Pulp Librarian This is the story of the 1970s great calculator race... (thread)

Design Objective

Are we designers shamelessly good at self promotion? What do tech designers write about? What do they read and share most? Posts about templates, news, case studies, etc get far more attention than essays about ethics and responsibility. Much content is self promotion, no surprise. And unfortunately, the people with the most experience to share don't have time to do so; the people with the most time to post, don't necessarily have insight from experience. So remember, just because it was posted on the internet and shared wide and far, doesn't mean it's good advice.

meg 👍

Something I have always wondered: why do airlines tell you departure AND boarding time? Like, we really only need to know boarding time, and if you’d stop telling us when we were supposed to take off, we’d stop getting mad that you never seem to do it

Tools of the Trade

Beyond Interactive: Notebook Innovation at Netflix Netflix has quite the infrastructure to power Jupyter notebook.

Timsort: Fastest sorting algorithm for real world problems. I missed this one in Computer Science, maybe because it was first implemented in 2002. Timsort is O(nlogn) for worst case, and O(n) for best case, due to interesting combination of Binary insertion and galloping.

sclack Command line Slack client, because of course.

C Is Not a Low-level Language Unless your computer is a PDP-11:

Compiler writers let C programmers pretend that they are writing code that is "close to the metal" but must then generate machine code that has very different behavior if they want C programmers to keep believing that they are using a fast language.

Moon Mom 🌙 "Reminder that we should be using the 🥖 Baguette emoji as the directory separator"

Lingua Scripta

JavaScript for impatient programmers I often link to Rauschmayer's blog posts because I like how well he introduces new JavaScript concepts: accessible to novice and experienced developers, covers common and advanced use cases, distills the Good Parts. Anyway, the book's out, go buy it.

Lines of Code

engineering values ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Hanging this in our engineering Slack room:

don’t be clever
code is a liability
ask, learn, and teach
design and architecture matter
first make it correct then make it fast
only make it fast if you know it matters
it’s not done until customers are getting value
it’s not done until there’s nothing left to take away
don’t automate something you haven’t done manually
quick incremental progress is better than the alternative
code is shared by the team. there is no such thing as my code
it’s easier to change a dry-erase board than a production system
code is written to be understood by humans first, computers second

Patricia Aas Generally good life advice:

OH: “Be like a compiler, and ignore comments.”

Vanessa McHale 🤗

how to write a garbage collector in bash:

rm -rf ~/my-code/

Amen Zine "That's very clever 😂😂😂"

Architectural

John Cutler "This actually makes us faster"

Sean Heber Not wrong:

Programming is great because you can just take that huge messy chuck from the middle of your function and hide it away under a new name in a new function and feel good about how you "cleaned up" the original function by abstracting the internals.

This is exactly how I used to clean my room as a kid - I'd refactor all the junk on the floor to be under my bed. Boom - problem solved.

Devoops

Josh Varty "Fixing bugs in production..."

Peopleware

Scott Belsky Yes:

the enemy of tough decisions is, more often than not, a sunk cost.

a critical superpower in #TheMessyMiddle is being able to cut a loss rather than carry it as a subconscious debt.

Darrel Miller ⛅️☁️☁️☁️☁️

I just figured out how to remove the stigma of remote workers. I now describe myself as a Cloud Native Employee.

Meagan 🔥

It's weird that ppl interpret the moral of The Pied Piper story as "Don't trust strangers" when really it's "Always pay freelancers"

Chuck Wendig Go magic skeleton, go!

TUESDAY. The day you realize that nothing can stop you, because you are a MAGIC SKELETON packed with MEAT and animated with ELECTRICITY and IMAGINATION. You have a cave in your face full of sharp bones and five tentacles at the end of each arm. YOU CAN DO ANYTHING, MAGIC SKELETON

Electric Dreams

Q: Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? "A: Because Keynote Speakers Make Bad Life Decisions and Are Poor Role Models." Fantastic keynote by James Mickens, funny but also tackles serious topics like algorithmic bias, IoT security, and tech's Manifest Destiny. I watched it twice, it's that good.

All-optical machine learning using diffractive deep neural networks This 3D-printed paper implements a classification of handwritten digits and fashion products. To activate, shine a light through the paper!

Locked Doors

henrikschroder Electronic voting machines are the wrong abstraction:

For people to have trust in their vote being counted, the voting machine needs to be understandable by everyone, not just software engineers specializing in cryptography.

A counting room full of people counting paper ballots is a machine, and it's a transparent machine where everyone inside it and outside of it can understand how it works, and trust that it's working properly.

But the biggest argument against electronic voting is that you're not solving any problems, you're just adding problems and decreasing the trust in the elections massively. And for what? To get election results a few hours faster? That's ridiculous.

Google Tracks You Even If Location History's Off. Here's How to Stop It FYI If you're using Google apps, Android or iOS, turning off Location History does not actually turn of location history. What a shocker that Google UI would make it difficult to stop Google from collecting your data. Article has more info on where to find the real setting.

None of the Above

Clint Falin "editing two videos together can really change a story."

Momma Meets World Something many of us can relate to:

Hello, I’ve finished my free trial of adulting and I’m no longer interested. I’d like to cancel my subscription. Is there a manager I can speak to?

Brooke Pryor I feel like proper use of the Oxford comma is something to discuss before moving in together:

This is what happens when an AP style journalist marries an English major and the English major edits the wedding website copy

yolo contendere Bingo!

imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin

Goth Ms. Frizzle "today I learned that goats who won't stop head butting have to wear pool noodles and it feels like information I should share"

Ted Rogers "The Bay Area in two headlines"

Austen Allred Thread:

Silicon Valley expects you to start a company by finding a problem you have yourself, solving it, and it being a problem for others.

But Amazon’s story was basically, “I did the math on this new thing’s growth, then systematically found the ideal product to play into it.”

The Political Education of Silicon Valley "How the anti-government tech-libertarianism of John Perry Barlow gave way to enthusiasm for wealth redistribution and a Berniecrat named Ro Khanna."

T!MoRi "We are still in 2018, this guy is already in 2048 😀😁😁"

Rob Russell "Without comment"

Design Objective

Michael DiTullo Great example of an iconic design, from rough idea to production:

Sketch, prototype, production. A sketch from Bertone, I presume by Marcello Gandini, of the Lamborghini Countach. The next image is a similar view of the 1971 Geneva show prototype, and then a later year (probably late 80’s) production example.

Martyn Reding "When the design team loses a debate with the legal team."

Tools of the Trade

How is Redis Licensed Redis Labs decides to develop new modules under the Commons Clause license. Cue community outburst, as some people want to use these modules, but not write the code, or pay to use it. Oh no! Or as Arnaud Porterie puts it:

It saddens me that closed source companies are acclaimed for merely putting a piece of code on GitHub, while commercial open source companies get the worse shit for any action that involves protecting their work.

Justin Weiss "Even BASIC had cross-platform issues! #RetroComputing"

felixrieseberg/windows95 Windows 95, running in an Electron app. Because of course.

Pulp Librarian Speaking of 1995, and this new thing called "the World Wide Internet": remember when we had glossy print magazines teaching how to surf cyberspace!

Web-end

Wes Bos That's awfully convenient:

🔥 Did you know CSS has a turn unit? It’s often easier to turn something rotate(0.75turn) instead of doing the math to rotate(270deg)

Lines of Code

Mark Dalgleish And just like UX, some issues worth fixing more than others:

The quality of your codebase is a UX issue. If everything is inconsistent, if it takes longer to deliver than your competitors, if every major change results in countless additional bugs, if performance only ever degrades over time—your users will notice.

Parsing Expressions, TDD, and the Big Why Don't take hard shots:

baby TDD is red green refactor. grownup TDD is taking the shots that look hard at first blush, then rearranging things until they're not hard, then baby-TDDing them.

the steering premise says "tests & testability are first-class participants in design". it means, in the simplest telling, "don't take hard shots. when you can't test this design in an easy shot, change it until you can."

francesc Ed note: according to some stats I found online, this corner case affects hundred of thousands of people a day:

the traditional corner case no programmer expects: "arrives -1 days later"

The flight actually arrives one day earlier, yeah ... that's a thing

@rw@mastodon.social "Personally, I prefer to increase the spacing for each successive indent according to the Fibbonaci sequence:"

Peopleware

Matthew Flint Nothing wrong with choosing your own individual contributor adventure:

Feels like it’s wrong to be an experienced dev who loves dev.

“With your experience, you could be doing these tech designs or writing docs or managing a team or...”
“No thanks, I like devving”

“You have no career ambition!”
“Wrong. I want to be a better dev who actually does dev work.”

Calvin Acosta 💯

Wanna know why you’re unhappy with your work?... because you keep wasting energy looking at everyone else’s, when you could be appreciating your own growth. You’re doing great all on your own, so own that shit.

Resilience +1 to culture of resiliency:

One parting thought: the truly outstanding entrepreneurs aren’t just resilient themselves, but instill resiliency throughout their organization. It’s one thing for you to move on, it’s entirely another for you to develop a culture in your business where everyone does.

Locked Doors

Google Data Collection The personal device that records everything you do:

Both Android and Chrome send data to Google even in the absence of any user interaction. Our experiments show that a dormant, stationary Android phone (with Chrome active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour.

Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to 1 Look how quickly Black Mirror is turning from a dystopian sci-fi series into a documentary.

halvarflake Sad but true:

People speak about the "security poverty line", but the harsh truth is that there is an "engineering poverty line" in tech, and many large, world-famous companies fall below it. Good security is normally a result of healthy IT engineering culture & competence; reality is that ...

Comprehensive Vulnerability Analysis of AT Commands Within the Android Ecosystem From which I learned that cell phones are just glorified modems, AT commands still exist, of course they're not secured or anything, and don't connect your phone to a public USB charger!

Techtopia

Tech billionaire parenting Remember this scene from Scarface: "Don't get high on your own supply"?

Melinda Gates’s children don’t have smartphones and only use a computer in the kitchen. Her husband Bill spends hours in his office reading books while everyone else is refreshing their homepage. The most sought-after private school in Silicon Valley, the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, bans electronic devices for the under-11s and teaches the children of eBay, Apple, Uber and Google staff to make go-karts, knit and cook. Mark Zuckerberg wants his daughters to read Dr Seuss and play outside rather than use Messenger Kids. Steve Jobs strictly limited his children’s use of technology at home.

None of the Above

Plausocks "all aboard the murder train"

How Ali Wong Structures Stand-Up The best stand-up introduces you to the comedian's world view, weaves multiple story lines, and brings them together into a climax. This structure also works for technical presentations, doesn't need to be funny, but it will get the audience's attention. Just reflect on all the best keynotes you've watched (eg from last week, James Mickens).

Also, go watch Ali Wong on Netflix, her stand-up is fantastic.

The laughter climax is meta funny. For 50 minutes, Ali has built a universe, with each joke expanding the audience’s understanding of her world-view.

Oil industry wants government to build seawall to protect refineries from climate change effects Not. The. Onion.

Steven Sinofsky "A tale of Apple in two headlines separated by a two quarters." According to financial analysts on TV, there's no winning move for Apple (top: January 2018, bottom: August 2018):

For Centuries, People Thought Lambs Grew on Trees When you don't check your sources, 436 A.D.

isis agora lovecruft "petition to bring back rainbows in computer logos. rt if u agree, fav if u agree"

Simon Kuestenmacher "Timezones of Antarctica. It must be a mess when all the staff of all arctic research stations want to organize a BBQ or at least a phone conference..."

Design Objective

Patrick Thornton This should be common knowledge:

Designers are usually given symptoms, not actual problems to solve.

First step is to figure out the real problem that needs to be solved.

This means that product managers, journalists, business people, etc. need to understand this first step. They usually get problem wrong.

Ryan Singer Because if you don't understand the problem, the solution will eat your product alive:

A major cause of product bloat is building things you know how to build but don't understand. If a customer wants it, but it doesn't fit into your mental model of use cases, building it creates an area in the system that you can't reason about.

Aneesh Karve At the very least, do this:

I find that focusing on "jobs to be done" helps to cut through feature creep. More so than use cases, which are not always situational and thus easier to contrive.

Introducing Project Paper Cuts I wish more software vendors would follow:

Project Paper Cuts is dedicated to working directly with the community to fix small to medium-sized workflow problems, iterate on UI/UX, and find other ways to make the quick improvements that matter most. … One big source of inspiration for us has been the Refined GitHub browser extension.

Scott Belsky To do things that don't scale:

Here’s what i’ve observed and been perplexed by after 10+ years trying to organize the creative world: Creative minds don’t want productivity at the expense of creativity. While the science of business is scaling, the art of business is the stuff that doesn’t.

Tools of the Trade

Real world SSD wearout Don't RBD in production, and watch for slow SQL queries:

• Redis+RDB generates a ton of disk writes and it depends not on the amount of changes in Redis db, but on DB size and dump frequency.
• Actively used SWAP on SSD is probably a bad idea.
• In DBMSes like Postgresql … bad database design or access patterns might produce a lot of temp files writes.

matt blaze How dare you!

I'm told that I'm being very disrespectful by referring to the Blockchain as a mere data structure, and that it is more like a way of life. I apologize to any computers I've offended.

First million integers, laid out with UMAP A beautiful visualization of the first million integers and their prime factors. Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection is an interesting way to "see" order in the data, and it took me two readings and I still have no clue how UMAP works.

Astra! Friendly reminder:

microprocessors are domesticated sand

wideNES - Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games Reverse engineering the Nintendo Picture Processing Unit, and detecting scenes without using computer vision.

Lines of Code

Ted M. Young 👍

Your regular reminder that coding includes writing tests, writing docs, talking to folks, moving code around, deleting code, renaming things, and thinking.

George Porter This (read story to find out) is a relic from the days of PDP-11, why do modern programming language still carry this baggage?

A quick story about the hardest bug I ever debugged. My first job in high school was working at a Houston-based ISP called NeoSoft. I was writing a multi-platform web server in Tcl/Tk (w/ OTcl) called NeoWebScript 1/

David Winterbottom 😈

On your first day at the new job, squash every commit from the repo into a single commit with message "Legacy code" and force-push to master.

Sam Halliday No idea why I find this so funny:

How many programmers does it take to screw up a light bulb?

5 story points

Architectural

My Favorite Sayings 💯

The greatest performance improvement of all is when a system goes from not-working to working … The real challenges are getting programs completed quickly, ensuring their quality, and managing the complexity of large applications. Thus the primary design criterion for software should be simplicity, not speed.

John Feminella What's easy to measure is not necessarily what you need to optimize:

Whenever I see a company hyper-focused on optimizing their infrastructure pennies, I wonder how many dollars are being missed elsewhere in the pipeline.

📜 Here's a thread of one example of what I mean by this.

The subtleties of API contracts, or how enabling HTTP/2 broke Go clients API contracts are not just function name and argument types (h/t drewish):

Go had previously not defined whether it was safe to reuse a request, but it was. Go 1.6 still didn’t define whether it was safe to reuse a request, but it wasn’t, and in the meantime users started to implicitly depend on the behavior. The slight shift in contract is about as subtle as things get, but it was a change in contract nonetheless, and demonstrates how it’s possible to introduce a breaking change even if every function signature stays the same.

Bruce Hauman Or as they say, "pro tip":

It happens far too often that the process of documenting a feature after its been implemented reveals serious flaws the design of that feature. I’m just not learning the obvious lesson.

Peopleware

bechillcomedian ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Apparently kids are taught this acronym in school now:

T.H.I.N.K. before you speak.

T - is it True?
H - is it Helpful?
I - is it Inspiring?
N - is it Necessary?
K - is it Kind?

I feel like I need this to pop up every time I go to post online.

Autism from the inside Too many depictions of autistic people rely on tired clichés. Listening and learning.

Danielle Paquette That's the right move:

Interesting: Microsoft announces it will only ink contracts with companies that provide workers 12 weeks of paid maternity/paternity leave.

That includes firms that staff landscapers, janitors and cafeteria workers:

Techtopia

Franken-algorithms: the deadly consequences of unpredictable code I guess we humans will learn the lessons the hard way:

In an algorithmic environment, many unexpected outcomes may not have been foreseeable to humans – a feature with the potential to become a scoundrel’s charter, in which deliberate obfuscation becomes at once easier and more rewarding. Pharmaceutical companies have benefited from the cover of complexity for years (see the case of Thalidomide), but here the consequences could be both greater and harder to reverse.

phooky 👻

My mom, staying in my guest room, texted me to ask why it sounds like there's a fax machine stuck behind the wall. I told her it was the 3d printer running in the basement. We selected a weird future.

Locked Doors

The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History In which Russia uses code leaked from the NSA to craft a vicious malware, attack Ukrain and in the process cause $10 billion damages to various businesses around the world, including Russia's own Rosneft:

Then, in June 2017, the saboteurs used that back door to release a piece of malware called NotPetya, their most vicious cyberweapon yet.

The code that the hackers pushed out was honed to spread automatically, rapidly, and indiscriminately. “To date, it was simply the fastest-propagating piece of malware we’ve ever seen,” says Craig Williams, director of outreach at Cisco’s Talos division, one of the first security companies to reverse engineer and analyze NotPetya. “By the second you saw it, your data center was already gone.”

Data vandal changes name of New York City to “Jewtropolis” across multiple apps Quality control meets user generated content business model.

None of the Above

LEGO "We’ve built the impossible: a full-sized LEGO Technic @Bugatti Chiron …and it drives! #BuildforReal"

James Mishra 😭

Why did they call it "Airbnb" when they could have called it "localhost"?

Anarkingu Gidora Use case:

fervour with measure Emoji, fancy unicode, and accessibility:

• always add descriptions to images, so screen-reading users know what they're about. include what the key info is (e.g. what food it is, description of yr face and mood if it's a selfie)
• use normal/custom emoji if you want, but sparingly
• avoid spelling whole words with the letter emojis.

To Heal Some Wounds, Adult Cells Turn More Fetal Not just stem cells:

In a newly discovered type of wound healing, which some researchers call “paligenosis,” adult cells revert to a more fetal state.

Mr. Roger Live and let toast:

Could we, without relentlessly criticizing, let people have their pumpkin spice, and avacado toast, and their fandoms, and their D&D, and their too-early-Halloween-decorations, and whatever little harmless things in which they’ve manage to find a tiny shriveled flower of joy?

LEGO Axle Sorter AS-L40A Impressive.

Pattern TIL

This is how Utah stocks fish in its mountain lakes. Utah's Department of Natural Resources says air drops are less stressful for the fish than a long journey by ground. More than 95% survive the fall. Utah DNR compares the fish to high divers diving into a deep pool of water. 🐟

Parker Molloy 🚨

I really feel like people aren’t taking the Republican PR campaign against perceived bias in tech companies anywhere near serious enough.

What they’re not going to do:
actually regulate tech companies

What they’re actually trying to do:
convince tech companies to favor them

Fluff Society This sheep has all the bounces.

Brand New Roman "Brand New Roman is the most corporate Corporate Font ever created! Now all your content can be sponsored content, and sponsored by everybody!"

Design Objective

The ultimate guide to proper use of animation in UX This article makes good use of animation, to illustrate how to make good use of animation in application/web design.

Dan Duett Absolutely:

Scott Belsky:
“The Product Life Cycle”: (1) Customers flock to a simple product, (2) Product adds new features to serve customers + grow biz, (3) Product gets complicated, (4) Customers flock to simple product. 😩

Dan Duett:
A product leader's job is to yield to complexity as slowly as possible.

Paul Boag Which law talks about the meetings, stakeholder feedback, and endless design revisions, that result in these websites:

Hick's law states that there is a predictable increase in the time it takes somebody to decide, as the number of options goes up. Yet we regularly bombard users with options on our websites.

Ha Phan Where do meatballs fit in this analogy?

Somebody told me that the 2nd floor of IKEA with the faux rooms is Browse and the 1st floor with the warehouse is Search. That is spot on. Browse is aspirational. Search is about having direct control.

Tools of the Trade

Serverless Docker Beta While there are tools that make serverless platforms easier to use (*cough*AWS Lambda*cough*), Zeit made their serverless platform so easy to use, you don't need additional tooling. It's super easy to configure, effortless to deploy, got all the right features, natively supports Node/Go/Rust, and Docker. And their Node micro framework is a blast to use.

nicbravo "This is Skype White. It’s the white noise that Skype inserts into every side of every call, just loud enough that the listener knows that the line is still connected. It’s a repeating pattern. (Visualized in iZotope RX)"

Nick Craver It's been many years since I SQL-ed, so I had to think about this for a second, but sounds right:

Related fun fact: “I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more…” was the first song to really popularize SQL. Their message about a massive commit failure and equally long rollback resonated with many people.

Innovation Bot 💡

SMTP over GDPR

Web-End

A Crisis of Permissions On the current state of browser permissions:

The web needs to be naturally resistant to these kinds of abuse, harassment and privacy violation. Anti-abuse measures must be built into a permissions standard to stop bad actors.

Architectural

Notes to myself on software engineering Fantastic stuff. Go read, bookmark for later, share with your team:

7. The most powerful mental models are modular and hierarchical: simple at a high level, yet precise as you need to go into details. In the same way, a good API is modular and hierarchical: easy to approach, yet expressive. There is a balance to strike between having complex signatures on fewer objects, and having more objects with simpler signatures. A good API has a reasonable number of objects, with reasonably simple signatures.

jordwalke "Immutability: A story in three acts."

Lines of Code

Cindy Sridharan Hardest problem in computer science is getting good at naming things:

The chapter on naming from the book “The Philosophy of Software Design” has so many quotable lines:

• names are a form of abstraction: they provide a simplified way of thinking about a more complex underlying entity
• names of Boolean variables should always be predicates

Ethan Lee "Someone sent this to me last night and now you have to look at it too"

Peopleware

Top 5 lessons learned working at startups Some things to consider, if you're working at, or looking to work at a startup.

The Peter Principle is a joke taken seriously. Is it true? I'm not seriously suggesting this is a good strategy, but maybe it will lead the path to a creative idea:

If performance at one level of a hierarchy is uncorrelated with performance at the next level up, the best strategy is simply to promote the very worst people. Nobody knows whether they will make good managers, but at least they will no longer be dreadful staff — or as Dogbert in the cartoon strip Dilbert put it back in 1995: “Leadership is nature’s way of removing morons from the productive flow.”

Emil Stenström 🤔

Just saw the CAP theorem used on people: “I guess you must be available and fault tolerant - because you certainly are not consistent”

Techtopia

josef 💤

is "dream about your smartphone screen breaking" the new "dream about your teeth falling out"

Internet of Shit (hint: this company uses yellow for its logo)

Oh it's just the terms of service of all the apps printed on the ground

I like that the long one is from the company that uh 'deletes' your photos

Locked Doors

Vess I'm posting this because not too long ago, someone asked me about one of those John McAfee scam apps, based on an ad that took too much credit for McAfee's history at McAfee. So here's what you need to know:

OK, folks, I hear that John McAfee claims to have invented cyber security. (I don't know; he has blocked me.)

Gather 'round the fire, kids, for a short story, because I was around at the time.

A Deceitful 'Doctor' in the Mac App Store Reminder that downloading apps from the Mac Store is generally safer than a random website. But it is not absolutely safe. This article tears into one of these, Adware Doctor, which ranks 1st in the Mac App Store paid utilities category, yet will steal your browser history.

So We Got Tracked Anyway Now that many browsers block third-party cookies, the next surveillance trick is using TLS sessions:

As Facebook isn't as pervasively present in all of the web, it went even further. It is enough for you to visit any website bearing a Like button every second day to allow Facebook to profile you, even if you never dreamt of logging into that service.

None of the Above

Ian Laking "I 100% subscribe to this philosophy"

Cheish Hell yeah:

Mother: can you please fix my computer

Me: *leans back in chair* well... well ... well ... if it isn’t Miss ‘Get Off That Computer’ Years 1994 to 2006

ziphi renata Some languages you can learn quickly:

I’ve been trying to learn how to speak Dog. So far it seems like everything translates to, “Are you gonna eat that?”

Sofía Martínez-Villalpando "Dogs herding sheep 🐑🐑🐑 via Tysonism."

don hertzfeldt Someone invent a device for listening to cat dreams!

my cat probably dreams about me. and in his dreams, i’m probably talking to him, like i always do. so when he dreams, his subconscious must simulate a gibberish cat version of the english language for him to hear and i really want to know what that sounds like.

Trammell Hudson Also known as "2 hours".

Michael 🤔

You know those silly critiques of anti-capitalism, like "You can't critique capitalism, you have a smartphone!"

I wonder why they don't ever use the critique that would actually work on me: "You can't critique capitalism, you're really looking forward to your free birthday month gift as a member of the Sephora rewards program!"

I mean if I'm going to tear down capitalism I want to look good for the public beheadings.

Zack Kanter I'll take Fortnite, thank you very much:

Fortnite is impressive, but it’s absolutely dwarfed by the world’s largest video game, LinkedIn, played exclusively by 40-50 year old white guys who compete by sending random connection requests in a quest to build the furthest-reaching “professional network.”

Birdnesting... The little one …

My nephew works in the North Sea on a wind farm project he sent me this today -

‘Had this hawk chasing this bird around a boat yesterday. The hawk flew into the window and knocked it’s self out, the bird it was chasing then landed on the hawk. #lad ‘

Burrill Strong When people are asking for the simplest sorting algorithm:

What do we want?

NOW

A SOCIAL MEDIA FEED PRESENTED IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

When do we want it?

Existential Comics How come there's no emoji for garlic?

Tips for people new to cooking:

1. Use more garlic.
2. Every online recipe lies to you about how much garlic to use.
3. One clove? Are you fucking kidding me? I can't even taste it.
4. I want my whole mouth to taste like garlic for a week.

Jevholution This is all about representation. And they captured it on YouTube.

i noticed there was a blank wall at mcdonald’s so i decided to make this fake poster of me and my friend. It’s now been 51 days since i hung it up.

Nieman Lab Here's your periodic reminder that issues trending on social media are not a reflection of public opinion:

"A full 93 percent of tweets about vaccines are generated by accounts whose provenance can be verified as neither bots nor human users yet who exhibit malicious behaviors."

Mystery of the cargo ships that sink when their cargo suddenly liquefies On average, ten “solid bulk cargo” carriers are lost at sea each year, because liquefaction.

Oddly Satisfying Vol. 4 These CGI short loops are oddly and inexplicably satisfying to watch.

Fluff Society "This family is cuteness overload!"

Design Objective

Data visualisation, from 1987 to today How computers have transformed data journalism. Remember carbon copy, Tipp-ex, Letraset?

Details were copied onto semi-transparent tracing paper from the projected image and later transferred onto the drawing board by means of carbon paper. Again, all the labels would be added in pencil for approval before the time-consuming (and virtually irreversible) inking took place. No pressure!

How to stay scrappy On keeping that scrappy mentality, even as your team grows big enough to fill a movie theater:

We’ve also been experimenting with different ways of working. We’re now trying something called “hack-a-sprint,” where a small group focuses on one project for 6 whole weeks. They can skip all meetings and other responsibilities, so that they can focus on just one thing. It’s like having a scrappy startup within a bigger team.

Tools of the Trade

Josh Weinberg 💡

Did you know you can put console.log statements inside the breakpoint condition in chrome? Kind of crazy but it gets you nice logging in the console that you can easily enable/disable without actually editing your code.

Peeking Behind the Curtains of Serverless Platforms Some highlights from this study:

• AWS Lambda achieved the best scalability and the lowest coldstart latency, followed by GCF. But the lack of performance isolation is noted.
• GCF, only about half of the expected number of instances could be launched at the same time.
• AWS launched new instances of the outdated function (2% of all the cases). We found zero cases with a 6-second waiting time.
• Azure vulnerability: a tenant can arrange for function to run on same VM as another tenant, stepping stone to side-channel attacks.

Jen Simmons Standard bodies I participated in, all had this same issue:

I find the difference between how front-end developers understand CSS and how browser engineers understand CSS utterly fascinating. There's a huge gulf — almost like these two worlds are working with totally different technologies. I had no idea until I joined the @CSSWG.

The Expert Beginner The hardest problem in computer science is parsing irony.

Architectural

Bruce Hauman Why README-driven develoment and throwaway code matter:

It happens far too often that the process of documenting a feature after its been implemented reveals serious flaws the design of that feature. I’m just not learning the obvious lesson.

M. J. Fromberger Optimizing for performance is hard, but it's a technical challenge. Doing less, or saying "no", requires political capital and emotional intelligence:

There are only three optimizations: Do less. Do it less often. Do it faster.

The largest gains come from 1, but we spend all our time on 3.

Cindy Sridharan Build in increments of abstraction:

Almost nearly finished reading the book “A Philosophy of Software Design”

• increments of development is abstractions, not features
• there’s definitely a kernel of truth to some of these highlighted statements, especially agile and TDD.

James Iry 🤔

Today I learned the best phrase ever. "Load bearing optimization" - an optimization that has an unintended semantic effect that people come to rely on.

Devoops

Encourage.exe When the server is down …

Peopleware

Here’s why so many data scientists are leaving their jobs Budding data scientist: "I want to change the world" Paying employer: "I need you to clean up this leads database". Also, being a one-person team not easy.

Related: LinkedIn reports dramatically increasing shortage of data scientists across U.S.

Naval I call it "Restless Founder Syndrome". But like smoking or gambling, someone's making money off it, so sure, let's find a better name and glorify it.

People with “founder mentality” can’t rest once a problem or opportunity is identified.

They take on personal responsibility without complaint, learn and recruit skills as needed, and deliver results despite politics.

There is unlimited global demand for founder mentality.

Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions That would not surprise me:

Brainteaser interview questions such as “Estimate how many windows are in New York” are just one example of aggressive interviewer behaviour that lacks evidence for validity and is unsettling to job applicants. … Results of a multiple regression, controlling for interviewing experience and sex, showed that narcissism and sadism explained the likelihood of using brainteasers in an interview.

Robin 👏👏👏

A couple of weeks ago I was at a café and someone dropped a plate on the floor. Half a second after it exploded they shouted “I AM GROWING AND LEARNING” and I still think about it everyday

Locked Doors

Private by Default While many moan the death of Google Reader, the void allowed other feed readers to thrive. And when there are paying customers, there can be privacy:

I want Feedbin to be the opposite of Big Social. I think people should have the right not to be tracked on the Internet and Feedbin can help facilitate that.

Since Feedbin is 100% funded by paying customers, I can focus solely on making the best product possible without compromises. Therefore, Feedbin can be private by default.

Almost half of US cellphone calls will be scams by next year, says report I'm looking at my call log for this week, and I've got zero legitimate calls in there. The last call that was not spam, was in August.

Techtopia

Brandon Friedman This was always the case, but back in the days we excused it as "engineers don't get along with marketing/sales/support/users", it was introvert vs extrovert, soft vs hard science, and we sighed and moved on. Well, now we're all paying the price for tech's inability to grok the world, and poor decision making:

Tech folks often sneer at college, believing degrees are unnecessary. They wear a high school education as a badge of honor.

The irony is that, while the U.S. system certainly has flaws, what Zuckerberg struggles with the most are things you learn with a well-rounded degree.

None of the Above

@selfsame@tiny.tilde.website "The recursive centaur: half horse, half recursive centaur"

Vivian Take this easy quiz:

ARE YOU A HUMAN CAT?

• naps all the time
• needs to be loved
• done with everyone’s shit
• always wants snacks
• might want to kill everyone
• cute but will fight

Jernone I feel you:

My greatest accomplishment ever was today when I put my quarters in the gas station air machine and I filled all four tires and I checked that the pressure was right all before the air stopped running.

How The Weather Channel Made That Insane Storm Surge Animation A look at the tech behind this video. And to anyone in the affected areas, stay safe!

Dr Rachael Livermore Physics is amazing!

To me the most amazing thing about the universe is that if you take a bunch of hydrogen and leave it alone, 13.7 billion years later a small lump of that same matter will have the idea to sell hot fresh Nutella donuts right on my doorstep. Physics, y’all.

cypnk@mastodon.social Even landmarks have a photogenic and not-so-photogenic sides:

If you were wondering why most photos of the Pyramids in Giza always seem to be from the same angle, this is why

Because of the extensive tourism, they built a highway right up to site. And with tourism and traffic come shops. Businesses get money and they build houses and yet more shops, and so on...

The end result is a city which kinda ruins the mood if you want your pyramid photo to have the “lost in the desert” vibe

Nicole Cliffe How the boss key was invented:

I remember when I was a kid and wasn’t allowed to watch TV, the minute I heard my dad’s car in the driveway I clicked to a sports channel first and then the news channel and then off so if he hit “previous” I wouldn’t get caught.

I found a 90's phone that has a hashtag button on it, I thought Twitter invented hashtags? This is all the proof I need that people have travelled back in time to the 90's, and planted some clues behind for us to find:

My mom was going through a box of her old stuff and she found one of those bulky phones that are from the 90's and it has a hashtag button!!! Like for real it has ( # ) on it!!! Like Twitter wasn't even invented yet so why did they need hashtag buttons???

Third Thumb Changes The Prosthetics Game Ever wanted to have a third thumb?

jake That's so sweet:

i recently noticed that whenever life was getting me down, i'd usually find a dollar in my pocket the next day. i told my parents how weird it was and they told me my little sister puts a dollar in one of my pockets when she knows i'm sad to help cheer me up and now i'm cryin

Playing With Numbers How come Harvard, Yale and Princeton always come top in US News' America’s Best Colleges? Funny story …

Elfin subsequently removed the first statistician who had created the algorithm and brought in Morse, a statistician with very limited educational reporting experience. Morse rewrote the algorithm and ran it through the computers. Yale came out on top, and Elfin accepted this more persuasive formula.

How the West Was Lost The story of John Wesley Powell, who tried (and failed) to prevent an overdevelopment that led to an environmental disaster.

Andy Ryan 😭

Daughter: What does gays mean?
Me: Well you know mum and dad love each other - two men can love each other the same way
Her: So what's 'penetrating gays'?
Me: Er... read me the whole sentence
Her: "She stared at him with a penetrating gaze"
Me: Oh

Ian Laking "If the world’s getting too much today here’s a cat cleaning an owl to get you feeling better again.👌🏼🦉"

美しき物理学bot "微分" (differential)

Design Objective

How Desktop Dashboards Really Work Using eye tracking to design a better dashboard:

Tests demonstrate the effectiveness of negative space. A minimalist layout with space between functional components improves user flow.

Julie Presentation matters:

Designers, you should present your work with the confidence of speakers at Apple Keynotes.

"Amazing. Absolutely beautiful and highly functional. Rich, vibrant colors."

Software disenchantment Great rant about the state of software: we got immensely powerful computers, yet software isn't faster or more reliable than it was a decade ago. But misses the key point that what we got today exactly "meets business goals":

Ever seen this dialogue “which version to keep?” I mean, bar today is so low that your users would be happy to at least have a window like that.

And no, in my world app that says “I’m gonna destroy some of your work, but you get to choose which one” is not okay.

Tools of the Trade

Todd Motto™ "🔥 Love this new Chrome feature, on the fly evaluation in the console!"

XML, blockchains, and the strange shapes of progress 😱 Comparing blockchain to XML is mean, but probably justified:

1. Bitcoin is like the XHTML of blockchains.
2. No, I don't think cryptocurrency investing is a good idea.
3. Blockchain math is actually rather useful, to the extent that it is a (digitally signed) "chain of blocks," which was revolutionary long ago, when it was first conceived. As one example, git is a chain of blocks and many of its magical properties come directly from that. Chains of blocks are great.

Andrew Chen "iPhone XS Max versus MacBook Pro 13. About the same price, about the same specs!"

Rebecca Turner 👻 Get your paranormal terminology right:

Zombie processes should have been called ghost processes.

They have unfinished business and can't move on until their death is acknowledged by their parents. That's totally ghost territory not zombie territory.

Thomas Fuchs "Got a divMMC Future (SD card cartridge for Sinclair ZX Spectrum) from https://www.thefuturewas8bit.com and it’s the most beautiful #retrocomputing thing I’ve ever seen"

tulpa_security The most logical explanation I can think of:

Restarting a computer fixes problems because its soul dies and is replaced by a new one which might have different opinions about your work

Andrew Thaler 🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌

I got this banana phone as a joke but it turns out it's the best Bluetooth headset I've ever used.

Help, I'm managing an international consulting firm via banana.

Lingua Scripta

Finally in Promises & Try/Catch TIL finally has two different semantics, depending on syntax. And also, you can finally.then.finally.then if you need to log intermediate values in a chain of promises.

Array state will be cached in iOS 12 Safari. Is it a bug or feature? Cool bug in the latest Safari that's going to break some websites.

The JavaScript Equality Table Game How well do you know JavaScript equality?

Architectural

Leon Bambrick 😭

Immutability is different now

Emily G "Excuse me, I have been a government software contractor and I assure you this is not the largest man-made waterfall"

Evan Kirstel: The Largest man-made waterfall outside a building in #China #architects #architecturelovers

Peopleware

John Cutler Not all company cultures allow people to gracefully reduce scope:

“The team consistently hits its deadlines...”

Translation...the team:
1 underpromises, overdelivers or...
2 works overtime or...
3 works on highly repeatable/similar efforts or...
4 gracefully reduces scope

Only #4 is a “skill”.

Chad Fowler Me right now:

Procrastination is a powerful tool for working on the 2nd- and 3rd-most important things you need to get done. #productivity #thoughtleader

Affect Conf "Like our Color Communication buttons and want to bring them to your own events and things? The template is now available for download! https://affectconf.com/resources"

Locked Doors

Extended Validation Certificates are Dead Mobile devices combined with the visual simplification of address bars have made EV certificates redundant. Democratizing HTTPS in action.

Cabel PSA: Don't. Trust. Caller. ID. Read this to learn why:

I almost just got scammed hard: a cautionary tale. So, I got a call from the 1-800 number on the back of my ATM Card: Wells Fargo. I answered, and a Fraud Department agent said my ATM card had just been used at a Target in Minnesota, was I on vacation? Ugh.

1Password 1Password auto-fill is my favorite new feature in iOS 12 🚀

Electric Dreams

Stephanie Hurlburt A cautionary allegory about machine learning (h/t Kyle Byers):

Oh no my dog accidentally knocked down the trash and discovered old cheesy pasta in it, and is now convinced trash cans provide an endless supply of cheesy pasta, knocking it over every chance she gets

None of the Above

Jerry Bell "Just look at what we can do with this technology!"

Crypti-Calli 🔥

*to the tune of Destiny's Child's "Say My Name"*

SPELL MY NAME, SPELL MY NAME
IT'S RIGHT THERE IN THE EMAIL
IT'S NOT A HIDDEN DETAIL
THE SPELLING DOESN'T CHANGE

SamCalkins_ "Actually me"

David Bowles Fascinating thread about the way languages evolve:

I often read this question: "Why is Mexico spelled 'México' in Spanish, especially if in Nahuatl Mēxihco was pronounced [me: SHIʔ ko]? What's up with that 'x'?"

The answers given are usually partially right or totally wrong.

Guess what? I'm going to explain it to you. 1/???

Curve-Fitting Science!

Media Manipulation, Strategic Amplification, and Responsible Journalism Danah Boyd on journalism in the age of digital martyrs, responsibility to democracy and society, and dealing with professional media manipulators:

You are not algorithms. But you are also not neutral. And because you have the power to amplify messages, people also want to manipulate you. That’s just par for the course. … Focus on networks — help connect people to information. Build networks across information and across people. Be an embedded part of the social fabric of this country.

National Geographic "Turn your sound on for some fantastic commentary"

Bruce Lawson "Every software project I've worked on since 1988."

Design Objective

Dave Herman So much this:

Part of the design process is letting a thing get more complicated before it gets simpler again. Unnecessary complexity is often the result of lack of follow-through. You can't take shortcuts to good design.

Bill Buxton Convergent innovation:

3/3 Without knowing about Mallebrein's 1968 mouse (almost nobody did), Ronald Rider reinvented the ball mouse which Xerox patented in January 1973. This is the mouse that really got the ball rolling ... Such is the nature of innovation and its long nose.

Tools of the Trade

ColorBox Easy tool for creating ranges of color/shades/etc.

From Farm to Blockchain: Walmart Tracks Its Lettuce I can't even … (h/t Tracy Alloway)

Blockchains are supposed to make it possible to keep updated databases without any central authority in charge. But currently, all of the records for the Walmart blockchain are being stored on IBM’s cloud computers, for Walmart’s use. That has led to questions about why a distributed database like a blockchain is even necessary.

Web-end

Josh Loewen "You guys, Nike's robots.txt says "just crawl it." #seo #webdev"

Una "Writing CSS 15 years ago"

Locked Doors

Samantha Ming Naming variables gets easier by following simple rules:

Coming up with good variable names can be a challenge. For boolean values, you can follow this convention. Prefix it with is, has, or can. Just by reading the name, you'll know it's a boolean 👍

Devoops

Vicki Boykis 👍

Producer: Pitch me.
Me: It's an ensemble sitcom about a lovable, goofball DevOps team that works for a startup in New York and investigates outages. It's called Brooklyn Five-Nines.
Producer: Get out.

nik Well …

Techtopia

Giana Reading this, I realized that's how I navigate the internet:

Does anyone else just... stick to the same <50 sites because exploring the modern web is a hellpool of autoplaying videos and janky scrolling and declining notification requests and closing newsletter signups and cookie notices.

flysanityfly "Rereading Lord of the Rings 10 years later, only to realize that the Ring is my smartphone."

Locked Doors

Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine Chrome is a fantastic web browser, and has the best developer tools, and also combines the worse of Internet Explorer and Facebook.

Yehuda Katz More about the culture that leads to such products (Chrome, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc):

The thing to understand about the Chrome team is that they always believe that their technical goals are the real reasons for the choices that they make that people find abhorrent.

Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information Related. It makes perfect sense if you only consider the feature as is, and don't look at the wider implications:

“People own their address books,” a Facebook spokesperson said by email. “We understand that in some cases this may mean that another person may not be able to control the contact information someone else uploads about them.”

Wim Remes "this is going into all my security presentations"

None of the Above

Christie Dietz Thank you whoever did this:

My son has parked his bike by this lamppost just about every day for the last year. This morning, this sticker had appeared. Absolutely made our day. People can be so brilliant. Thank you, whoever did it 😊

tobypinder Such bravery:

trying some next level shit called "going to bed when you feel tired", will report back

Fluff Society "High Speed Charger"

John Wiswell 😭

Spider-Man is an aspirational fantasy about being able to quickly and conveniently get around New York City.

Ben Hall "Those four people who always like your posts no matter what."

Mike Perham I like "holding entropy at bay" 😭

No one ever told me that I’ll spend 15-30 minutes per day holding entropy at bay in my kitchen for the rest of my life.

CoolPics "I love our pediatrician’s shirt today"

maura quint Tearing down the "boys will be boys" myth:

I want to tell a story: Once in high school, I felt insecure, I put on a tight top too low cut and dark lipstick I didn't usually wear. I went to a party drank terrible wine coolers, too many of them. A man asked me if I wanted to leave, I slurred, said maybe. He said "maybe"?

Pulp Librarian I had one of these growing up:

Bűvös Kocka was patented in Hungary in 1975: a plastic cube, made up of nine coloured squares on each side, that could be rearranged in 43 quintillion different ways. Eight years later over 200 million had been sold worldwide.

This is the story of the Rubik's Cube...

Matt Colville "A seal slaps a man in the face with an octopus. The best headline you'll see today."

An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3 million at Sotheby’s A stunt masterpiece only Banksy could create. Video h/t Zoe Smith

Design Objective

Why Small Teams Win And Bigger Ones Fail Why smaller teams are better at designing products.

Thomas Wendt 💯

I always chuckle when UX designers talk about "journeys." People are paying their phone bill, not trying to get to fucking Mordor. Take it down a notch.

Really Bad Design Exercises Learning about good design … by thinking about bad design:

So now, my really strange idea for better design exercises: instead of asking a candidate to design the best version of something, ask them to design the worst version of something.

Mark Dalgleish True story:

👨‍🎨 I've made a responsive design, of a car that turns into a plane.
👩‍💻 Neat—how does it work?
👨‍🎨 *Draws car*
👩‍💻 Yeah, but how does it turn into a plane?
👨‍🎨 *Draws plane*

Tools of the Trade

Stuart Sierra Oh snap:

Remember when we used to do “serverless” with PHP and CGI?

ryanlittlefield 😭

love too accidentally open software and let it update

Anatoly Shashkin "The U.N. building has always reminded me of Scandisk/Defrag"

Lines of Code

That One Bug The hunt for that one bug that only appears every so rarely:

1. Be playing a retail build of the game, from a disc.
2. It must be an EU build of the game, not a US build.
3. It must be playing on a PAL50-formatted television. (Not PAL60/SECAM)
4. The game language must be set to German.
5. You must play through the whole game from the start to a cutscene near the end of the game, in a single sitting.
6. Notice that the game crashes at a particular, reliable moment in the middle of the cutscene, if all the above conditions are true.

Jodi Beggs Putting up with frustration is part of the job description:

student: I’m frustrated we’re not really making progress, in an hour we’ve only written a few lines of code
me: I have some bad news for you about programming

Kelly Vaughn Also breaking, and failing, and fixing, and learning:

You know how to become a better developer?

You break things. You break a lot of things.

But most importantly, you learn from what you've broken so it doesn't happen again.

Sergio Gil "Running the tests again without saving your changes"

Architectural

Colm MacCárthaigh So I just learned two interesting concepts. (1) Shuffle Sharding, a technique for splitting workload to minimize the (2) Blast Radius when a server goes down:

It's my ten year anniversary at AWS, I got a new badge and everything! To celebrate, I'm going to tweet out the lightning talk I gave at last week's Amazon dev con. It's all about my favorite thing from my ten years: Shuffle Sharding!

Retry Strategies for Transient Failures Analyzes how different back-off strategies deal with transient failures.

Devoops

Katherine Scott I'm not saying you should prank your team with this trick …

The day I learned that AWS instance names can contain emoji.... 🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀

One weird trick to piss off your SREs....

Techtopia

bootsy.exe "a ministory"

Startup Life

The Demise of Blockbuster, and Other Failure Fairy Tales Yes, Blockbuster did see Netflix coming, and other "big companies can't innovate" myths:

It immediately gained traction, and before long Blockbuster was adding subscribers faster than Netflix.

So what happened? Investors didn’t like the costs associated with the program (about $400 million), and franchisees were wary about the threat to their businesses. Things came to a head when, in 2007, Antioco stepped down after a compensation dispute with Carl Icahn, Blockbuster’s Chairman of the Board. His replacement, Jim Keyes, reversed the strategy to focus on the retail operation and the company went bankrupt three years later.

Walter Chen 💯

do things that don't scale, but don't do things that don't compound

Locked Doors

Why You Shouldn’t Use Facebook to Log In to Other Sites Facebook's security breach compromised at least 50 million people. But it wasn't limited to your Facebook page or cat videos: attackers could gain access to any app that uses Facebook Log In. Lesson learned: don't use Facebook to sign on to stuff, use a password manager.

Security Update Facebook in their own words, describe how the breach works:

Second: A new version of our video uploader (the interface that would be presented as a result of the first bug), introduced in July 2017, incorrectly generated an access token that had the permissions of the Facebook mobile app.

Third: When the video uploader appeared as part of View As, it generated the access token not for you as the viewer, but for the user that you were looking up.

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies Bloomberg reports. Apple, Amazon, and the Chinese vehemently deny.

The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies Also this gem of a quote from the Bloomberg article:

Two of Elemental’s biggest early clients were the Mormon church, which used the technology to beam sermons to congregations around the world, and the adult film industry, which did not.

None of the Above

Hend Amry "I present to you...the best Halloween baby costume. Ever."

Sarah Drasner This toothpaste tube analogy …

Technical articles are like toothpaste tubes. Takes only a couple of tries to complete the first 90%, and weeks for the last 10%.

atomjack@mastodon.cloud One of these cats is smarter than the other …

Sofia Gallo Poetry in alt-text:

Whoever wrote the alt-text descriptions for iPhone wall papers is pure genius. "The Swirling vortices elicit a distant memory of dark mysteries" "craters pockmark the surface of the moon with determination" "large, mesmerizing petals explode off the stem of a green tinged flower"

Alex Hillman "Harsh."

Christopher Mims Late night capitalism:

one thing adam smith did not predict is that in a sufficiently mature economy all workers would be employed either inventing new mattress brands or creating podcasts to advertise them

Turn Salesforce Tower into Eye Of Sauron on Hallowe'en night This petition has some momentum behind it.

Steve Silberman "This kind of made my day."

Marcin Wichary 🛎🛎🛎

I have a new iPhone, and noticed that the Twitter app now gives me a gentle tap 20 characters before I run out of room.

Which immediately reminded me of something else: a typewriter bell, warning you that the end of the line is approaching. Everything old is new again!

Fluff Society "Harry Purrter"

Wes Miller "Excel, offering deep philosophy."

Design Objective

Things that might be missing from your job description All the things your design manager expects from you, even if they're not listed anywhere. For example:

Be flexible; briefs change
Find problems before they occur
Bring energy to the table
Don’t take design critique as an insult
Understand the impact of moving that button
Make people around you feel comfortable
Bring 3 solutions with every complaint

Stephanie Walter I guess the design meeting went something like "well, people want more control over their privacy, so let's add more privacy controls …"

Tools of the Trade

Microsoft open-sources its patent portfolio Well, that's a pleasent surprise:

By joining the Open Invention Network, Microsoft is offering its entire patent portfolio to all of the open-source patent consortium's members

Vicki Boykis 🔥

Hottest programming skills in 2018:
5. Fixing git merge conflicts
4. Correctly mapping ports in Docker containers to host machines
3. Getting info from AWS documentation
2. Pulling summary stats from a data stream
1. Turning any of the above into a conference talk about AI

@thomasfuchs@mastodon.social "My favorite IBM design though is their 1980s cloth-bound manuals, designed by Massimo Vignelli. These are a joy to use and to look at."

Web-end

Via Dan Mall Spot on:

"The whole history of CSS feels like we're mostly just struggling with overflow problems." —@jensimmons at @aneventapart #AEAORL

Simon Howard 🎤

take me down to parallax city where the back moves slow and the front moves quickly

Architectural

Kevlin Henney It's hard to comprehend the temporal nature of software:

If you change data validation & collection at the front end, you need to test it against existing data stored. If it fails, you either have to change your validation or you have to write (& test) some migration scripts.

Data validation is a system issue, not a front-end issue.

Oliver Gierke Or to put it another way:

Business logic is not moved to the client, it’s replicated into it. Including all resulting downsides…

Devoops

Liz Lam 😭

* * * * * - Five star cron job. Will run again.

Peopleware

Screamy Moraine Thread:

Okay, I actually want to talk about this for a second, regarding millennials and how really goddamn difficult it is for us to make sense of our own age sometimes.

I Just Knew I Was Going to Surpass These Guys I Was Working For Kara Swisher shares her career story:

When I was just starting out, I’d see some of the decisions my early bosses made and I’d think, I’m not experienced, but this is how I’d do it. I was beginning to get an inkling of my own tastes and judgment. I just didn’t have the certainty and maturity to act on it. I wasn’t a prodigy personality who is like, “Get out of my way, I’m doing this.” I was a little bit uncertain about my skills. But I just knew I was going to surpass these guys I was working for. I remember once I interviewed for an internship at the Washington Post, and a guy said I was too confident. I was like, “Why don’t you retire now, because you’ll be working for me?” Men are always trying to drag women down. I said, “I’m not too confident. I’m fantastic.” I was always, always like that. And I appreciate that about myself, I have to say.

Jeypee "believe me i'm trying"

None of the Above

Because I'm a Guy "THIS IS AMAZING 😂"

@citrustwee@knzk.me Don't try this at home!

sits down across from you
The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right... and who is dead.

How the Smiths took over Europe Smiths, Millers, Priests, and how different European countries got to choose the most common surname.

viral viral "Invisible doors"

Southwest Airlines That settles it:

seth levine the age old @southwestair dilemma. look mean and hope the middle seat stays open or look friendly and risk sharing the armrest...

Always start with the bad cop look. Straight face, little curve in the eyebrows, and no sparkle in your eyes. If they still sit down, then acceptance is key and it's time to go for the friendly good cop look. You may make a new friend! -Ariel

girlziplocked Solid strategy:

Treatments that cause the immune system to attack cancer earn a Nobel A huge step towards curing cancer.

Fluff Society "Seals are just dogs of the sea"

jmhodges The Great Externality:

I'm a moderate on climate change. The moderate position is massive government intervention into the economy.

The extremists want a ban on single-passenger car rides, personal jets, and beef sales. Couldn't be done. Just the massive government intervention, thanks

Climate change is the Great Externality that no market can fix

stephen thecatamites Nature can be so weird:

Having penetrated the protective exoskeleton, a wily hunter harvests the succulent housemeat within.

dylan "I wasn’t ready to laugh this hard" (watch this with sound on!)

alex "A brief summary of me trying to follow any type of tutorial on the internet."

Design Objective

Des Traynor 🤔 There's something to it, at least this example proves the point:

The opposite of a good product principle is itself a good product principle.

Everything else just is a truism.

Designing for Cognitive Differences Often people think of accessibility as “design for blind people”, but what about users with cognitive differences like inattention, anxiety, and depression?

If most users are making mistakes on a form, users with inattention will struggle even more. When this happens, figure out exactly where the errors are occurring, and fix the design of the form to target that error. For instance, if you’re receiving the wrong data for a field, it’s a sign that form labels are unclear; if you have inline-only labels, adding regular labels outside of the fields will do more than adding an explanatory note.

The Art of Feature Naming — Four Survival Tips Naming is hard, here are some shortcuts:

1. Keep names simple.
2. Anchor as much as possible to existing knowledge among your customers.
3. Say what your product or feature does or is.
4. Try to use the name.

Sans Forgetica A font designed to help you remember your study notes, by being more difficult to read than most typefaces. The 'desirable difficulty' you experience prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing (or so they claim).

Tools of the Trade

Suggested Changes Github's Suggested Changes is just the feature I didn't know I needed, and now can't live without!

Zach Holman I … I … I actually like the new JIRA:

This gif of the new @Jira redesign is probably some of the smartest "show don't tell" marketing I've seen in quite some time. Makes it wildly obvious what's happening in the new version.

Web-end

Smart Bundling: How To Serve Legacy Code Only To Legacy Browsers As you can imagine, it takes a lot of effort to have the ES6/CSS5 cake and eat it too.

Ricky Mondello 😭

OH: “Just because there’s no objective truth, it doesn’t mean you just use divs and spans everywhere.”

Lingua Scripta

Thomas Sunde Nielsen 🔥

I think I solved javascript.
undefined = function(){};

Lines of Code

J.T. Grimes This doesn't mean ship shitty code, it means don't spend too much time on code that provides little value to users:

Maintainability is less important than shippability - nobody submits feature requests on software that hasn't been released.

If you have a choice between getting it *right* and getting it *done*, pick *done*.

Heidi Howard 👌

Best advise I every received on software development: You don’t have to (and will not succeed at) fixing everything, just leave things better than you found them.

Kevlin Henney I think data structures were treated more seriously when computers had limited memory:

I'm intrigued by how often I see the wrong choice of data structure in code.

Data structure choice is considered by many to be less of a priority than it once was, but in the last few weeks the usual suspects have popped up in different contexts, and the choice was significant.

Loch Nessa Monster "this is absolute genius"

Architectural

Sprints, marathons and root canals How to prioritise technical debt, and convince the business side that refactoring is important?

To keep the pace constant, we need the process to be sustainable, of course, but the product needs to be sustainable as well. That second part of the sustainability is often neglected. That is where all that work wanted by the delivery team comes in, even if it’s not necessarily wanted or understood by the stakeholders. Brady, the cleaning supplies company, sells warning labels that perfectly explain this problem: “If You Don’t Schedule Time for Maintenance, Your Equipment Will Schedule It for You”.

Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing - aka RFCs I like this idea, we do pretty much this (except we share, not send, documents), but labelling them as RFC sounds better:

1. Do planning before building something new.
2. Capture this plan in a short, written document.
3. Have a few, select people approve this plan before starting work.
4. Send this planning document out to all engineers in the company and let anyone and everyone comment on it.
5. Have everyone follow the above steps

Mathias Verraes The illusion of structure:

I think historically we've approached software design too much as an attempt to impose structure. Interesting problems are usually interconnected, so our goal should be to manage interconnectedness instead of squeezing it into the illusion of structure.

Devoops

Belgian Air Force F-16 destroyed by fire during maintenance – Collateral damage on second F-16 Next time you accidentally rm -rf * in production, remember it could be worse:

a technician was working on an F-16 when he accidentally activated the six-barrels 20mm Vulcan M61A-1 cannon of that F-16. The cannon was loaded and some bullets hit another F-16AM (FA-128). That aircraft had just been refuelled and was – together with another F-16 – being prepared for a (training) mission. Due to the bullets, the F-16AM exploded and damaged the other F-16.

Peopleware

How to Get Things Done When You Don't Feel Like It It happens to all of us, and there are few easy tricks you can use to cheat procrastination:

Next time you are stuck on a project you don't want to start, try doing something that you know will be satisfying. You just might have a bright idea while you're rinsing off your dishes, and that will make you excited to run over to your computer and get to work.

Locked Doors

Kenn White Know your threat model:

I opened my Linux Chromebook and found my (grounded) daughter was logged in. I guess props for bypassing my "hardened" profile. But it made no sense. Screen-lock-on-close was enabled and guest logins were blocked, and… /1

Don A. Bailey Well played!

As some of you know @InfoSecMouse is closing its doors.

I'm proud to announce that as my Goodbye to infosec consulting, I am dropping an uncoordinated RCE 0day for OpenSSH (all recent versions affected) that is exploitable due to compiler optimization:

https://www.trusted.is/lms-2018-10-18-openssh-rce

None of the Above

Solid Sanek

Andy Hunt Nailed it!

No, I don’t want to hop on a damn “quick 30 minute call”. WTF is wrong with you. Third time today I had that offer.

I want your terms, conditions, examples, references, in writing. On record. For future reference.

Ah, now I see the problem...

Peacharu_ "Good morning everyone have an absolutely furious mongoose"

Tess Rinearson Got a point!

hot take: the new yorkers who are upset about the bagel emoji are actually upset about the steady and inexorable shift of economic and cultural power from NY to California

Apple Fixes Bagel Emoji Fortunately, on such critical matters, Apple does listen to its customers.

ShAHHH!nnon Miller Twitter does have its shining moments:

Here is a beautiful hill.

Quote tweet this with the pettiest argument that would make you gladly die on this hill.

Trevor McKendrick True:

The weirdest part of being the 1st finance person @ a startup is going back & forth between doing high value strategic stuff (e.g. hiring, raising money, etc.) and then tediously paying some random $70 invoice

Mauly Fright
me: "I think I'll work from home today so I can be productive and relax!"
foster kitten: 😂

The scariest idea I could think of for a spooky pumpkin 🎃👻😱

Design Objective

UX Best Practices: How to Design Scannable App Screenshots This article walks you through practical ideas for making app screenshots that are more effective, informative, and enjoyable to look at. Which of course leads to more people downloading your app:

1. Explain the most important user story of your app in the first two screenshots.
2. Increase the font size and cut down on text.
3. Highlight UI elements that represent text captions.

Technology Myths and Urban Legends TL;DR

When users don’t clearly understand how systems function, they develop unique (and often incorrect) theories to explain their experiences.

Designing Better Choices for Your Users The power of a nudge in design:

A nudge is any factor that significantly alters the behavior of humans. To count as a nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Putting the fruit at eye level while it encourages for it to be picked up or bought counts as nudge. Banning junk food does not — Richard Thaler, Nudge

Pulp Librarian Advertising has come a long way, from the creative genius of Leonetto Cappiello — you could stare at these ads for hours — to boring annoyances like AdSense:

Today I'm looking at the work of pioneering advertising artist Leonetto Cappiello!

Jon Hicks 😭

Actually what I said was "If it fits between two slices of bread, it's a sandwich"

Tools of the Trade

Saron Asking questions is a very powerful tool, and not enough people know to use it:

I talk to A LOT of developers, and one of the biggest differences I've see between new and experienced devs is that experienced devs don't wait to ask questions. #CodeNewbie

React v16.6.0: lazy, memo and contextType Reacts gets better at functional composition, object state, and code splitting. Also, RFC for adding hooks, so you can have state without using classes (yes please!):

const MyComponent = React.memo(function MyComponent(props) {
  /* only rerenders if props change */
});

James Long The difference is notable:

I'm tired of demos. It's time to see if this async version of React really works.

I flipped it on in my (changed 5 lines of code) and this is the difference. It completely changes the user experience. There's a lot of little things left to do, but this is huge. Awesome work.

The Intl.RelativeTimeFormat API JavaScript finally gets internationalized relative time formats :

const rtf = new Intl.RelativeTimeFormat('en');
rtf.format(3.14, 'second');
// → 'in 3.14 seconds'
rtf.format(-15, 'minute');
// → '15 minutes ago'

Jesse Engel 🔥

I've started mentally replacing "AI", "Neural Network", and other buzz terms with "Predictive model". It removes a false sense of agency, better reflects reality, and instantly brings the hype factor down by 300%.

Lines of Code

Practice - Longer than a Code Kata This is an interesting way to find and unwind common practices that you may not be aware you're doing (eg over-engineering, messy merges, slipping on schedule):

But every one of the groups was writing more code than strictly necessary. They wrote code that they knew they would need in later features. This is something very natural for programmers. We write more code than we need to. For me, that is too still a very hard thing - To only write the code that is required, not what I think is required.

Because they wrote more code than necessary, we still did not have a release at the end of the second iteration. The two features worked, but there was code for some of the next features that was only partly working.

Amber Race "some strings are more equal than others" (clue)

Just learned the lesson again that just because a line of code is covered by a unit test, doesn't mean it actually works in reality. In Java, especially, some strings are more equal than others

Architectural

nicole forsgren The product mindset:

Build the things that differentiate you, buy the things that dont.

Devops

dvlping "When you've lost your API key"

Jake Williams 🎤

Annie, are you ok?
So, Annie are you ok
Are you ok, Annie
Annie, are you ok?
So, Annie are you ok
Are you ok, Annie
Annie, are you ok?

Michael Jackson understood the requirements for continuous monitoring...

Sky News This is one network rollout that didn't go according to plan:

Drivers in Houston had to negotiate their way around an unusual piece of road traffic - a giant, rolling cable spool.

Peopleware

Matt Aimonetti Add this trick to The Art Of Avoiding Unnecessary Meetings:

I started messaging people with whom I have a scheduled meeting but no defined agendas. I offer them to cancel/postpone unless they have agenda items to discuss.

So far, all meetings were cancelled which I think is a win/win situation.

Shreyas Doshi Buckle up, long but excellent thread about the journey from product manager to product leader:

More than 8 years after my last public talk on product management, I spoke about PM career management at Products That Count.

What follows is a long tweetstorm with the key content.

It isn't for the faint of heart.

Are you ready?

Fabrizio Ballarini So you're saying that cross functional teams are more effective than silos:

We put SEOs & devs in the same team, to build stuff with same goal. Moving same KPIs makes tangible and eleminates noise of whether is necessary

Takes time + technically prepared SEOs but instead of explaining what SEOs do, we spend energy on what to build for our customers.

Scott Belsky Or even better, cross functional people:

a lot of the magic i’ve observed in teams over the years happens when the talent stack is collapsed - when a designer also codes, when an engineer has a growth hack skill set, when a product leader is great at copy.

None of the Above

Amy Scott "Ouch, @NYT_Crossword."

Annie Mueller Kids always know. (Also, interesting new friendly social platform, micro.blog)

“You know, I think that cheddar is, like, more dominant. And what’s that other white one? Not mozzarella. Monterey jack. That one’s kind of weak. Swiss is a baby. Cream cheese is soft. And goat cheese is emotional, you know, it just kind of falls apart.”

Zeke, age 9

DJ Sundog - from the spook-lab "Thanks, GMaps!"

Chenoe Hart "Apparently there's names and abstract diagrams for different types of parking garage configurations."

The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture Greek and Roman statues were often painted, so how did we come to believe they're bare white marble? And why this perception is hard to change.

Matthew Dalby, PhD Probably same number of people in both groups, but one is an upper limit on audience, and the other is just a sub-group of all audiences:

If you made a film that was six hours long no one would watch it.

But if you make a six part TV drama with hour long episodes people will happily sit for six hours binge watching them all.

This probably illuminates something deep about human nature.

Patrick Hackett Ooof:

Normal brain: a building.

Videogame brain: through the door, up the pipe, across the ledge, up the ladder, on to the roof.

Apple News’s Radical Approach: Humans Over Machines It's called "journalism". The NYT gets an exclusive behind the scene look at how "journalism" works, and I wish this was an Onion article, and not actually the NYT being schooled on journalism:

For the first time recently — and after extensive negotiations on the terms of the interviews — Apple agreed to let a Times reporter in on how it operates Apple News.

The Surprising Nuance Behind the Russian Troll Strategy How the Internet Research Agency is playing both sides, to sow discord and undermine democracy.

You Had One Job "Not again."

Evan Kirstel "Genius! #makers #maker #WednesdayVibes"

Design Objective

Keith Stoeckeler “We know our users/customers"

Ben Thompson Born in a different generation, I still Ctrl+S even when I don't need to:

My daughter deleted an entire report because, after only using Google Docs previously, she had to use Word. She was completely befuddled by the idea of "save", especially because she didn't have a pre-existing folder for her class in the dialog. Finally she just quit the app 😬

iPhones are Allergic to Helium TIL if it gives you a funny voice, it may render your electronics useless. Keep your phone away from MRI machines!

That’s when he posted the issue to Reddit, where other sysadmins speculated that it might be caused by the liquid helium used to cool the MRI machine. So he investigated, and found there was a helium leak at the same time that vented into the building.

Eoghan McCabe Relevant because, did you know MRI machines are just huge magnets?

Apple consistently set the bar for simple yet engaging marketing copy. This is light and easy to read. Yet informative and fun. It makes you want to read more. This part made me smile.

Tools of the Trade

Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal Fascinating look at the history of the BASIC language, born in a liberal arts college, to make computers more accessible. A feature of every 70's home computer that was lost to time.

IBM to acquire Red Hat in deal valued at $34 billion What a crazy year for open source:

Open source has been the biggest theme in technology this year. Prior to IBM's purchase of Red Hat, two of the biggest tech deals of the year were Microsoft's $7.5 billion purchase of GitHub, a code-sharing service, and Salesforce's $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft, whose technology stitches together disparate software applications, data and devices. Earlier this month, big-data rivals Cloudera and Hortonworks agreed to merge in a $5.2 billion deal.

I Am Devloper Ghost Of Projects Past:

For Halloween I'm dressing up as all your abandoned side projects and domain renewal emails.

muesli Where is the lie?

In other words: XML combines the efficiency of text files with the readability of binary files...

Alex Novemberg "1 new message"

Devoops

Lorin Hochstein ETOOREAL:

Software engineer (quoting Fred Brooks): The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.

SRE: Your service fell over after it ran out of file descriptors.

Peopleware

JBD Thread on job interviews and how to present:

Just because you didn't pass via the interview process, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are not eligible to work at that place. It means the signals are not produced. It might be you, might be the system, might be the interviewers.

Electric Dreams

Google Webmasters I guess Waymo has collected all the data it needs to identify street signs and store fronts (citation):

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of reCAPTCHA v3. Your users no longer need to solve any challenges. You’ll get more visibility to the abusive traffic on your site and more flexibility on what actions to take. Watch this video to learn more →

Reinforcement Learning with Prediction-Based Rewards Neural network learns how to solve Super Mario by avoiding boredom:

RND incentivizes visiting unfamiliar states by measuring how hard it is to predict the output of a fixed random neural network on visited states. In unfamiliar states it’s hard to guess the output, and hence the reward is high. It can be applied to any reinforcement learning algorithm, is simple to implement and efficient to scale. Below we release a reference implementation of RND that can reproduce the results from our paper.

Locked Doors

App Scams: Sneaky 'Utility' Apps Are Stealing $260, $2500, or even $4700 Each Year ... Per User This is another fascinating use case of how flaws in user experience (aka edge cases) will be exploited:

“Users open the app and quickly tap a “Start” button or “Continue” button on the first page,” she told me via email. “Unfortunately this loads the Apple payment prompt instead of starting the free app as most users would expect. Users then panic and press the home screen to exit the app – unfortunately on fingerprint devices this makes payment or signs up for the free trial.”

Lukasz Olejnik And at the other hand, we got UX of privacy:

Closing (modern, with T2 chip) MacBook lids causes a physical disconnect of miceophone. Protects from eavesdropping even if the system is hacked/infected. https://www.apple.com/mac/docs/Apple_T2_Security_Chip_Overview.pdf …

None of the Above

Worker at Utah DMV wears best #Halloween costume ever for DMV worker

Max Fagin TIL

November is here, and that means a massive shift is coming. And by "massive" I am of course referring to the redefinition of the kilogram unit of mass that the world has been building up to for more than 100 years. Let me explain:

Fluff Society "Spooky level is rising <- This stuff is why the internet was invented."

Amy Renee "Most accurate time change graphic out there… ⏰😂"

Audrey "The Salesforce tower has turned into the Eye of Sauron for Halloween and I swear it’s staring at me."

Apple’s New Map Fascinating. "Has Apple closed the gap with Google’s map?"

Words matter, and they’re destabilizing the American tribe Bold. We deserve more tech leadership like this:

That’s why we at Twilio banned not just hate speech, but any organization whose primary purpose is spreading hate. It’s in our control to decide who uses our product, and from whom we take money. We choose not to profit from this hatred, or those who spread it.

Nature is Amazing "Look at the happiness on the dog's face after his big jump 😂😂"

Guide to Computing Amazing photos, from when computers doubled as furniture.

Design Objective

Luke Wroblewski "people will scroll unless you tell them not to."

Early Drafts Every great piece of work starts somewhere.

Tools of the Trade

Now 2.0 Zeit has built an incredibly easy to use tool for deploying microservices, including support for monorepos:

• A unified deployment type: All deployments are one type, regardless of static or dynamic parts
• Massive build parallelization: Each deployment can kick off many concurrent serverless builds.
• Monorepo support: Define API endpoints in Go, PHP, Node.js, Next.js, and such, in just one repository.
• Zero-instruction builds: Our open-source builders take the build and cache config burden away.
• Universal Cloud: Our platform leverages the best cloud infrastructure, with no lock-in or config.

React lazy, Suspense and Concurrent React Breakdown with Examples Explores the new lazy() loading function, <Suspense /> component and fallback, what works now in 16.6, and what to expect when React Concurrent (16.7) comes out.

enquirer "Stylish CLI prompts that are user-friendly, intuitive and easy to create."

李赛博 "If relational databases were invented today"

Web-end

e: Why the React community is missing the point about Web Components On point:

React users would love to not have to npm install a date picker and bloat their bundles! If they need to "use the platform" then why doesn't that platform ship the features they actually ask for? Instead of a <carousel> they get an <aside>. Features like service workers are touted as a solution to many problems in the web, but their ergonomics are so under-designed that people actually have to change domains to bust the cache from a broken build (I’m not making this up).

Lines of Code

Sarah Drasner That will be fun to watch:

I wanna do a “Project Runway” but for creative code projects. Sort of like a hack but many time-boxed specific challenges.

“You can only use these two array methods, you can use canvas, and you have to create a planet. You have 24 hours. Go”

Vicki Boykis "Your code versus the code she tells you not to worry about."

Devoops

nixcraft "People working in IT will know everyday is a coffee struggle."

Tabletop Scenarios 🔥

A growing number of your engineers are streaming themselves on Twitch while coding.

One of them just revealed a production secret while alt-tabbing.

The chat is now being spammed with a production IaaS secret from your repository.

Team Work

Alan Cooper Thread:

When I started programming, it was a solo skill, performed by individuals, with little or no sharing and virtually no collaboration. A culture was built around those facts. 1
...
Going from one person coding something, to two persons coding something is not just a 100% increase in staffing, but it changes programming from a solo practice to a team sport. 7
...
If, on the other hand, our goal is to be a good ancestor, then we have to understand that everyone is poor while anyone is poor. Thus we see that collaboration is necessary for a sustainable culture and not just a tool for more efficient programming. 21

Delay Chokes Innovation What the game of poker can teach us about innovation and small iterations:

If exploratory projects take twice as long, you get half as many of them, which is half as good, right? It’s actually much worse than that and here’s why. This is a story of innovation and incentives and unintended consequences, but first it’s a story about poker.

Coding as an Engineering Manager Pretty much:

If you’d like to and still have the time to work on the codebase sometimes, I’d highly recommend picking bug fixes or small features. Bug fixes let you dive into the breadth and the depth of the codebase and understand how it works, while also contributing back something useful to the team.

With features, I’d be more cautious. Your schedule is sometimes unpredictable, as you might be getting pulled into meetings unexpectedly, so you can easily end up blocking your team.

Peopleware

Damon Edwards 💯

OH: “Culture is how people make decisions when the boss isn’t in the room”

Techtopia

Kane Baccigalupi 🔥

My wife asked me what machine learning is and I said: remember when we ordered the hot plate for the boat and amazon suggested buying all the equipment needed to make a full meth lab?

UnHookathon: Why & how A hackathon where the end goal is to unhook ourselves from technology.

Facebook Portal Non-Review: Why I Didn’t Put Facebook’s Camera in My Home Product review you can believe in:

I just couldn’t bring myself to set up Facebook’s camera-embedded screen in the privacy of my family’s home. Can you blame me when you look at the last 16 months?

The hardest job in Silicon Valley is a living nightmare A new documentary “The Cleaners,” about the people who do the exhausting, traumatizing work of content moderation.

Óliver Login screen poetry:

"I'm a human.
I'm not a robot.
Remember me."

None of the Above

@thomasfuchs@mastodon.social I have one of these at home:

Playing a game of Apple Boxes Tetris ¯_(ツ)_/¯

panamapauper 😴

high difficulty escape room: youre laying in bed and you have one hour to get out of bed

Mulboyne "Everyday cosplay":

Just catching up on the 地味なハロウィン ("sober Halloween") event, where flashy fancy dress is banned, in favour of everyday cosplay. This girl has come as the kind of model you see on cheap Korean fashion mail order sites.

Sweatpants Cher 😭

god I wish I was the person I believed I could be when I bought all this produce

Bill de hÓra I'll take "irony" for $500:

Fluff Society "The evolution of the spin cycle"

Quinn Cummings The best intentions …

Gather round, Gentle Readers. It is time I tell the story of the worst decision I ever made in an office. Some of you have heard this. Some have not. Whatever you do in your office today, this week, the rest of this year, you can console yourself by recalling this tale.

chaeronaea "please enjoy this video i found on reddit of a dog trying to steal another smaller dog"

Ian Making a statement:

For election night, I present to you the best thing I learned in my time as a (third-party) sysadmin in the House of Representatives:

From a congressional IP, you can only read one XKCD comic: the climate change/average Earth temperature timeline.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

gaelitegymn 🦄