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About me and the blog

My name is Marcin Wichary (he/him). I’ve worked as a UX designer, typographer, front-end person, and manager at Google, Medium, and Figma. I’ve also written a book about keyboards and typing, gave talks, and published essays about design, typography, and technology.

Unsung is my blog about software craft and quality.

More info about Unsung

Send me feedback, tips, bug reports, and anything else:

More info about Unsung

text.makeup

I am generally not someone who cares much for easter eggs (unless they come with interesting stories), but John Gruber’s one-liner made me pause for an unexpected reason:

Joanna Stern explains why this emoji is correct today: 📅. (This one too: 📆)

I thought the two different calendars was some trickery, but the answer is simpler than that. I did not realize that, inexplicably, there are two distinct calendar emoji: one for calendar, and one for a tear-off calendar.

The way I learned about it was to use a tool I made a few years ago called text.makeup:

I thought this would be a nice opportunity to share it with you. If you’re debugging a string you don’t understand, or are just interested in learning about various Unicode or encoding secrets through playing (see the left sidebar!), it might be a fun thing to use.

I just updated it with the most recent emoji (and Unicode goodies) that will drop after September this year.