple enough to be performed with the electronic circuits provided by the hardware. Everything must be translated to biip booop fluent machine.

Grace Hopper invented the compiler, which in a sense is the translator that we have in all modern (high-level) programming languages that turns human natural language instructions (computer code) into something the machine understands. She also coined the term debugging, at a time when a computer took up the space of an entire building, and running a program could be interrupted by a moth getting stuck in a relay!

Today a bug is what we call all and any programming errors, and debugging is the process of of tracking down the errors and fixing them. When you try to build something out of lines of code, you can be sure to get plenty of errors Debugging is one of the most valuable skills you can hone as a programmer. It can be incredibly frustrating to find the error and spend lots of time on it, especially if it turns out to be something dumb like a typo, unsaved file somewhere or a forgotten npm i. Not knowing how to make the thing work, can trigger the worst and most deeply held belief that I'm a dumb-dumb.

I always struggled with this. I don't feel like a natural talent. I didn't assemble my own computer when I was a kid, or build my own game in highschool -for fun-. I'm a slow learner and nothing has ever been easy breezy about building this technical career for myself. The only thing I have going for me is stubbornness, and sometimes even that fails me too.

Its one of the reasons why I love to teach intro to programming for beginners. I always found it easier to be kind, patient and encouraging of making mistakes when other people are making them. Something clicks whenever I am able to help/motivate/cheer/give the right tools to another person who is struggling. I stil struggle. But I found some comfort in leaning into good habits when I get stuck for too long and the dark clouds of self-doubt begin to gather above my head. Sometimes one of the best things to do, if you can, is take a break!

Another incredibly helpful way out of the soup-of-despair is calling a friend. I saw Alma the other day to knit and drink coffee. But also ask her, with my laptop perched between us on the wobbly cafe table, how to simply run something in my terminal, after I had fallen into the deepest, darkest, toxic youtube pit of 10x-engineer-dude-splaining madness. The issue I've had the most with learning anything technical, has been about being patient and kind to myself. Most things that are worth getting good at, take time! Via Rusty Foster's brilliant newsletter, I learned that in 1991, songwriter Ron Miller wrote a set of affirmations for the practice of music, which Glitch user @thricedotted made into a web app that can be adapted to any art: "It is only code and I am a beautiful person."

Thanks for reading.

♡ Nynne

Ooof it has been a minute since I started ye olde newsletter more than two years ago, never to be heard from again. What did I do in the meantime? Well not much, except TWO ENTIRE HUMANS. Talk about a task I'm glad I underestimated beforehand. In my extremely limited downtime, I enjoyed digging myself deeper into the rabbit hole of how to optimize the technical aspect of this blog. I spent entirely too much time over-engineering a custom static page generator for these Markdown posts, building a custom continuous delivery pipeline with Github Actions that publishes the changes from every git commit to a cloud server instantaneously.

Then I finally got cracking on implementing the immaculately cute design for the blog that AK made me, also two whole years ago. Please please if you're reading this in the newsletter format, go to the web and look at it there on desktop, to get the full experience.

One of the reasons I have postponed writing for this long, has perhaps also been some kind of trepidation, not wanting to come out with anything less than perfect. A feeling that only grew as time moved on. With this meandering nothing-burger post, I hope to get over that, or at least shushhh the voice enough to get to writing. Not necessarily with any kind of promise of frequency. But with the kind of open, curious and excited space in my mind I can only find if I manage to suspend judgment and toss out all "plans for greatness". There are a lot of things I want to write about: imposter syndrome, raging against the computer machine, teaching, learning, technologies I love and hate, people and projects that inspire me.

The internet really is going to shit. I feel like carving out a little corner of it and making it nice and cozy and delightful.

Thanks for reading.

♡ Nynne

Are you older or younger than the internet? I grew up with it, and I think that is why the early stages of www feels so nostalgic to me. Pure HTML is how the internet looked when I first encountered it, and at a time when it was simpler in a lot of ways and felt like a more pure place to hang out than it does today. A perfect example is the very first website to ever be made. Did you know it is preserved for your enjoyment? Here it is in all its glory. This is what HTML gives us: content (headline, paragraphs, links, images, tables) with no styling whatsoever to make it pretty. Functional brutalist and beautiful!

Modern web development is constant flux. As a web developer, I need to keep up with a staggering amount of changes to the languages and frameworks I use for work. I also need to learn a couple of new ones every few years or so, in order to keep my skills current. In a world that is always changing, HTML is forever! I mean, isn't it incredible that the first website ever created is written in such a simple and powerful markup language that it perfectly renderes in every browser known to man today — some 30+ years ago.

Beginner-friendly

HTML is what you use to organize the content of a website with tags, such as headlines, paragraphs, links, images and lists. It is as versatile and box-shaped as LEGO bricks, simple and relatively beginner-friendly to learn. If you're excited about learning how to build websites, this is the place to start and this. There is a finite number of tags you need to learn in order to create your very first website and see it render in the browser.

Accesible

When building for the web, you need to keep inclusion and accessibility in mind. Just like a responsible architect should include ramps and escalators so that the finished building can be used by people with disabilities, web accessibility is about making sure web projects can be used by people with disabilities such as vision impairment, blind, deaf or people who can't use a computer mouse. HTML, particularly semantic HTML is structured in a way that automatically makes it work for screen readers and enables keyboard navigation.

A lot of the challenges to make websites accessible, is that we keep adding more and more complexity. A lot of it is nice and makes your experience on the internet more interactive and visually immersive. Some of it is pure evil and centered around tracking your every move and selling you toothpaste. The simplest motherfucking website made with HTML will be the most accessible any day. Web accessibility is a big and really exciting topic in and of itself. I might dedicate a whole newsletter to the necessity, purpose and poetry of it.

Beautiful!

What initially caught my interest in HTML was encountering a bunch of artists and designers that challenged me to think of it as an aesthetic. It all started When Johanne made me aware of the prolific artist, interaction designer and Princeton lecturer Laurel Schwulst. Listening to the interviews with artists and designer in her podcast, HTML Energy, reminds me how much fun it is to be able to draw something that fills the screen in my browser. It makes me question why technology have to be so hard. I am also inspired by designer Mindy Seu, artist Agnes Cameron, among many others.

I started to think that pure HTML can be beautiful. Shoutout to Pernille who found this pretty HTML page in the wild.

Thanks for reading.

♡ Nynne

Welcome to my new newsletter! I think this is going to be a not-so-newsworthy place where I delve into things that aren't necessarily in the news-cycle just now. There will be no listicles! No hot takes on the latest and greatest!

This will be a place where I collect my thoughts on topics that inspire me to be technical, to learn, teach and build things. To be critical of tech ecosystems, tools and paradigms. Every newsletter will be a selection of things I find meaningful and gives me energy at present. A deep-dive into an area that always fascinated me or unpacking a theme that I find particularly exciting.

Kære Computer is Danish for Dear Computer. I am typing this letter on/to my device. Writing code is a kind of conversation with a machine. Like talking to someone who has no sense of humor at all. Computers are a tough audience to write for. Often I'll mumble under my breath, while trying to make something work: Dear Computer, please work!

This newsletter is for anyone interested in technology and I aim for making it beginner-friendly for readers not yet well-versed in programming.

whoami? I'm a fullstack programmer, currently working mostly with React and Typescript. I wasn't always, though. I was late to discover my interest in computers, and I'll tell you the story about how it happened in one of the next letters.

Thanks for reading along / subscribing.

♡Nynne