Credits & thanks

This website was made by hundreds of talented people, who are unlikely to have even heard of us! This section is to acknowledge our indebtedness 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 do appreciate beautiful typography. In Łukasz Dziedzic's Lato, not only did we find a gorgeous typeface, we found one that offers superb legibility, a full range of 18 fonts, plus over 3000 glyphs for exceptional language support. We employ our favourite typeface almost everywhere. 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 everything! A big thank you is also due to Peggy and Marco Lachmann-Anke for their clever artwork, as well as to Irko Palenius for his ingenious Stairs Loader.

Our website exploits many innovative technologies that are freely available to all. Caddy and Let's Encrypt help us support TLS 1.3, the latest standard for internet security and privacy. With AVIF, Brotli, HTTP/2, 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. The star of the pack is Elixir and its associated technologies, primarily Erlang / OTP, Phoenix and Ecto. We are grateful to the creators of the Elixir ecosystem for introducing us to an ideal environment for the pursuit of programming excellence.

MintFirsts.com sits on top of a highly analytical book cataloguing platform we have developed in-house. The efficient and reliable handling of data is therefore of paramount importance. Thanks to the 500+ contributors to our database of choice, PostgreSQL, we enjoy first-rate capabilities and complete peace of mind.

We have been greatly served by several other free tools, all open source projects, or else based on one. Notable among them are Node.js with Webpack and the brilliant libraries they provide access to. The ImageMagick team does a fantastic job. Rich and famous Chrome and Firefox should not miss out on our kudos either.

Building this website has been a process 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 all we could invest in order to realize this project. Yet we managed to achieve our set objectives by drawing upon the immense wealth of the internet. Unsung heroes from every corner of the Earth deserve the credit.