Credits & thanks

This website was made by hundreds of talented people who are unlikely to have even heard of us! This section acknowledges our deep gratitude for their work. We have stood on the shoulders of giants: individuals, companies and non-profit organizations willing to share their superior knowledge, skills and aesthetics.

Booklovers truly appreciate beautiful typography. In Łukasz Dziedzic's Lato, we found not only a gorgeous typeface, but also one providing superb legibility, a full range of 18 fonts, and over 3000 glyphs for exceptional language support. Our favourite typeface features on all of our visual materials. Even our logo is pure Lato!

We wanted a colour scheme that would exude a relaxing ambience. The Boom Boom Room by Jaime Guadagni stood out amongst countless palettes surveyed. It inspired our entire design! A big thank you is due to Peggy and Marco Lachmann-Anke for their clever artwork, as well as to Irko Palenius for his ingenious Stairs Loader.

Our website leverages several innovative technologies freely available to all. Caddy, Let's Encrypt and ZeroSSL help us support TLS 1.3, the latest standard for internet security and privacy. With AVIF, Brotli, HTTP/3, Service Workers, SVG, WebP and WOFF2, we attain faster page loads and an overall better user experience.

Under the hood, one finds over half a dozen computer languages. At its core lies Elixir, complemented by the robustness of Erlang / OTP, Phoenix and Ecto. We are grateful to the creators of the Elixir ecosystem for offering the world an outstanding environment that fosters the pursuit of programming excellence.

MintFirsts.com is built on a highly analytical book cataloguing platform we developed in-house. Efficient and reliable data handling is therefore of paramount importance. Thanks to the over 500 contributors to our database of choice, PostgreSQL, we enjoy top-notch capabilities and complete peace of mind.

Our undertaking has greatly benefited from a plethora of other free tools, invariably open source projects, or else based on one. Notable among them are Node.js and Webpack, along with the brilliant libraries they enable access to. Kudos also to the ImageMagick, MJML, pgBackRest and SCSS teams.

Building this website has been a journey of exploration and learning. Thousands of online articles and blog / forum posts have been consulted over the years. Doing justice to their authors would be impossible. Let the mentioning here of MDN and Erwin Brandstetter be seen as a token of appreciation for them all.

At the far end of the fibre optic cable, we run Debian servers on Proxmox virtual machines. This software infrastructure is the product of the grand collective effort of the vast Linux community. If every person was counted, the "hundreds" of the opening sentence would turn out to be a gross understatement!

Some businesses can afford to spend big on technology. Most cannot. Personal time was the main resource we could invest to bring this project to fruition. Yet we managed to achieve all our set objectives by tapping into the immense wealth of the internet. Unsung heroes from every corner of the Earth deserve the credit.