Artëm Chistyakov "Rembrandt, “A New Message in Slack”, 1633 #devart"

Design Objective

The Graphic Art of Incredibles 2 Behind the scenes look at the architecture, graphic design, and the two world fairs that inspired the Incredibles 2. The amazing attention to detail make it such a fun movie to watch. Take for example:

One of the hardest things to do was this cereal box where a character illustration appears next to one of our real characters. I turned to Teddy Newton for help on this illustration, and the stylization feels perfect next to Dash. We also play up the humor of it being an over the top sugary cereal so that when it gets swapped out for Fiber O’s, we understand where Dash is coming from.

Learn about Dyslexia for the Web with me! Simple steps to design content that is more accessible to those who have dyslexia:

• Left alignment
• Avoid justified text
• Write in sans serif
• Use headings and images to break up large blocks of text
• Avoid passive voice and double negatives

Tools of the Trade

Cloud Computing without Containers This is really interesting. CloudFlare is building the fastest and cheapest serverless. They decided to bypass containers (Docker, K8, all that), and instead use V8 Isolates. Tested in the harsh environment that is the Web, V8 Isolates provide strong multi-tenant isolation, probably better than any container architecture. And minimum overhead:

Because Workers don’t have to start a process, Isolates start in 5 milliseconds, a duration which is imperceptible. Isolates similarly scale and deploy just as quickly, entirely eliminating this issue with existing Serverless technologies.

Simon Hearne 😳

Five years using a mac and I've just noticed this little dot in the close button, indicating unsaved changes

Marques Brownlee The new iPad Pro can double as a $800 fridge magnet(*):

(*) I only had mine for two days, so all I have is a first impression. It's expensive but noticable upgrade over last year's model. The new form factor feels like a true tablet, if that makes sense. You get more screen space, noticable speed up, a better keyboard, Face ID that just works, etc.

Steve Troughton-Smith If you're using the physical keyboard, you can also select using the Shift and cursor keys:

I can tell from a bunch of iPad reviews that a lot of people don’t know this, so here’s a pro tip: use two fingers to select text and move the insertion cursor around when editing text. It’s almost as good as a physical trackpad

I Am Devloper $ whois new-year.resolution.gym:

Buying a domain name is buying the wonderful feeling that you’ll actually finish the side project you have planned for it.

How Things Work "This is how Charlie Chaplin did things before CGI"

Lingua Scripta

Faster async functions and promises The short version is: trust the language implementation to get better with time, and use idiomatic async/await instead of hand-written promises. The long version is a peek into the internals of V8, ECMAScript, promises, and transpiling.

Lines of Code

The Developer Coefficient TL;DR "‘Bad code’ costs companies $85 billion annually"

While it’s a priority for senior executives to increase the productivity of their developers, the average developer spends more than 17 hours a week dealing with maintenance issues, such as debugging and refactoring. In addition, they spend approximately four hours a week on “bad code,” which equates to nearly $85 billion worldwide in opportunity cost lost annually, according to Stripe’s calculations on average developer salary by country. Nearly two-thirds of developers agree that this is “excessive” and believe that clear prioritization, responsibilities, and long-term product goals would improve their own productivity.

André Staltz 🤔

In programming, natural selection is "survival of the ugliest". Small and simple code gets extended and repurposed. Ugly and complex code stays untouched and becomes legacy.

It's very interesting that efforts to write good code are in direct opposition to the nature of code.

Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work? Behind every piece of software that sells for billions of dollars, there's a mountain of technical debt. Such as (guess the vendor):

Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousands of flags. The whole code is ridden with mysterious macros that one cannot decipher without picking a notebook and expanding relevant pats of the macros by hand. It can take a day to two days to really understand what a macro does.

Sometimes one needs to understand the values and the effects of 20 different flag to predict how the code would behave in different situations. Sometimes 100s too! I am not exaggerating.

The only reason why this product is still surviving and still works is due to literally millions of tests!

Architectural

Let’s take a crack at understanding distributed “consensus” This article takes a look at the various distributed system consensus protocols, to explain the why and how of the Nakamoto consensus protocol — the core protocol behind Bitcoin.

Moritz Heiber "Microservices™️"

Peopleware

Nathan Allen Pirtle 💯

To protect your energy ...

It’s okay to cancel a commitment.
It’s okay to not answer that call.
It’s okay to change your mind.
It’s okay to want to be alone.
It’s okay to take a day off.
It’s okay to do nothing.
It’s okay to speak up.
It’s okay to let go.

Team Work

Alan Cooper Litmus test:

To me, a “Product Owner” is someone who not only has the power to modify its features, but they have sufficient power to kill the product they own. If they don’t have that level of power, then they are not really the product owner, and someone else really owns it.

Ryan Singer To be a successful product manager, you do need all four:

Four literacies for product managers:

1. Design. Will this work for customers?
2. Tech. What’s possible, what’s easy and hard?
3. Demand-side value. What matters to customers?
4. Supply-side value. What matters to my bosses?

laney "When you work alone a lot."

Locked Doors

Japan's cyber security minister admits never having used computer Here's one security person who's never getting hacked:

"Since the age of 25, I have instructed my employees and secretaries, so I don't use computers myself," he said in a response to an opposition question in a lower house session, local media reported. He also appeared confused by the question when asked about whether USB drives were in use at Japanese nuclear facilities.

None of the Above

Fluff Society "Making its breed world debut in New Zealand, dubbed 'The Worlds Cutest Sheep' <- these are blacknose sheep"

Alexandra Petri That's me:

ten writing rules

1. find exactly the right place to sit
2. better get coffee also
3. turn off the internet we're WRITING
4. but i have a question only the internet can answer
5. more coffee!
6. maybe i got an important email
7. how is the coffee shop closing
8. oh no

Max "Sweaty Eddy" Eddy "This is the single greatest triumph of technology over itself, boost if you agree."

Writer in Pyjamas 😭

My Mum lost her password for 23andme. Instead of getting a new one, she ordered another spit kit, gave another sample, and had another DNA test!

Today, she rings me: baffled, but excited and happy, that they’ve found a twin she didn’t know about!

Steve Trendall This is next-level pranking:

VM (Vicky) Brasseur Thank you:

English is hard, so here's today's technical grammar reminder…

The noun form is one word. Examples:

• login [page, form, credentials, etc]
• logout
• setup

The verb form is two words. Examples:

• log in(to) [a site, an app, a server, etc]
• log out (of)
• set up

Nick Kapur "Mercator projection vs. the true size of countries"

Igor Schatz "The Britney Spears effect on the labor market"

@1961___ "هذا لا قلنا ابداع 😻"

Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis Oh wow:

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

You Had One Job "Gate with WiFi."

James Corden "Holy shit. This commercial." You want to play this video with the sound on:

SS astronaut finds NASA floppy disks in space Windows 95. Mint condition. Buyer picks up.

Design Objective

This Is UX Writing at Its Very Best Examples of great microcopy, many puns, and even a brutally honest search filter:

Alan Cooper This thread applies equally well to development practices and interaction design:

Analogies between how things are made in the software world and how things are made in the non-software world are fraught. Software is different, and an analogy that shares one common aspect subtly makes you think that there are other aspects in common, but this is rarely true. 1

Helen Tran Personas (like brainstorming, Agile), has been co-opted to the point where maybe we need a reset and new term:

A 'persona' is not an opportunity for you to create biases for your team.

What is in a Persona:
Needs, motivations, general technical literacy, income/age ranges, etc.

What is not in a Persona:
One made-up individual's picture, name, hobbies, age, and ethnicity

Kill Your Personas Related:

They are inherently an amalgamation, an average of attributes that we imagine our average customer has. And there’s no such thing as the average customer.

Chris Owens 👍

Shout-out to all the sites that still make the login button more prominent than the sign-up button.

Slow Software Explains why the supercomputer in your pocket can feel so slow at times:

What feels "slow" to users? We all have a sense for when software annoys us with delays. But to get a better handle on this problem, we'll complement these intuitions with academic research that answers the question rigorously.

Tools of the Trade

Wired Elements Web components with a hand-drawn, sketchy look. "The elements are drawn with enough randomness that no two renderings will be exactly the same — just like two separate hand-drawn shapes."

Brandon Bloom More options doesn't make for a better product:

Next time you consider adding a config file to your tool, consider this: Every flag doubles the configuration space. Just counting boolean compiler variables alone, there are nearly 150 thousand trillion possible TypeScript configurations.

Post-REST Tim Bray on what awaits us beyond REST:

But I bet that for the foreseeable future, a high proportion of all requests to services are going to have (approximately) HTTP semantics, and that for most control planes and quite a few data planes, REST still provides a good clean way to decompose complicated problems, and its extreme simplicity and resilience will mean that if you want to design networked apps, you’re still going to have to learn that way of thinking about things.

Wynn Netherland Related:

For me, the big benefits of GraphQL have been:

• Types
• Free API explorer with purchase
• Auto documenting
• Explicit contracts with the front end behind which to iterate
• Not needing to think like Roy Fielding to intuit use

Kelly Vaughn 😭

Osahon A "Imagine getting married to another great human who adores you >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>"

I saw the >>>>>>> and immediately thought "shit a merge conflict" and that's how I know I'm in too deep

Krissy Brierre-Davis "How come you guys never told me this iPhone trick? I feel duped."

Web-end

web.dev "Google's web platform team has spent over a decade learning about user needs. Now we want to make it as easy as possible for you to master the defining standards of web development today."

Some notes about HTTP/3 HTTP/2 doesn't excite me, but HTTP/3 looks like a worthy upgrade from HTTP/1.1:

This means that as you move around, you can continue with a constant stream uninterrupted from YouTube even as your IP address changes, or continue with a video phone call without it being dropped. Internet engineers have been struggling with "mobile IP" for decades, trying to come up with a workable solution. They've focused on the end-to-end principle of somehow keeping a constant IP address as you moved around, which isn't a practical solution. It's fun to see QUIC/HTTP/3 finally solve this, with a working solution in the real world.

Glen Arrowsmith "npm install..."

Surma "I, in fact, did NOT mean that."

Lines of Code

Will Crichton A rant:

Picking good names is a crucial tool for thought. A good name communicates or reminds you of the idea underneath an abstraction. Naming something after a person is the 2nd laziest form of naming. First is "Type 1" and "Type 2" error, the dumbest naming scheme ever invented.

Cindy Potvin I need that on a t-shirt:

First rule of debugging: Are you really running the code you think you're running? 😇

Architectural

Matt Wensing 2018, programming is 10% writing code, 90% configuring 3rd party services:

Slack app fun project turning out to be less fun. Time spent writing useful code: 30 minutes. Time spent figuring out OAuth, permissions, and scope by user, bot, and workspace: 5+ hours and counting.

Dave Cheney Yes!

A little global state is not an invitation for a little more. It’s a prescribed substance, not a precedent.

jasongorman Learn concepts first, tools second:

1998: "You should build systems out of single-purpose loosely-coupled components

2008: "You should build systems out of single-purpose loosely-coupled components"

2018: "You should build systems out of single-purpose loosely-coupled components"

Technology changes so fast!

Peopleware

Sophie Alpert Sums it up:

Timeless software engineering skills:

1. Not feeling scared to change code you didn't write
2. Empathy for your users and for your collaborators
3. Ability to communicate ideas clearly

I'd hire someone with these skills any day.

Team Work

Product Managers: How to Stop Drowning in Feature Requests Since my team also practices fixed time/fixed cost/flexible scope, going to start calling it "Goal orientated Roadmaps":

As the name suggests, this type of roadmap describes goals you will set out to achieve during a release but not full disclosure of the detail behind what this will entail. For example, the goal for the next release could be “to deliver the platform via a native app”.

Oscar Godson (한글 학생) 😳

Engineering Manager: "How long do you think this will take? "

My brain:
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it
Don't do it

Me:
"Shouldn't take too long"

Fluff Society "Wow. And some humans won't even talk to each other"

Devoops

Lesley Carhart This:

Which do I find myself doing more? To be honest, it’s often arguing against IT folks (and my better sales pitch) that things aren’t as catastrophic as they think. Panic is counterproductive to triage. I do plenty of arguing that conditions really do merit faster response, though.

Karen López Or to put it another way (a thread):

Another incident response tip: don’t panic and start pulling all the plugs, twisting all the knobs, flipping all the switches.

I watched a celebrity consultant do this during a minor incident. His voice went up several octaves as he went crazy panicking. 1/

Cory Foy Whether you're fixing computers or saving human lives (a thread):

“Panic is counterproductive to triage”. Oh my gosh yes. And after you read her excellent thread, let me tell you something that happened tonight in a very different scenario which highlights this brilliant phrase from Lesley.

Lynn Grant On the subject of clear communication:

Reminds me of advice from an airplane pilot’s blog I used to read: She said when you turn on the fuel pump switch, you don’t say the fuel pump is on, you say it is *selected on*, because it could have failed due to tripped circuit breaker, etc.

Incidents As We Imagine Them Versus How They Actually Happen "Real incidents (and the response to them) are messy, and do not take the nice-and-neat form of: detect⟶diagnose⟶repair"

Techtopia

Guillaume Chaslot And somehow this involves Boko Haram and Kyrie Irving:

So basically we have the two best AIs of the world, on Instagram and YouTube, competing to convince people that the earth is flat. Because it yields large amounts of watch time, and watch time yields ads. This is a #raceToTheBottom 11/

Wanted: The ‘perfect babysitter.’ Must pass AI scan for respect and attitude. What could possibly go wrong?

Jamie L. Williams, a staff attorney at the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said most algorithms deployed now to assess the meaning of words and images online are widely known to lack a human reader’s context and common sense. Even tech giants such as Facebook have struggled to build algorithms that can tell the difference between a harmless comment and hate speech.

None of the Above

On November 26th, a mole will land on Mars The mole lands this Monday.

To Give a Great Presentation, Distill Your Message to Just 15 Words This article may be 1,045 words long, but it communicates the first key point in only 12 words. Show, don't tell. There's more to this article, if you're into public speaking, worth a read.

A good talk has content that is fresh and well-edited, with a clear arc that takes us on a journey. A good talk is one that is so well rehearsed that you are able to let go of the script and freely share the content in the moment. A good talk is one where your audience wants to adopt your idea at the end of the talk.

Climate change will shrink US economy and kill thousands, government report warns Released during Thanksgiving, so to not to attract too much attention. So please share!

The report was created to inform policy-makers and makes no specific recommendations on how to remedy the problem. However, it suggests that if the United States immediately reduced its fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions, it could save thousands of lives and generate billions of dollars in benefits for the country.

Annalee Related. Calls for "individual action" are the whataboutism of climate change:

My dad was a forest fire fighter and Smokey will always be my bro, but seeing "only you can prevent forest fires" during a fire PG&E started is a reminder that focusing on individual climate action is an intentional strategy to distract from corporate responsibility.

Tom Gara "Ahh yes, the Science Channel, time crack open a cold one and settle in for some Science"

alicegoldfuss 😭

Netflix has been doing this thing where it plays one episode then returns me to the main menu and I cannot help but feel judged

I did not become a software engineer to have a website tell me to go outside

melisapressley 🎹

At my library we have an upright piano that the public can "checkout" for 2 hours. There's a homeless patron playing the most beautiful concerto--he told me that he misses his piano most of all. Never underestimate the resources your local library has to offer. #librarylife

Pulp Librarian "The 1983 Sony Liberty LP/Cassette/ CD player. Compared to this your Bluetooth speaker is feeble. FEEBLE!!"

Namastaywoke 🔥

NPR "What if loans are actually a good thing?"

Then why don’t y’all take out some loans and stop begging us for money on the air every 3 months

Airlines face crack down on use of ‘exploitative’ algorithm that splits up families on flights Once you get over how nasty they are, turns out, it's also a dangerous practice:

“This is especially important when adults and their children need to be seated near to each other if an emergency situation occurs, such an evacuation, decompression or air turbulence, when the assistance and supervision of an adult is likely to be of paramount importance.”

Fluff Society "When the squad is finally ready to head out"

Julian Friedman 🤔

Brexit has reached the part of a waterfall software development process where two years in you realise you aren't going to hit the deadline, your architectural assumptions were all wrong, and no-one wants what you built anyway

Inside the Pricey War to Influence Your Instagram Feed A price sheet for authenticity:

For a single photo post with a product, prices for an influencer with a million followers on Instagram start at $10,000, they say. YouTube is more expensive. A content creator with 3 million subscribers will usually charge at least $40,000 per video. If the company wants the YouTuber to produce a negative review of a competitor’s product, that’ll cost extra—often from $10,000 to $30,000 more.

On Thanksgiving Eve, Facebook Acknowledges Details of Times Investigation TL;DR Facing accusations of spreading false news, Facebook decided to attack by … paying a lobbying firm to spread false news.

Abhishek Singh "Built a universal remote control using #Arkit and a #RaspberryPi to control any device in my room."

Scott Jon Siegel 🤯

Design Objective

Jared Spool Point that's often lost in the org chart:

Adrienne Porter Felt Who counts as a family? According to @cvspharmacy, all parents must share the same last name as their child. Some developer added an if-check, probably without thinking about it too much, and ended up codifying their own cultural norms into the medical system.

Everyone is a UX designer.

Including developers writing validation checks to match business rules. And the policy/product people who made those rules.

The UX Uncanny Valley We often talk about reducing options, to avoid the paradox of choice. But the reverse is also true. Introducing — or not hiding — unnecessary options, so as to give the user an illusion of control.

Google Maps, for instance, will show you several route options even though users will likely go with the suggested option. There is a sense of security in knowing that you’ve chosen a lesser of evils.

Solve for X Analytical approach to experience design:

Product + Design without Technology is Vaporware. We have a great idea and people seem to want it. But we can’t build it.
Design + Technology without Product is a Hackathon Project. It looks great and it’s even fully functional, but there’s no market for it.
Product + Technology without Design is an Office Printer. The necessary evils of the world that are completely at risk of being disrupted by a customer-centric innovation. Think Netflix, Airbnb, Uber again (man it would be great if someone created the “Uber of Printers”).

Ivo Mägi "This is your 1500ms latency in real life situations -"

Thinking in Triplicate Design is constrained by the business model:

Virgin America, Rdio, Google Reader, and Comcast.
Which of these offered a good experience? Which of these still exists?

Chris Messina And when the business model is based on advertising:

That red dot is an infuriating example of Facebook's technomanipulation (I have unreads in every other category — they just want me to TRY to clear that dot (spoiler alert: you can't)).

The Mystery Font That Took Over New York The story of Choc.

It's Centred That Can you tell when something is centered? Test your designer eye.

Tools of the Trade

VisBug 101 Turns any webpage into a playground.

Schedule emails without polling a database using Step Functions If your use case fits within these limits, you can delegate a lot of state management to AWS Step Functions.

Ben Halpern He's right about GUI shaming:

No matter how much you love the CLI, don't GUI-shame. Lots of perfectly amazing programmers like working with GUIs, and it's perfectly fine.

There's some weird gatekeeping tendencies centered around the command line. #DevDiscuss

Vicki Boykis "The reInvent announcement of my dreams:"

Lingua Scripta

The International Obfuscated JavaScript Code Contest Open for submissions.

ncc: Node.js Compiler Collection ncc outputs a self-contained script that bundles all its dependencies. Benefit: faster bootup.

Experimenting with brain-computer interfaces in JavaScript. When do we get brain install <newskill>?

Edward Torvalds "npm install"

Lines of Code

Thomas Parslow "Told another programmer about the Monte Hall Problem. He was not convinced. Then later that night.... #nerdsniping"

grapefrukt The other day I saw a transaction record that stored the credit card number as floating point …

i'm not without sin as far as data type mistakes go, but storing phone numbers as floats is maybe not the best idea.

Architectural

Jared Short People time isn't free, but also you don't need expense approval to spend it:

"We run three nodes... At $.42/hr for the managed kafka, compared to $.192/hr self hosted... we'll keep it self hosted for now..." I love HN math.

Real world math: Over 1 year that is ~$2k difference, ~20 hours of engineering time. Maintenance isn't free, it obscures true cost.

Brenan Keller True story:

A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicbksjdhd.

First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.

Philip Guo "My computing setup is supported by strong theoretical foundations"

Peopleware

Notes on Hyperfocus On managing your attention, focusings on tasks, avoiding distractions, and also setting time for scattered thoughts.

Beyond that, the advice is to do it as often as possible, especially when need to work on a complex task. One interesting thought is that if you find you are resisting focusing on a task to reduce the time until the point where that resistance disappears. Complex tasks will require multiple slots.

deep work update #2 Related, how about scheduling every minute of your day? Would that work for you?

Team Work

Dirty Kurty Thread:

I recently left a position as a tech lead and I thought I would share some of valuable lessons I learned during that time. A proverbial thread, if you will.

Locked Doors

I don't know what to say. #116 So this happened. An NPM package with 2 million weekly downloads was injected with malicious code. Seems to be stealing Bitcoin wallets. Good chance one of your projects is using this package directly or indirectly.

Gary Bernhardt And yes, this was something many people saw coming. But it was also convenient to bursh aside, to evangelize Node and the "many small modules" philosophy:

There was an option 3: don't decompose your application's dependency graph into thousands of packages. People who argued that position were dismissed as (to paraphrase heavily) old and slow. That ship has sailed, and now we're here.

Em "Still my fave"

Techtopia

How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request "A few days later, the Council’s codification lawyer merged my pull request"

Ad-diction

Dan Rather 💯

When someone starts an argument with "I'm not a scientist, but..." maybe we should stop listening to them weighing in on science. And maybe news shows should stop asking these pundits to talk about something they’re not qualified to talk about.

The Miseducation of Sheryl Sandberg This article throws more blame at COO Sandberg than at CEO Zuckerberg. This is a hit piece, not something I'd expect from Vanity Fair.

Michelle Ghoussoub "My favorite scene in All The President’s Men is probably the one where they gather around the chartbeat monitor and a/b test their headlines"

None of the Above

Eric Amazing!

Recreating GTA style footage with a @SkydioHQ experiment 2. Now with more traffic and a soundtrack. This took only 1 tap on my iPhone: LAUNCH

aunt dad Relationship goals:

don't waste your time on anyone who wouldn't absolutely lose their shit on speakerphone if you won star baker

Patrick Collison 😭

From: Titus Labienus
To: Caesar
Subject: Gentle bump

Just wanted to get this back to the top of your inbox. Hoping to get working group approval on the plans for Gaul. Can resend the link to the deck if you like.

Farbod Saraf "This is why things in commercials don't look like they do in real life #HowThingsWork"

Peter Life advice:

PSA: Don't EVER let your printer know that you've waited until the last minute to print something out and you're in hurry because they can sense fear.

Tommi Forsström TIL

The biggest contribution I’ve been able to bring to the table in the US from my Finnish heritage is the idiom

”Climbing a tree ass-first”

to illustrate doing a not-wrong thing in a needlessly complicated or difficult way.

You’re welcome, 🇺🇸.
Love, 🇫🇮.

This glass appears to break when people walk over it, leading to some funny frights Whoever designed this …

David Milner 😭

Kristen Ruin a first date in four words or less.

"Four words or FEWER"

Payless fools influencers with a fake store Someone deserves a promotion for this brilliant stunt:

Payless, a brand known for budget-friendly shoes, opened a fake pop-up store called "Palessi" in a Los Angeles mall and invited influencers to the grand opening. The store was stocked with Payless shoes in disguise.

"I would pay $400 or $500," a woman says in a TV ad, holding a pair of $19.99 sneakers. Another shopper calls the Payless shoes "elegant and sophisticated."

Mike Rosenberg An explanation of how democratic elections work in the US:

North Carolina: Democrats won 48% of votes and 23% of seats
Ohio: Democrats won nearly 50% of votes and 25% of seats

Pennsylvania, new court-ordered nonpartisan map: Dems won 55% of votes and 50% of seats, up from 28% of seats under old map

Chuck Wendig 😳

So, I watched that POKEY MANS movie today, my first actual viewing of anything Pokémon, and uhhh

welp

I have questions

Scott Linnen 💯

Scientists have again landed a spacecraft on a proverbial dime on a planet 40 million miles away that rotates at 241 metres per second. Think I'm gonna trust them on this climate change stuff.

Fluff Society "Once you run into a window, you're going to have big trust issues"

Tom Eastman I die.

Design Objective

The State of UX in 2019 Where to begin? I thought this would be another "hot UI trends for 2019 that will make you look cool to your Dribble friends", but this article is much better than that.

It talks about the evolving roles and expectations from UX designers. The industry's moral and ethical responsiblity, and doing right by the users. Ponders the Vim vs Emacs question of UX: should designers code? And many other serious topics.

If you read one thing this week, I recommend this link *.

As an industry we have become obsessed with our design methods. Some designers are so addicted to following the specific set of steps outlined in a playbook, or filling out a persona template that they found online, that they forget to reflect on why they are using that method in the first place. That extreme focus on output rather than outcome can be extremely dangerous to Design as a profession , creating a whole generation of designers who always have to be told what to do next.

* Ironically, the overly fancy UI makes reading this article painful, and it crashes Safari. Use reader mode or Instapaper or something like that.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb This thread is about books, but captures user research all too well:

1- Ignore surveys.

Pple think they prefer restaurants 1) quiet so they can tawk, 2) roomy, 3) no line.

Yet they flock to 1) loud, 2) cramped restaurants 3) w/50 min wait.

Never ask pple what they want, watch what they do. Revelation of preferences.

#SkinInTheGame

Reimagining the Morning Briefing New York Times iterating on their Morning Briefing email, has lessons that apply to other products that need to communicate to people.

Also, bold lead-ins is a great idea for office memos and such:

We use bold lead-ins as labels, to help the reader know what kind information they are being offered. “How we know” allows us to give a behind-the-scenes look into The Times and reveal a little bit about the reporting process — like how many months our journalists spent reading through secret documents for a particular story. Other lead-ins: “Why it matters,” “Background” and “Another angle.”

Norgard 👍

You can’t predict if people are going to like your product nor should you, there is no more mentally exhausting exercise

All you can do is have a crystal clear point of view, obsessively reduce and deliver

The market will sort the rest out

Why Truly Great Product Managers Love Code Review PMs should be aware when the team is over-engineering, or being held back by technical debt:

For a developer who takes pride in her work, eight weeks of trudging through a swamp of technical debt is crushing. As a PM, you know the concrete costs that come with each day your fixes aren't yet live, and there are also the intangible costs to your development team—a loss of trust and faith in you as a leader, in the project, and in the team to get things done.

Tools of the Trade

$10,000 Fellowships for women working on open source programming projects, research, and art Apply, or share with people who may be interested:

Is there a project you’ve always wanted to start or contribute to, but you haven’t had the time or resources to do so? Now’s your chance: apply to RC this winter for a one, six, or 12-week retreat. We’ll provide up to $10,000 in funding (depending on batch length), 24/7 access to our space, and a supportive community of fellow programmers.

JavaScript Teacher True. Invest in learning the principles, not the tools.

When you are hired... no one will ask you what "best" framework is. You will be coding in what is already set up and available by the lead engineer. Don't try to learn every single thing out there. Learn to adapt.

The Rise of Microsoft Visual Studio Code Also, check the end of this article, for how Triplebyte correlates interview performance with choice of text editor:

Yikes! VS Code is eating everyone else's lunch! The story here is pretty clear. Over the past year, VS Code usage has gone from 5% to 22%. Over the same time, Sublime Text usage has fallen from 17% to 11%, and Atom usage has fallen from 11% to 6%. Even Eclipse is falling. And VS Code is accelerating every month.

remotedebug-ios-webkit-adapter You can use VS Code or Chrome DevTools to debug Safari and hybrid apps running on iOS.

tobyhede TIL butterflies are not made of butter!

If your rebuttal to "serverless" is "contains servers" I have this thread for you of things that are not literally the words

Kent C. Dodds Cool hack!

Netflix: This episode is 58 minutes long.
Me: But I'm to tired to stay up that late.
Netflix: Then watch it later.
Me: But I want to watch it now.
Netflix: Tough.
Me: document.querySelectorAll('video').forEach(v => v.playbackRate = 1.5)
Netflix: Snds gd.

“Alex” Not wrong:

golang's compiler is quite strict and opinionated, for example, the compiler actually forces you to brag that your code is written in go

Web-end

Mike Riethmuller Raises hand. Me too.

The one thing in web development I will never remember how to do without looking it up, is linking a stylesheet: <link href="styles.css" rel="stylesheet" />, Why is this so hard to remember?

bterlson.d.ts Edge was "yet another browser to QA", a tax on developers, but once it's gone, which browser are we going to vilify and blame for missing the deadline?

Today's Edge announcements tl;dr

• Edge moving to Chromium (Blink+v8) for compat reasons. Still called Edge.
• Will be OSS. Will contribute code upstream.
• ChakraCore development continues for various non-Edge uses.
• No change to standards work - still pushing the web forward!

Laurie Voss I agree, but skeptical that Mozilla can make a difference:

A world with a single browser made by Google would be just as dangerous as the world with one browser made by Microsoft was. Mozilla's role in the world just became even more crucial.

karen Which probably explains how we got here:

2012: low powered netbooks for internet browsing
2018: browsing the internet is one of the most resource intensive tasks you can do on a computer

Lines of Code

Jared Hanson Once you learn to treat code as disposable, you'll become a much better developer. For this, and other reasons:

When solving the problem, explore the possible solution space. Code is often a great tool to aid in that process. Don’t think of it as a final product.

Architectural

AWS Lambda Now Supports Custom Runtimes and Enables Sharing Common Code Between Functions With Lambda layers and the runtime API, you can now deploy many different types of serverless workloads.

Not just choice of language, but tool, and precise control over execution. For example, the Node|Solid runtime bundles Node 10 and code instrumentation:

In essence, N|Solid for AWS Lambda is an augmented Node.js runtime that enables extraction of metrics with as little overhead possible. This is achievable thanks to the approach we’ve taken with the N|Solid Agent – it sits outside of the Node.js event loop in the native C++ layer, meaning that your application’s performance isn’t affected while being monitored.

Kelsey Hightower I think containers are about to peak:

Given the combination of the Lambda Runtime API and Lambda Layers I no longer believe adding support for containers would add any additional benefit to Lambda.

The Lambda Runtime API provides a major benefit over containers for Serverless workloads: a well defined and opinionated runtime API for getting work done.

Real-time applications with API Gateway WebSockets and AWS Lambda And with Web Sockets support coming soon, I'm running out of reasons to maintain server instances.

Peopleware

Morgan McGuire You can be right most of the time, or innovate, but not both:

It's easy to be right about the future 99% of the time as a pessimist. Most new ideas really don't work!

A scientist's job is to be unreasonably optimistic and fail a lot. Because that's the only way to find a 1% idea like penicillin, transistors, or the fast Fourier theorem.

betsythemuffin And don't let anyone block you from learning:

Sometimes, reinventing the wheel helps us understand how the wheel works.

When we shit on learning as a purpose in itself, we force people to rationalize it by pretending they’re not “just” learning, they’re “innovating.”

Teamwork

John Cutler How can you use roadmaps to keep everyone in sync:

4/8 Feature-based roadmaps are often used because "everyone in the organization needs to know what's coming!" Fair point. But what if I told you that this need causes premature convergence which impacts outcomes?

The trick is to converge at the last responsible moment.

Jason Lemkin 💯

Raise your hand and own something no one is owning

Instant career accelerator in a startup

Staffan Nöteberg Applies to individuals, and to teams at every scale:

Overloading the brain disables Kahneman slow thinking. The same goes for organizations. Starting too many initiatives inevitably leads to firefighting rather than continuous improvement. #monotasking #multitasking

Locked Doors

SwiftOnSecurity In response to outage caused by expired certificate:

I cannot emphasize enough to skeptical security people about LetsEncrypt autoenrollment:
Manual certificate cycling is a massive operational risk that makes IT hesitant to enforce encrypted communications. The old way is not the best way. It’s time to move

Camilo Martinez "If someone asks you: what's your password?"

Mark Burnett Cat In The Middle attack:

I caught my cat running out of my office with my yubikey in his mouth--a threat model I hadn't considered.

Ad-diction

It’s the End of News As We Know It (and Facebook Is Feeling Fine) "Right-wing propaganda is still doing great. Journalism, not so much." What makes Mother Jones' reporting different from mainstream media, is that they do not try to shield newsroom reality behind a contributor op-ed. They let it all bare:

Still, the decline in Facebook audience over the past 18 months translates into a loss of at least $600,000 just from advertising (not counting donations or subscriptions that won’t happen when people don’t see our stories). That’s a big part of the reason why we need to raise $400,000 this month. It’s a big goal, more than what we did in December ’16 and ’17—because it has to be. We can’t pull back from investigating right now, with the stakes so high.

None of the Above

Allison Parrish "why can't you use"

NatashaVianna 💥

My new requirement is that if my kid wants to download a new app, she has to write a one page report on the founders, company story, and business model so that she understands how the app benefits from her use.

This is what happens when your mom works in tech.

alexis "wait what" this thread 😭

Peter Lyons ⏲

I want a kitchen timer with a beep sound appropriate for "the tea is done steeping" instead of the standard noise which is appropriate for "the patient's respirator stopped working".

Spooky Automated Jobs "Are you calling me fat?"

Unlimited power: ASUS ROG Phone charges when plugged into itself, solves world's battery problems TIL There are gaming phones. Gaming phones have several USB ports. So gaming phones can self-charge, and also mount themselves as external USB drives. Infinite battery life! Infinite external storage!

Aditya Mukerjee Thread on the latest in internet censorship:

Now that Tumblr is shutting down all "adult content", will people finally start paying attention to #SESTA/#FOSTA (and hold the people who created it accountable)?

Cohort and Age Effects Me too.

Stephanie Hurlburt AKA the bystander effect:

A social media phenomena to be aware of: After a certain number of likes/shares on a post, sometimes people think person is overwhelmed and doesn’t need help anymore. When in reality everyone’s thinking that & the person ends up with very little help. Always reach out to check!

Starlight, Esq. Thread:

I'm having a bit of fun playing with the scale of things on https://thetruesize.com

let's start gentle: this map is actually a really good explanation of 1) how fucking big the lower 48 are and 2) why so few people in the US become fluent in a second language

Karl Sharro "The first instance of humans sharing pictures of their food with friends on their wall."

Design Objective

Consistency in Design is the Wrong Approach Consistency can be a design trap:

When you think about consistency, you’re thinking about the product. When you’re thinking about current knowledge, you’re thinking about the user.

David Denham Outcome vs output:

Product Roadmaps should be outcome-focused (OKRs, problems to solve, etc.). Release Plans should be more output-focused (features, timelines, etc.). This is where I'm seeing the rubber hitting the road with teams becoming Feature Factories. They're given output-focused roadmaps

Eric Jorgenson I use Linkedin, but I don't ever enjoy it, so this strikes a chord:

Linkedin is the kind of product you get if you always take the winner of the A/B test, even if users will obviously hate you for it.

Tools of the Trade

How Firecracker Is Going to Set Modern Infrastructure on Fire AWS open sources core technology behind Lambda: a VM designed for running transient and short-lived processes, with the isolation of VM and performance of containers.

Isopropanol #4 🤔

SQLite is a mineral that consists of SQL molecules.

BlesstheInfoSec This thread:

New Switch for Christmas!!! Gonna see how long the kids will go hooking it up while I explain networking!!!

Thankfully they have never seen either type of Switch. Also thankfully they don't know what EOL is

Lingua Scripta

Stefan Baumgartner "0 vs null vs undefined"

Lines of Code

Sarah Drasner "Claiming 100% test coverage"

Architectural

jasongorman The "Evil FizzBuzz", interesting exercise for developer teams:

Once you have a working (green) build on a skeleton solution (i.e., one that compiles and runs at least one dummy test), the build must not go red. This is an exercise on delivering as a team WITHOUT BREAKING THE BUILD. OK? If the build goes red again, the exercise is over. (11/)

The team has 1 hour to deliver a working solution they can demonstrate to the "customer" (12/12)

Cory House Thread:

I've wasted countless hours through the years on slow feedback loops. Over time, I learned: If the feedback loop is slow, job #1 is to ask: Is there a way to make the feedback loop fast?

Fast feedback loops lower stress, aid focus, foster creativity, and reduce risk.

Joe Armstrong Now I'm hungry:

Blessed are they that stop programming and go and eat lunch for their tummies shall be full and their programs better when they return from lunch.

Peopleware

Johnny 🤔

Thinking is by far the most underrated activity.
People consider it "unproductive" to sit on a bench and think.
So they spend their lives doing things they never thought through.
An hour of clear thinking,
can yield a conclusion that changes your life.

Morgan Housel 💯

The career lessons from 2018 are:

Work hard.
Focus on the customer.
Don't sexually harass anyone.
Avoid espionage.

Teamwork

Erik Bernhardsson Yes!

It’s always worth spending 15 min extra on a chart. Otherwise you bring some really cool insight to a meeting and people are like “uh, the y axis has a confusing label” or “why are the lines colors so similar”.

How to Exhibit Leadership as an Individual Contributor How to be a leader without getting into management:

This mindset separates good employees from excellent ones. Leadership-minded people proactively improve and develop their environment — their product, their codebase, their colleagues, their teams. Over time, these little improvements multiply and make a huge difference.

Dev to manager Interviews with experienced software developers on moving to management.

Danielle Leong TL;DR what eng managers do all day:

Engineering management is 50% figuring out times to meet, 10% restarting zoom, 30% this should’ve been an email, 40% therapy, and 30% making lists of things you’re supposed to do

Locked Doors

Cory Foy Air travel attack vector:

Please, please - if you’re a security professional with the ear of executives who travel, highly encourage them to buy privacy screens. Watching an exec with a big financial firm working on all his numbers in a spreadsheet just in front of me.

None of the Above

Siqi Chen Kid paradise!

I'm at an absurdly over the top 80,000 sqft indoor kids playground called Neobio right now and you guys I'm LOSING it.

Let me show you around. Thread👇

Christopher Ingraham Not sure if funny or horror story:

So, a shipment of crickets for the lizard arrived via FedEx today. It was my first time ordering bulk crickets off the internet, and I naively assumed that they would be in like, a bag or some other contraption to facilitate easy transfer to another container. They were not.

Judy Brown A prank in three parts:

Some of you out there may recall that in 2016 I played an excellent Christmas prank on my long-suffering Dad. It worked a treat.

Jenn Ellis Not to be out-done:

Every year our aunt in Maine sends us little handmade chocolate lobsters. This year they are soap. Guess how I found out? 🦞 🧼 👄

Laura SilverBells-tian 💯

Forcing kids and teens to read centuries-old “classic literature” about a very slim subset of the population, living experiences they can’t relate to, is the most surefire way to kill the future of books.

HxOvAx 🔥

the ancient greeks divided content into four elements - hot take, controversial opinion, hill i will die on, and subtweet - as well as a fifth, which surrounds and suffuses the others - discourse

Andrew Armstrong Bottom/left:

One of the weirder things about being an adult is having a favorite stovetop burner, yet nobody talks about it.

Researchers Show Parachutes Don't Work, But There's A Catch This may help people understand why some research doesn't hold in the real world:

Research published in a major medical journal concludes that a parachute is no more effective than an empty backpack at protecting you from harm if you have to jump from an aircraft.

gina loves calum "IM AT THE PET STORE AND YOU GUYS NEED TO ZOOM IN ON THE NAMES PLEASE"

41 Strange "Joseph Ducreux (1735 –1802) was a French painter who is known primarily for his unorthodox self-portraits"

Design Objective

How the Great Recession influenced a decade of design The relationship between the economy and how things look:

Consumers’ growing interest in used fashion — which means more people are wearing clothing from different seasons and eras, all at the same time — supports the idea of the Big Flat Now. Similarly, Instagram is filled with fan accounts dedicated to the pop culture and style of basically every decade, including the ’00s; follow a bunch of them and suddenly time is a flat circle.

Tools of the Trade

Dr. Roy Schestowitz 😭

Welcome to 2019, traveler from 2009. The brief:

• sysadmins are now "ops"
• servers are all just "cloud" something
• algorithms are "AI"
• DBs are "blockchains"
• Everything that spies on people is "smart"
  Good luck. And update your CV with the above words.

Carlos Pizano Uribe "I was bitching about time in operating systems when I came across this 1857 time table.."

kim 😮

It's 2019.

We're now exactly halfway between y2k and the 32-bit Unix time overflow.

Lines of Code

pv_controller.go This comment is everything!

// ==================================================================
// PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO SIMPLIFY THIS CODE.
// KEEP THE SPACE SHUTTLE FLYING.
// ==================================================================
//
// This controller is intentionally written in a very verbose style.  You will
// notice:
//
// 1.  Every 'if' statement has a matching 'else' (exception: simple error
//     checks for a client API call)
// 2.  Things that may seem obvious are commented explicitly
//
// We call this style 'space shuttle style'.  Space shuttle style is meant to
// ensure that every branch and condition is considered and accounted for -
// the same way code is written at NASA for applications like the space
// shuttle.
//
// . . .

Pulp Librarian A look at the first high level programming language:

By 1958 FORTRAN II had been released and other computer manufacturers were offering FORTRAN compatibility. It was the start of the separation of software from hardware, as programming became a platform-independent skill. But the big leap took place eight years later.

Devoops

lucien fregosi "True story... 💸💸💸"

Peopleware

New Office Hours Aim for Well Rested, More Productive Workers What if business hours adapted to our sleep/wake cycles?

For many office workers, the answer may be as simple as delaying work start times an hour or two — say until 9:30 or 10 a.m. Since many people are in the middle of the chronotype continuum and wake naturally around 8 or 9 a.m., such a modest shift could provide widespread relief. “We’re talking about one hour,” Ms. Kring said, “not a revolution.”

Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder This:

Hopefully you have already gathered that management is a career change, not a promotion, and you’re aware that nobody is very good at it when they first start.

That’s okay! It takes a solid year or two to find new rhythms and reward mechanisms before you can even begin to find your own voice or trust your judgment. Management problems look easy, deceptively so. It’s really hard to generalize here, but reasons this is hard include:

Locked Doors

uncaptcha2 Using Google tech to defeat Google tech, this project defeats Google's ReCaptcha by asking for the audio challenge, and then using Google's Speech2Text API to submit the answer. 🤦‍♂️

Dan Kaminsky Meme thread:

I’m a hacker in a movie

My code works the first time even when somebody’s watching

Somebody is watching

There’s a progress meter and it isn’t even a lie

Mike Tsao 🗝

zero-factor authentication: something you forgot and something you lost. #0fa

None of the Above

Samantha Melamed "This is the most aspirational parking garage I have ever seen"

dan seifert 🔥

instagram is now QVC for millennials

Read This Article!!! Language is ever evolving:

At journalism school, I was told that you get one exclamation point to use in your entire career, so you should use it wisely. You could, perhaps, spend your one exclamation point on a headline like “WAR OVER!” but nothing less would merit one.
...
After we spoke, McCulloch ran a Twitter poll asking: “If I wanted to convey genuine enthusiasm to you, how many exclamation marks would I need?” After nearly 800 votes, the winner was three.

@algo_anthill Language is ever evolving, part II:

When you start looking at a post about some foreign language's oddly specific word for something that you never thought there would be a specific word for, remember that English has a specific word for tricking people into listening to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up".

English also has a single word for "manipulation of electoral boundaries to reduce the influence of opposing political groups in future elections".

Dana Schwartz 💀

If you pay me $50 I'll show up to your funeral but stand really far away, holding a black umbrella regardless of the weather, so that people think you died with a dark and interesting secret.

How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation Eventually something will have to give:

We’ve “killed” diamonds because we’re getting married later (or not at all), and if or when we do, it’s rare for one partner to have the financial stability to set aside the traditional two months’ salary for a diamond engagement ring. We’re killing antiques, opting instead for “fast furniture” — not because we hate our grandparents’ old items, but because we’re chasing stable employment across the country, and lugging old furniture and fragile china costs money that we don’t have.
...
But individual action isn’t enough. Personal choices alone won’t keep the planet from dying, or get Facebook to quit violating our privacy. To do that, you need paradigm-shifting change. Which helps explain why so many millennials increasingly identify with democratic socialism and are embracing unions: We are beginning to understand what ails us, and it’s not something an oxygen facial or a treadmill desk can fix.

How a Phone Glitch Sparked a Teenage Riot Interesting story about teenagers and pre-internet hotlines.

83 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2018 “Himalayan” pink salt comes from Pakistan, Hippos poop kills fish, your eardrums move when you look around, and other useless but entertaining trivia.

23andMe's Pharma Deals Have Been the Plan All Along Turns out, even when you pay for the product, you may still be the product.

Scott Davidoff "Medieval browser tabs — how scholars jumped between multiple texts #desktopmetaphor #notametaphor at Mexico’s first public library"

Design Objective

Michael Bolton Hits nail on the head:

25. In most user stories, nobody is ever interrupted, distracted, naive, confused, under pressure, impatient, disabled, outside of wireless access. Nobody makes human mistakes. Nobody closes the damned laptop lid. The characters in user stories might as well be drones, robots.

Web-end

Kent C. Dodds These are not alternative fonts, they're mathematical symbols abused to make the text look different. Play the video Kent prepared, to hear what this text really sounds like.

You 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 it's 𝒸𝓊𝓉ℯ to 𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 your tweets and usernames 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖜𝖆𝖞. But have you 𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙙 to what it 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 with assistive technologies like 𝓥𝓸𝓲𝓬𝓮𝓞𝓿𝓮𝓻?

The Flexbox Holy Albatross Make Flexbox switch between multiple and single column layouts, without media queries or JavaScript. CSS tricks I could never have imagined.

Nicole Sullivan For real. We don't even need to convince, FOMO will do the convincing.

Unpopular opinion: CSS and HTML need to increment their version numbers again so we can convince business to invest in these technologies. 😂

Lines of Code

This week we apply the KonMari method to our messy codebase, learn to let go, and tidy up. (Yes, I binge watched all the episodes, as one does)

Joe Groff

As you go through every line of code, you should be asking, does this bring me joy?

Edward Danilyuk

If not, tell that line of code 'Thank you for being in my life' - then toss it in the garbage along with its thousands of friends.

Alexis Gallagher

Before you start refactoring, copy all the code into one big file and just look at it in one place.

nickteissler

Leave the most sentimental lines of code for last.

Architectural

JBD This:

Storage is the single hardest problem in our domain. Storage related tradeoffs are sometimes the hardest tradeoffs to tackle. Storage decisions often impact every other design decision. I don't know why we are acting like it ain't so.

Tom Eastman From a thread about the latest Ethereum incident, and relevant in so many contexts:

Douglas Adams, in 1992, describing the blockchain:

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

Devoops

Ryn Daniels 💡

Konmari, but for PagerDuty. "I thank this alert for teaching me that we don't need to alert on things like this. Also this alert did not spark joy."

Locked Doors

Alan Feuer Jealousy is the ultimate vulnerability:

A jaw-dropping twist this morning to the story of the Colombian IT guy who helped the FBI crack El Chapo's encrypted comms network.
He also helped the feds tap the kingpin's texts w/his wiife, Emma Coronel, taking us deep into the intimacies (and crimes) of their marriage.

@notdan Yes. Also, I'm Californian and we're soft like that.

Being able to turn the heater on from bed is totally worth getting hacked.

None of the Above

Kevin Liao "2019 is still young but nominating this for press conference prop of the year"

dream ghoul Life hack:

in college we named our intramural softball team “NO GAME SCHEDULED” because if the other team didn’t show up they lost their league deposit and
forfeited. it worked several times. everyone hated us and nothing as cool as that has happened to me since.

third looks 😭

A Blade Runner sequel where Deckard just walks around the city trying different ramen joints

Harvey Newman "A 3D printed light projected animation. Proof that there's always new ways to animate everything."

@EmeraldJhannae 🕶

“I came, I saw, I left early.” A lifestyle.

Shit Academics Say

If you can't say anything nice¹

---

¹Say it in a footnote.

Rotarywing "Unbelievable flying and landing at that slope to rescue an injured skier
By French mountain police 👏"

Peter Bukowinski "Chaotic neutral"

Design Objective

The ghosts of technology in today’s language Explores the origin of words/terms that we use figuratively, but once had a literal meaning. For example:

Both radio and TV stations still ask us to tune in, even though tuners don’t really exist in television any more (and in the radio, tuning is much more automatic, using buttons and programs rather than… another dial.)

The user interface component where you choose one of a few options is called radio buttons, based on old radio buttons you’d toggle to… tune in to different frequency bands.

Doug Collins Nobody thought this will be a problem?

Important controls should be separated by proximity and design.

Case in point: nobody wants to risk shifting into park instead of turning down the radio or adjusting the AC while cruising down the road. #ux #design

The Ideal Design Workflow I'm laughing, but also crying:

22.) Once Pixate has driven you to the brink of insanity, switch gears and download the free trial for Framer.

Looks promising!

23.) Now go get some lunch. You’ve earned it.

Tacos sound good.

24.) Come back from lunch and realize your Framer trial has expired. (Seriously, they give you a 32 minute trial)

@minebocek "Everything I know about colors of metals, I've learned from Keynote"

Tools of the Trade

Zack Whittaker 🤔

I just found out that if you hit a Chrome security warning that you can't pass — like an HSTS issue or a revoked certificate — you can just type "thisisunsafe" and it'll load anyway.

You can try it out here: https://revoked.badssl.com

Dimensions.guide A comprehensive reference of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects.

David R. MacIver 😭

"Pandas is what happened when someone concluded that the problem with Python was that it wasn't enough like R, so built an R clone on top of numpy, the library that was written when someone concluded that the problem with Python was that it wasn't enough like matlab."

CORSAIR "This is your RAM. And THIS is your RAM on Chrome."

Web-end

Tyler van der Hoeven Cool!

Today I learned about font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums; Basically makes a text value act like monospace so when you’re scaling it up and down via a slider etc. it doesn’t jump around as much.

Nicole He 🔥

when i go to a website and my computer fan turns on, that’s how i know it’s a good website

CSS LEGO Minifigure Maker h/t Smashing Magazine

Lingua Scripta

@bterlson 🤠

Q: why do JS numbers-
A: IEEE-754
Q: ok but when I add-
A: IEEE-754
Q: fine but NaN doesn't even-
A: Aye. Triple-E. Seven five four.

Khalil Sehnaoui "Coffee calligraphy, or Java Script (pun intended) ¯_(ツ)_/¯"

Lines of Code

How To Speed Up The Code Review TL;DR Don’t create huge pull-requests with mixed categories of changes.

For example, in feature changes, we check business requirements, but in the structure refactoring, we review backward compatibility. And if we mix several categories it will be hard for a reviewer to keep in mind more than one review strategy. And most likely the reviewer will spend on the request more time than necessary and thus may miss something. Moreover, in a request that has mixed changes any fix being made will force the reviewer to review all these categories again.

brianleroux 💯

Today I am going to write some tests for code I already wrote and it's going to be 🆗. Sometimes I write tests first.

Sometimes I don't or can't because either the tech is too early or my understanding of it is.

Per UNIX philosophy, distrust all claims of 'one true way'.

Des Traynor This is why some code is throwaway, and some tests come after the code:

Explore the solution space before refining the solution.
(aka 'Get the right design, then get the design right')

This is the biggest lesson I've learned from @wasbuxton.

Locked Doors

Kate O'Neill Time to play the Harmless or Data Mining quiz:

Me 10 years ago: probably would have played along with the profile picture aging meme going around on Facebook and Instagram
Me now: ponders how all this data could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition

Sarah Drasner "I photoshop to relax."

None of the Above

detremura 👑 "Não consigo parar de ver"

Man unexpectedly locked inside 24 Hour Fitness after closing I have questions.

David Wohlreich "God bless the manual writers who really overdo it."

‘Close’ Proximity, ‘End’ Result, and More Redundant Words to Delete From Your Writing Advice on extraneous words from the Random House copy chief.

Why Gen Z Loves Closed Captioning Because close captioning is the best.

William Hanson "Either there’s a @netflix glitch or @MarieKondo’s methods have escalated."

Peter Rojas Competition comes in many forms:

Wow, in its latest letter to shareholders, Netflix (correctly, if you ask me) identifies Fortnite as being a bigger threat than HBO:

"We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO."

holly This thread is full of truth bombs:

What's a dirty secret that everybody in your industry knows about but anyone outside of your line of work would be scandalized to hear?

Simon Kuestenmacher "Amazing digital art installation on the Galata Tower in #Istanbul in #Turkey. Hope nobody walked past the tower while on drugs..."

Dr Sarah Taber Does "ugly" food really go to waste?

As someone who works in ag & food distribution I gotta disagree w this.

A lot of "ugly" food

-Won't survive distribution bc weird shapes makes it prone to getting smushed, bruised, start to rot, & make everything else in the box/crate rot. Broken skin does the same thing.

Dorsa Amir Legacy code, human edition:

Did you know the human body is full of evolutionary leftovers that no longer serve a purpose? These are called vestigial structures and they’re fascinating. (1/8)

Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? Is it possible we got sun exposure and sunscreen all wrong?

In spring, as the sun strengthened, they’d gradually build up a sun-blocking tan. Sunburn was probably a rarity until modern times, when we began spending most of our time indoors. Suddenly, pasty office workers were hitting the beach in summer and getting zapped. That’s a recipe for melanoma.

Earth’s magnetic field is acting up and geologists don’t know why Interesting.

Jeremy Littau Thread:

For those who aren’t quite sure why these media layoffs keep happening, or think “it’s the internet!” or “people don’t pay to subscribe,” there’s a lot more going on. Though that is part of that. Here’s a cliffs notes version - not exhaustive but it hits the highlights:

Erik Wade Peanuts and flakes!

I am an American living in Germany. My grocery store currently has a temporary “American food” section. Join me for a tour of what Germans think Americans eat.

Ryan Creamer created the most wholesome Pornhub channel.

Design Objective

Nina Alli "Sometimes we forget who our user is" (source)

Jeff Chang Right size your A/B tests:

A/B testing best practices should change as a company grows:
👶: Do not A/B test, will not get stat sig. Talk to users.
👦: A/B test changes that you predict will affect metrics, testing everything too slow
👨: A/B test everything. Accidentally dropping metric by 1-2% is very bad

Reginald Braithwaite Amusing but apocryphal:

An IBM VP was being shown some new tape drives. When waiting, a yellow "Idle" light would come one.

The VP was aghast.

"Change that light to green, and rename it," he exclaimed:

"IBM equipment is never idle. It is READY!"

Tools of the Trade

antonmedv/fx Command-line tool and terminal JSON viewer.

Peter Cooper Related:

If you're on macOS and have Homebrew installed, run brew cask install quicklook-json and Quick Look will let you look into JSON files properly.

Ben Halpern "Client-side validation"

Web-end

Ben Furfie Absolute web dominance corrupts absolutely:

If you think there's no issue with Chromium having dominance in the browser engine market, then realise this. The Chrome team pushed a compat bug to their browser because they didn't want to fix an issue with their site. And it took a Mozilla dev to fix it. In a rival's browser.

zoe 😮

if you want to ruin someone's day, applying "font-weight:500.007797241211" to an element will make its text bold in firefox, but not chrome

anything between 500.007797241211 and 549.9999694824218181565811391 will work, but that one's just on the precipice so

Lingua Scripta

Allen Wirfs-Brock Amen. And we do have compatible languages that can move at their own pace (ReasonML, TypeScript, etc):

JavaScript's success is as a "worse is better" (look it up) language. Adding many new features to improve it may actually be detrimental to its continued success. What it needs is slow addition of carefully considered features that enable key new use cases.

Mathias Bynens And this is what it looks like in practice:

🎉 New JavaScript features in ES2019:

• Array#{flat,flatMap}
• Object.fromEntries
• String#{trimStart,trimEnd}
• Symbol#description
• try { } catch {} // optional binding
• JSON ⊂ ECMAScript
• well-formed JSON.stringify
• stable Array#sort
• revised Function#toStringOrli Matlow

Peopleware

Kenyon Laing 💡

You know how sports teams have “rebuilding years”? I think people should be allowed those too. When someone asks how you’ve been/what’s new in your life, you should be able to say, “It’s a rebuilding year” and leave it at that.

duretti hirpa Thread:

dear managers, here's a list of 10 items you should stop doing! love, your no. 1 best programmer pal, duretti

1. putting 10 minutes on my calendar for a "quick chat" with no context. it makes me think i'm gonna get fired
2. heck, just messaging and saying "have a minute?"

Locked Doors

Major iPhone FaceTime bug lets you hear the audio of the person you are calling … before they pick up That's one way to remote activate an always-on close-to-target listening device.

Apple blocks Facebook from running its internal iOS apps The very next day: Apple blocks Google from running its internal iOS apps 🍿

QuadrigaCX Owes Customers $190 Million, Court Filing Shows Cryptocurrency is a distributed way of learning why banks operate they way they do:

Troubled Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX owes its customers $190 million and cannot access most of the funds, according to a court filing obtained by CoinDesk.
…
Cotten reportedly died of Crohn’s disease in Jaipur, India in early December 2018. The exchange announced his death earlier this month. A death certificate was included in the list of exhibits.

The founder seemingly had sole control or knowledge of Quadriga’s cold storage solution. Robertson wrote that after his death, “Quadriga’s inventory of cryptocurrency has become unavailable and some of it may be lost.”

The doorbells have eyes: The privacy battle brewing over home security cameras If you're considering a doorbell camera, read this first:

Okay, Big Doorbell hasn’t yet evolved to the point where police are peering through live to see who’s coming over for dinner. But we probably don’t want to build that.

How do we stop a potential civil liberties nightmare? By talking about ethics now.

None of the Above

Abhishek "There is a story behind every tattoo. I used AR to bring tattoos to life."

Aaron W 🤔

In 2019, are phone calls really just real-time meeting requests with no subject, no agenda, an unspecified duration, and sometimes even a mystery attendee?

MrStinkEsq Punny:

Monday - Greg
Tuesday - Ian
Wednesday - Greg
Thursday - Ian
Friday - Greg
Saturday - Ian
Sunday - Greg

The Gregorian calendar

Aaron Parecki "How did we let the Web get to this point. All I wanted to do was read this blog post."

fiona Exactly!

all linear algebra textbooks are like

• 1 is a number 😀
• x can stand in for many numbers 🤯
• a vector is just an ordered list of numbers 😜
• the set of all polynomials of degree m with real or complex coefficients is a vector subspace of P(F), as you should verify 😇

WolfTron V 🔥

CNN & Fox News has done to our parents what they thought violent video games & Marilyn Manson would do to us.

Assumptions Objects in Pictures Are Not Always As They Seem.

Orli Matlow 😭

Is running for president just "starting a podcast" for rich people?

Lina Khan Can we get this in the US as well?

India has introduced a new rule prohibiting e-commerce platforms from selling their own goods on the platform. The idea is you can either run the marketplace, or sell your goods on the marketplace, but not both

iris "some earrings i ordered on aliexpress never arrived and they asked for photo evidence???"

1969 & 70 - Bell Labs check this photo album

Design Objective

Can't Unsee Fantastic game. If you're a developer working to bring designs to life, and struggling with the finer graphics, this is a good way to train your design eye.

Freddie Iboy Thread:

I've felt absurdly lucky the past two years working at Tinder and now it's my last week here. I'm heading over to Amsterdam soon to go work at @Framer ❤️

A couple of lessons that I learned from the Tinder interface as parting advice. None of this is gospel.

Tools of the Trade

Rodrigo Pombo Brilliant!

I was playing around with some text animations and thought I could use them to show a file's history on @github

Dan Abramov React components are … components. They're not functions, even though they can be written as such. They're not objects, even though they can be written as classes. They're something we're not as good at describing. This is thread makes the point and helps put React hooks in context:

If you look at it this way, there’s nothing magic about useState or useEffect. Of course they “know” which component they belong to! React knows it just like your language knows which variables belong to which function, and when to destroy them.

WebSockets the UNIX way "It's like CGI, twenty years later, for WebSockets"

$ cat my-program
#!/bin/bash

# Count from 1 to 10 with a sleep
for ((COUNT = 1; COUNT <= 10; COUNT++)); do
  echo $COUNT
  sleep 0.5
done
Start websocketd and tell it about your program:

$ websocketd --port=8080 my-program

Aron Griffis 🔥

Working on a new Bash book. So far:
Intro: You chose the wrong tool.
Ch 1: Have you considered Python?
Ch 2: Try calling Python from your Bash script.
Ch 3: If you're still here, try adding quotes.

Jochem I'm going to name my channel no-agenda-meeting:

TIL some @SlackHQ channel names that'll result in a nice message once someone leaves the channel... like a funny goodbye:

• my-phone-in-a-cab
• the-love-of-my-life
• running
• alive
• outer-join

After /leave the remaining channel members will see:
> John Doe left #running"

Web-End

Gary "Wrong. The ONLY way you should organise CSS properties is like a Christmas Tree."

Lingua Scripta

qntm "Try this, kids at home! (V8 only AFAIK so Chrome or Node.js)"

Lynn Hehe:

🌶️ HOT JAVASCRIPT TIP: 🌶️

to increment some counter on the page,

node.innerText += 1

doesn't work (0 → 01 → 011 → ⋯), but

node.innerText -= -1

works fine (0 → 1 → 2 → ⋯)

Lines of Code

Eric Lawrence I feel seen:

I find myself running code I wrote with the irrational hope that it has developed some improvements since I wrote it.

The “Bug-O” Notation “The Bug-O describes how much an API slows you down as your codebase grows.”

Locked Doors

Lesley Carhart 100%. Splitting hairs doesn't make people any safer.

Nest makes great points, but I dislike the trend of saying devices being maliciously accessed or abused weren’t ‘hacked’. It’s a weird kind of gatekeeping that kind of discounts the security hygiene and education issues most consumers are still struggling with. Outcome = same.

Kashmir Hill Unintended consequences:

Oh wow, Apple is getting rid of the mostly useless "Do Not Track" signal in Safari because it was a way to track people: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari_release_notes/safari_12_1_release_notes

Phishing email training The perfect excuse:

So every now and then my company sends out phishing emails to us to “test” us. The emails are obvious phishing emails but if you click one you have to sit through a boring hour long training that’s the equivalent of detention. The malicious compliance is I now open no emails from management with headlines that maybe a mundane task or generally something I don’t want to do. Whenever I’m asked why I didn’t respond I simply say I was being careful about phishing and I get praised for it rather than yelled at for dodging work.

Malware Unicorn The USB fairy is real!

In infosec folklore, if you leave a USB under your pillow at night, there will be malware on it the next morning.

Techtopia

Five Things That Scare Me About AI Not AI per se, but the blind use of algorithms we don't understand (could be anything with if/else branches):

Returning to the account of the popular 5th grade teacher who was fired by an algorithm, she suspects that the underlying reason she was fired was that her incoming students had unusually high test scores the previous year (making it seem like their scores had dropped to a more average level after her teaching), and that their former teachers may have cheated.

Daniel Holland "The perils of modern living."

Startup Life

David Frankel 🔥🔥🔥

"We learned a lot"

This phrase is almost always a euphemism for “We've spent nearly all of our capital, don’t have traditional traction, but need more money.”

Those four words that will chill a VC’s soul - here's what you should say if you're running out of cash/time. 1/9

None of the Above

Alex Rampell "This is the most brilliant iPhone app grouping I’ve ever seen..."

White gold: the unstoppable rise of alternative milks How wellness upstarts spoiled milk’s healthy reputation – and built a billion-dollar industry from juicing oats and nuts.

Michael Hainsworth "I was Today years old when I discovered this #lifehack"

Oregon Zoo "The best part of snow days in Portland ❄️"

Jeff Bezos Brings the Receipts In which Jeff Bezos stands up to blackmail, comes across as everyone's favorite underdog, there are nude pictures, and even the Saudi government is involved:

That strategic positioning hasn’t gone without notice. As Kristin Kanthak, a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, put it on Twitter: “You know we are at a disgusting moment in our nation’s history when the billionaire sending out dick pics is the HERO of the story.”

ginaa wilsonn "So a month ago I dropped a ring & a clip down my bathroom sink and I’ve been scared to try to save it because I was scared it would just drop farther down but look at my cat being the fucking GOAT"

pico-8 Virtual console app for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. Looks like tons of fun!

Mike Rosenberg Journalism has a future, if you care about your subscribers:

The Seattle Times changed course to focus on stories that drive subscriptions - not clicks. Now we're at 41,000 digital subscriptions, up 21% in a year. And no layoffs.
Love working in a community that values independent journalism enough to pay for it

julius tarng Of course this blows up on Twitter:

So everyone was joking about Konmari-ing their Twitter, but I went ahead and made a tool for that:

Say hello to ✨ Tokimeki Unfollow ✨!

Hang out with virtual me and go thru your follows one by one. Do their tweets spark joy? If not, hit [Unfollow]!

Rebecca Mix "my coworker has this hanging by her desk and I cannot stop laughing" (source)

Design Objective

4 Reasons Why You Should Design Without Color First 🤔 Using B&W as constraints for your early design iterations:

When you start designing keeping the B&W color palette constraint in mind, most of your thinking time goes into figuring out how to space things right to be able to seem like things are grouped together. You start thinking about the invisible yet more important aspects such as readability (line height, paragraphs and typography), center of attention (call to action buttons and sizes) and scannability (grouping of elements, spacing)

don’t get clever with login forms Your login forms should be simple, predictable, and play nicely with password managers. That's it. Avoid clever interactions that ends up turning into daily annoyances. For example:

This pattern is incredibly tedious.

1. Enter email into login form.
2. Open new tab or switch programs.
3. Open your inbox.
4. Find message from service (if you don’t get distracted by other emails first).
5. Open message.
6. Copy gobbledygook password.
7. Go back to website.
8. Paste in gobbledygook password.
9. Submit login form. Holy shit.

Robin 💡

Good UI design is 90% making things load quickly and 10% typography.

How white space killed an enterprise app (and why data density matters) Know your audience. Also, use less “furniture”:

Users absolutely hated the new system. Sure, the old system was ugly, but it had everything they needed, right at their fingertips! Their jobs were incredibly fast paced—they worked in a tech support call center and were rated on productivity metrics. They didn’t have time to click or scroll to find information while the clock was literally ticking.

Martyn Reding "Hey @Tesco the menu on your leaflet seems to be broken. You’re welcome 👍🏼👍🏼🤓"

Tools of the Trade

Sebastian Markbåge Cool tip (better if you understand the underlying principles):

This is a little known React optimization pattern. React rerenders this component deeply when updateX is called, and since children can't have changed, it automatically bails out of trying to update the children. No need for sCU, memo, etc.

Paul Frazee Mighty useful:

ℹ️ Bash tip: if you need to run a quick command in another directory, surround your call in parenthesis. This causes the command to be run in a "subshell" which is discarded after the command runs, keeping your CWD the same.

Example: (cd ~/work/foo ; npm install)

Archmonad of Saturn "Reading up on the PDP-11 minicomputer system and the module control panels are all absolutely gorgeous!"

redactyl.js "Redact sensitive information from JSON for logging (Node.js)" Also, I just love the name of this module.

Alec Muffett "BEST #XCODE REVIEW EVAR"

Web-end

Using the Little-Known CSS element() Function to Create a Minimap Navigator Interesting CSS feature, hopefully this one gets supported beyond Firefox.

1991 Server-side web framework written in Forth.

Lingua Scripta

Leah "Have an inspirational quote™"

Lines of Code

Nearby Cats 👍

A lot of programmers make the mistake of thinking the way you make code flexible is by predicting as many future uses as possible, but this paradoxically leads to less flexible code.

The only way to achieve flexibility is to make things as simple and easy to change as you can.

Mel Learn to throw code away:

Lessons from art school: one professor had us spend 4 hours on a still life painting only to have us reuse the same canvas for the following session with a different subject.

Don’t get attached because you can do it again and better.

Ryn Daniels 😭

OH: "I regret to inform you that that's a load-bearing yak you're trying to shave."

Architectural

andrew turley 🙋‍♀️

Most people are capable of building systems that are twice a complex as the systems they are capable of maintaining.

Peopleware

Tommy Collison 💯

I've had a couple of knee surgeries, and I've never forgotten a nurse who, after I told her how I was feeling, said "So — better than yesterday, and not as good as tomorrow?" If that's true of you learning a new thing, you're on the right track.

No, You Can’t Ignore Email. It’s Rude. In spite of the title, this article makes some good points on setting boudaries and when to not respond to emails. Also, reminds me I've got a few emails to respond to brb …

I have a few general rules. You should not feel obliged to respond to strangers asking you to share their content on social media, introduce them to your more famous colleagues, spend hours advising them on something they’ve created or “jump on a call this afternoon.” If someone you barely know emails you a dozen times a month and is always asking you to do something for him, you can ignore those emails guilt-free.

On Being A Principal Engineer A career path that doesn't require managing people:

Yes I am still a maker not a manager and I do not have anyone reporting to me but my new position now requires leadership duties that are best not left implicit or not handled with the same outcomes oriented focus as my past coding assignments. One of the most important competencies of a principal engineer is to become a force multiplier.

Paul Bronks "How to finish an argument when you're wrong."

Locked Doors

Amazon’s Home Surveillance Chief Declared War on “Dirtbag Criminals” as Company Got Closer to Police At least this dystopia comes with free one-day delivery, and takes only 5 minutes to install:

Not only does this portal allow police to view Ring customers on a handy, Google-powered map, but it also makes requesting customer surveillance video a matter of several clicks.
...
“Many people are not going to feel like they have a choice when law enforcement asks for access to their footage,” said Cagle.

Ian Coldwater 😮

They call it C because it's short for CVE

Electric Dreams

The Tinder algorithm, explained Can algorithms help you find love, or at least optimize for engagement?

New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators Definitely not "too dangerous to release", some sites specialize in producing daily content like that. But ignore the clickbait, and it's really interesting how far AI has evolved:

When used to simply generate new text, GPT2 is capable of writing plausible passages that match what it is given in both style and subject. It rarely shows any of the quirks that mark out previous AI systems, such as forgetting what it is writing about midway through a paragraph, or mangling the syntax of long sentences.

Daniel Gross "During WW2 the RAF flew missions solely for the purpose of generating training data:"

None of the Above

Gone In A Generation Washington Post interactive exploring how climate change is disrupting lives across the US.

Showerthoughts 🤔

House cats are basically lions that figured out how to get more calories out of a single human #Showerthoughts

Brett Wilson "This is what a Silicon Valley Thai restaurant looks like."

Benedict Evans So true:

Why is the default view in Google Docs an unsorted, read-only list of the 3,000 documents that anyone has ever shared with the team in the last 5 years?

Molly "Anyone need a job? A position just opened up"

MZS Rule to live by:

Roger Ebert was asked why he gave LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT remake 2.5 stars, mainly due to a graphic rape scene, but gave 3.5 to the original, which had a similar scene. "I wrote that original review 37 years ago. I am not the same person. I am uninterested in being 'consistent'."

James Melville "Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be amazed by the incredible product design magic show."

The Bad Science of Exercise Recovery TL;DR

They’ll run trials with a small number of participants or force extreme circumstances on their subjects. She refers to the findings of a team of researchers from the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, where researchers found that “if you apply evidence-based methods, 40 years of sports drinks research does not seemingly add up to much.”

flex tillerson "'how to survive an ostrich encounter' is the only wikihow article I care about"

Writer Louis Leung Please!

Million dollar idea: A smoke detector that shuts off when you yell "I'm just cooking!"

Kitten Rescuers Netflix and purr.

Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think How misinformation propagates and what we can do about it.

Pileup on the I-70 near Kansas today Stay safe out there!

Tess Rinearson This is absolutely how we "rough out" winter in San Francisco:

TERRIBLE WINTER WEATHER
seattle: 2 feet of snow
chicago: -20 degrees fahrenheit
san francisco: really bad clouds

Everyone should know about @bunnyarchive: tweet @bunnyarchive bunny for a cute bunny pic!

Design Objective

@edwinwee Next level presentation:

Today I gave a lightning talk on emdashes and endashes and passed out these custom M&Ms. I was so pleased with myself.

Helen Tran So much this!

I mean no disrespect to the Lyft Design team... in my perfect world the app simply asks, "Would you get into this car again?" Or assumes, "Yes" until otherwise noted.

The rating system is exhausting and leaves room for random punishment based on people's arbitrary moods.

Giora Morein Factor this into your design process:

You will only know all the requirements of a story when it is completed (not before you start it) #agile #scrum

Tools of the Trade

OptimalBits/bull Bull looks like a solid choice: Redis-based job queues for Node applications.

Mozilla to use machine learning to find code bugs before they ship That's a substantial reduction in bugs:

That system found some 60-70 percent of buggy commits, though it also had a false positive rate of 30 percent. Even though this false positive rate is quite high, users of this system nonetheless felt that it was worthwhile, thanks to the time saved when it did correctly identify a bug.

Magnus Edenhill "I too ❤ Logs. left: streaming, right: batching"

Mesh: Compacting Memory Management for C/C++ Applications Interesting technique (looking at you, Electron):

This paper introduces Mesh, a plug-in replacement for malloc that, for the first time, eliminates fragmentation in unmodified C/C++ applications. Mesh combines novel randomized algorithms with widely-supported virtual memory operations to provably reduce fragmentation, breaking the classical Robson bounds with high probability. Mesh generally matches the runtime performance of state-of-the-art memory allocators while reducing memory consumption; in particular, it reduces the memory of consumption of Firefox by 16% and Redis by 39%.

Teletype Model 33 "git push so slow"

Web-end

Details on <details> Using the HTML native details element and Web components to build drop-down menus and dialogs.

Pure CSS Still Life - Water and Lemons Mind blowing! Still life with CSS.

Lines of Code

Manisha Agarwal 😅

In software development, there's probably no worse situation than "it works, but nobody knows why."

Architectural

Roman Kofman My experience also confirms that adding slack to your roadmap speeds development in the long run. 👇 Thread:

When people complain about tech debt, and business disregard for it, they don't usually actually mean a limited set of specific issues.

What they're complaining about is a lack of "slack" to take on un-prioritized, but important work.

Slack is important for any healthy team.

Sakhavat Mammadov "When you keep postponing simple but important solutions .."

Team Work

Bret Taylor The story of how Google Maps “Satellite” mode was almost named “Bird Mode” has all the right elements of corporate decision making process, but with a happy ending.

Locked Doors

You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook. That we accept this as normal …

In the Journal’s testing, Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor, the most popular heart-rate app on Apple’s iOS, made by California-based Azumio Inc., sent a user’s heart rate to Facebook immediately after it was recorded.

Flo Health Inc.’s Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, which claims 25 million active users, told Facebook when a user was having her period or informed the app of an intention to get pregnant, the tests showed.

Real-estate app Realtor.com, owned by Move Inc., a subsidiary of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp , sent the social network the location and price of listings that a user viewed, noting which ones were marked as favorites, the tests showed.

Using DNA Databases To Find Your Distant Relatives? So Is The FBI. Fingerprint matching are so last century:

A majority of Americans could be genetically traced by the FBI using consumer genealogy databases and pinpointing a distant family member’s DNA, researchers say, greatly expanding investigators’ ability to identify members of the public suspected of crimes.

Eric Lawrence "Wife wrote a shopping list and entrusted my 5yo to deliver it to me. #infosecmetaphors"

Techtopia

Nike’s smart sneakers are breaking when used with an Android phone The day your shoes stop working and you have to wait for a software patch … say what???

Affected owners say either their left or right shoe no longer pairs with Nike’s app, meaning it can’t be used to tighten their fresh pair of $350 self-lacing shoes.

OTOH while not as stylish, they do have more processing power than a PDP-11.

Austen Allred 🤔

If you think about it the technology industry is just a giant mechanism for moving money from Saudi Arabia to San Francisco landlords

basibanget "Thank Excel!"

Electric Dreams

Do Neural Nets Dream Of Electric Hobbits? Explores the relationship between the GTP-2 algorithm (remember, from last week), and recent concepts of how/why the human brain dreams.

None of the Above

Gabby Tropea "My sister accidentally locked me out of the house so I went to check if the back door was unlocked and this happened"

Ryan Gantz 😭

boarding order:
1st class
flyvantage 9000 unobtanium elite cardholders
veterans (thanks for your service!)
skynet chryogen billionaire club members
travelers with kids
Verizon GO90 customers
flyvantage 7500 goldlife partners
YouTube Red subscribers
folks wearing UNIQLO™
group A

Benji "When you try to help but have no idea what you're doing"

Kevin Roose I can't complain about tech giants harming the social fabric, without pointing out examples of good stewardship. 👇 Thread:

Pinterest has half the staff of Twitter and 1/20th the staff of FB. No war rooms or byzantine enforcement frameworks or faux-democratic governance councils. It just saw people using its platform in a harmful way, and...blacklisted them. Wild!

Flightradar24 — how it works? TIL this real time map of commercial plane traffic is made by hobbiests, and for about $50 you can build your own tracker and contribute to the effort.

The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes "Crash-test dummies based on the ‘average’ male are just one example of design that forgets about women – and puts lives at risk."

Dragons and Beasties These sculptures are the most adorable!

Ash Crossan "Me not being dramatic"

Design Objective

Austin "If you want to be noticed during a portfolio presentation, tell a good story."

Norgard 👍

A useful tool is to end every product meeting with the following question, "Is this the simplest solution we can come up with."

Marc Hemeon When there's a will, there's a workaround:

I just spent .99 to get a 10 minute silent song because autoplaying music in cars is still a thing we can’t turn off in iOS...

Title of song is sonit always plays first...

Dare Obasanjo "No intuitive UI survives its first encounter with an end user"

Tools of the Trade

75 years since Colossus arrived at Bletchley The world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, celebrates its 75th birthday.

vim.dev is not what you think it is …

Introducing Package Diff See the difference between two published releases of an npm package.

AWS API Performance Comparison: Serverless vs. Containers vs. API Gateway integration TL;DR AWS Lambda is fast enough for most use cases.

emacs.dev is probably what you think it is …

Jake Williams "Does Python scale? You bet it does..."

Web-end

Cleave.js Format your <input/> content when you are typing.

Animation in React @nearform/react-animation for all your component transition animation needs.

Epilepsy Blocker A chrome extension that blocks dangerous, flashing GIFs. For people with photosensitive epilepsy that triggers from exposure to flashing lights at certain intensities or from certain visual patterns.

Lingua Scripta

Johannes Ewald "TIL exporting a function named then can be problematic 😱"

every_jorendorff Easy to fix, just add setTimeout, a thread 👇:

ECMA has changed the behavior of await p; to NOT create an extra promise (and enqueue an extra job) if p is already a promise. This makes await faster. No downside. Good idea!

So, I've got a patch for this. Guess what happens when I run all our browser regression tests.

Jane Manchun Wong 230K+ lines of code!

Google Domains, despite its recent redesign, is actually built with Google Web Toolkit

It loads megabytes of JS bundle, which is loaded by eval, which is compiled from Java!! Omg my eyes

If you wondered why the first page load of Google Domains is so sluggish, this is why

Lines of Code

Avdi Grimm In response to this monstrosity of a configuration file:

It is generally true that if you can fool developers into thinking they are "mastering" something hard (as opposed to learning tolerance for something badly designed), you can build a fiercely loyal priesthood.

Enrique "It's always a timezone-related issue"

More than once I've run into tests that start failing at 6pm. I live in Mexico City (GMT-6). By now, whenever that happens I immediately suspect a timezone-related issue.

It's always a timezone-related issue.

Architectural

The coastline paradox This basicly explains why software project estimations are always wrong:

The closer you look, the more wiggles and squiggliness you come across and instead of converging on a more accurate length, the coastline just keeps getting longer. The smaller your ruler, the longer it gets.

your friend myk "lol what a great definition of 'eventual consistency'" (original comic)

Peopleware

Daniel Gross True, but easier said than done:

Hardest part about hiring as a founder isn’t finding people. It’s orienting your schedule to spend enough time on recruiting.

You’re likely under-investing in it. Inertial draw is always towards the urgent, not the important. Audit your time. Eyes on the prize!

Sophie Alpert 🤔

if A players hire A players but B players hire C players… who hires B players?

Kathryn Brightbill This thread has some great stories: "What is your most on brand story from your childhood?" 👇

Locked Doors

David Byttow Shares his on brand story from his childhood:

My mom controlled our AOL account when I was about 13 and would come into my room to sign me in. So, I created an entirely fake AOL login flow in Visual Basic and had her sign me in once to capture the password. Old school phishing.

Top ten most popular docker images each contain at least 30 vulnerabilities Good to know:

The official Node.js image ships 580 vulnerable system libraries, followed by the others each of which ship at least 30 publicly known vulnerabilities.
...
The current Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Node.js runtime is version 10. The image tagged with 10 (i.e: node:10) is essentially an alias to node:10.14.2- jessie (at the time that we tested it) where jessie specifies an obsolete version of Debian that is no longer actively maintained.

If you had chosen that image as a base image in your Dockerfile, you’d be exposing yourself to 582 vulnerable system libraries bundled with the image

Electric Dreams

Microsoft Excel will now let you snap a picture of a spreadsheet and import it Finally, a use for AI.

Saleem Rashid 🤖

asimov's fourth law: a robot must not click the "i am not a robot" checkbox

hardmaru 🏎

A fun way to learn about neural networks and AI is to implement a simulation game giving your agents little neural net brains, and training them using a simple method like evolution.

This demo trains a small neural network to drive around the track after only a few generations:

Graham Cluley "Turing test."

None of the Above

Story Of My Fucking Life New favorite Instagram account, these fake real life book covers are everything!

AlwaysAshley Every printer owner can relate:

Me: And print.
Printer: No
Me: But why?
Printer: No yellow ink
Me: It’s a black and white document.
Printer: I NEED yellow
Me: You don’t.
Printer:
Me: But —
Printer: I’m not running a fucking charity, get me yellow
Me: Ok but this is the last time.
Printer: lol no

hoskas This also happens to me every time I open Instagram:

I bet there's a word in German for when you get a very brief glimpse of a fascinating tweet just as the page reloads and no matter how far you scroll, you never ever see that tweet again.

Tim Dunn "The world record for pulling a train... with model trains."

Manisha Agarwal 😭 I go to physical therapy twice a week, so I can relate:

My friend who's a physiotherapist thinks that half the guys on Tinder are using ten-year-old photos, the other half are married, and the other half are single for a reason.
I'd like to tell her that's three halves, but you don't debate math with someone who's rotating your spine

The Hoarse Whisperer I'd join:

Okay, hear me out.
New business idea: a sleep gym.
No athletic equipment. Only private nap cubbies.
Your friends when they see you hustling off in sweats: “Where ya going?”
You: “The gym. Back in an hour.”
I would seriously join a sleep gym.

RNIB 🐫 CamelCase FTW:

Make sure you capitalize the first letter of each word in hashtags so that screen reader software reads out each word separately. It also makes them #EasierToRead!

Jedi Cinememer "Danny Ocean describes Facebook's ambitious new messaging strategy. See Facebook plans to let Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp users message each other."

Quantitative easing was the father of millennial socialism Actions have consequences, part I:

Mr Bernanke’s unorthodox “cash for trash” scheme, otherwise known as quantitative easing, drove up asset prices and bailed out baby boomers at the profound political cost of pricing out millennials from that most divisive of asset markets, property. This has left the former comfortable, but the latter with a fragile stake in the society they are supposed to build.

Lyft's financials show a $911 million loss ahead of its IPO Actions have consequences, part II:

The company has been clawing market share from industry leader Uber, according to the filing. Lyft claimed 39 percent of the U.S. market at the end 2018, up 17 percentage points over two years.

Two years ago: With just her words, Susan Fowler brought Uber to its knees.

Axel Rauschmayer Actions have consequences, part III:

If we see this popup on a Medium post, we can’t use it for @ESnextNews. 😢

Matt Jameson "Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls."

It's infuriating how often I google a story to verify it, and the results are:

1. NYT (no free articles left)
2. Fox News (always free)
3. WaPo (no free articles left)
4. Breitbart (always free)
5. Daily Caller (always free)

Guess what people end up reading when this happens?

In Mod We Trust There's no escaping the click-bait industrial complex:

The Verge brings this up as an example of the totalitarian and dehumanizing environment that Facebook moderators experience. But I imagine that if an employee had written down (or used their phone to take a picture of) some personal details of a Facebook user, The Verge (or some identical publication) would have run a report on how Facebook hired contractors who didn’t even take basic precautions to protect user privacy.

I’m not saying nobody should ever be allowed to do investigative reporting or complain about problems. But I would support some kind of anti-irony rule, where you’re not allowed to make extra money writing another outrage-bait article about the outrages your first outrage-bait article caused.

De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation TL;DR Scientists picked a single-cell alga, introduced selective pressure in the form of a predator, and watched as it evolved into a multicellular organism over ~750 generations.

Andrew Cunningham 🤦‍♂️

The people who make USB are at it again!!

• USB 3.1 gen 1, which used to be USB 3.0, is now USB 3.2 gen 1
• USB 3.1 gen 2 is now USB 3.2 gen 2
• USB 3.2 is now USB 3.2 gen 2 2x2 because it’s twice as fast as USB 3.2 gen 2 (aka USB 3.1 gen 2)

'Moment of reckoning': US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports In many places in the US, recycling is over, and instead we get incinerate pollution. But you can still reduce and reuse! ♻️

Jennifer Wright "This woman is both my hero and history's greatest villain."

Marques Brownlee "Ok well played @elonmusk @Tesla"

Design Objective

Scott Bateman 👇 Thread on the design choices in airplane UI:

Almost every switch, lever, or handle that a pilot may have to move whilst inflight is shaped differently. Whether it be the external lights, radar controls, or the temperature control for the air conditioning, they are all subtly different. #AvGeek #Aviation

Jeff Morris Jr. And building that POV into a cohesive product offering:

The hardest part about product has nothing to do with designing UX/UI or motivating engineers.

Those skills can be learned through hard work.

The hardest part is having a unique point of view about the world & being able to articulate those ideas to customers in a simple way.

The changes! 😎

Antti Oulasvirta 👇 VR/AR will never work in practice, no way to solve usability issues, a thread:

Rant: Nine reasons why I don't believe in current VR/AR technology.

HoloLens, Magic Leap, and Oculus: Mind-blowing videos, and the market is estimated to explode to $200 billion by 2025 (Statista). So what's wrong?

HCI research tells why we haven't seen a killer app yet: 1/22

Luke Wroblewski 👇 VR/AR with new input modes and better screens, just a matter of time, a counter-thread:

1. many of these issues stem from trying to put graphical user interfaces into the real World. Porting windows, icons, menus, keyboards, etc. to 3D space & asking you to point at them will cause many HCI issues. wrong interaction model.

Tools of the Trade

tef of the author These are damn good heuristics:

the three true estimates:

it's quicker to do than to explain
it will be done by the next meeting
it won't

the three true priorities:

yesterday
right now
never

the three true results:

i made one change
i changed several things and missed one
changed everything & still broken

AnnaR 💡

TIL: Google Slides has an option to live-machine-caption your slideshows 🤯 Seems like a valid option if the venue you're presenting at doesn't provide CC!

Nader Dabit I know a lot of developers who do that, unironically:

I love how we as developers expect so much free shit, free applications, free platforms. When they try to monetize we flip out.

We then complain if we're not yet making absurd amounts of money building things for our companies, who we expect to make money to pay us (but how?) 🤔

Scott Hanselman 😭

Rather than “git blame” I would like to see “git I did the best I could with the tools and organizational structure available to me so just give me a little space and time and it will get fixed eventually”

Thomas Fuchs Both funny and sad (also):

Legendary Apollo project programmer Margaret Hamilton, next to a printout of the node_modules directory listing for her first Hello World react app

Web-end

Vincent Riemer 👇 Thread on running smooth animations:

[1] Transforms, transforms, transforms, transforms (and opacity)

I almost never animate any property other than transform/opacity. When paired with tasteful usage of will-change, you let the browser skip some of the more expensive rendering steps (paint/layout). (5/9)

@rem OMG he's right!

You've met the only unclosable HTML tag, right? <plaintext></plaintext> works today (try it in jsbin, jsfiddle, codepen, etc), and refuses to close and it'll baff all the subsequent markup onto the page (including it's own closing tag). Fun times, eh? Straight from the 1990s.

Lines of Code

Andreas Klinger Just this week, I had to figure out which of three similar repositories hold the actual code we use in production:

Job interview: "Solve this recursive graph problem"

Daily work: "Figure out why in this legacy app there are five things named almost the same. And which one to use."

James Newton-King The hardest problem in computer science is not giving up:

This is it. The end of my career. I've fought this bug for 3 hours and I can't defeat it. The bug defies logic and reason. The rest of my days will be spent in eternal struggle against an amorphous foe, destined to-

Oh, there was a typo in an environment variable. Never mind.

Hakim El Hattab "tfw your hotel shower is a more prolific OSS contributor than you"

Architectural

Bryan Caplan Defines the software industry to a tee:

The classic mistake of the old: Thinking there are no new ideas.
The classic mistake of the young: Thinking your ideas are new.

Eloi Valley 🔥

kuberbetes is just websphere for millennials. I shan't be reading any replies,

Peopleware

There’s an optimal way to structure your day—and it’s not the 8-hour workday Pomodoro fans, here's another data point for you:

In the process of measuring people’s activity, they stumbled upon a fascinating finding: the length of the workday didn’t matter much; what mattered was how people structured their day. In particular, people who were religious about taking short breaks were far more productive than those who worked longer hours.

The ideal work-to-break ratio was 52 minutes of work, followed by 17 minutes of rest.

Alistair Croll 💯

Less “women in tech” panels.
More women, in tech panels.

A New Luxury Retreat Caters to Elderly Workers in Tech (Ages 30 and Up) Not. The. Onion.

Teamwork

Steven 👇 On managing inputs vs outputs:

2/ Will riff from my POV on this.

At scale the inputs (themselves a product of alignment/collab) are
• Resources
• Schedule
• x-team technology bets
• Scenarios or “themes”

Output is created/owned by the team (recursively) within those constraints.

6 phrases managers need to stop using in team meetings Or why “Don’t bring me problems. Bring me solutions” is well intended but ineffective.

Amir Salihefendić Key takeaway: "Blocks becomes a non-issue as you are blocked by default"

0/ Remote work isn't exceptional as companies that are spread around multiple offices have done it for the last many years. The special sauce is communicating asynchronously as the default 💡 Here's a thread about why.

Corey Quinn Bingo!

I object to the reality that you can be trusted with root in production, but not the judgement to make a $50 purchase.

Priya Ghose 🔥

“Never attribute to stupidity or malice that which can be adequately explained by structural alignment of incentives.”

-Hanlon's Razor as revised via @kevinakwok

Techtopia

Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway Serving relevant ads doesn't require surveillance, a rant:

That's a lot about profiling for ad targeting, which obviously doesn't work, if anyone would just stop and look at it. But there are way too many people incentivized to believe otherwise. Meanwhile, if you care about your privacy, all that matters is they're still collecting your personal information whether it works or not.

matt blaze More states should enact bans on cashless retail:

Philly just banned credit- and debit-card only retailers, citing, among other things, economic inequity (not everyone has a card) as well as the privacy implications of requiring all customers to use trackable payments. Interesting policy tradeoff space here.

Startup Life

Eric Paley 👇 How to tell a story during an investor pitch:

When getting ready to pitch VCs, founders often jump right into assembling a slide deck.
I think this is a mistake.
I’d suggest that you start by writing twenty headlines that sum up your startup, and only then build the slides.
Here’s why:
1/11

Amazon Almost Killed Best Buy. Then, Best Buy Did Something Completely Brilliant "This is how Best Buy used a combination of corporate strategy and emotional intelligence to save itself from ruin." Best Buy didn't save itself from Amazon, it saved itself from itself. They turned into a retailer you'd want to visit.

None of the Above

Julia Macfarlane "Siri give me a metaphor for life"

CNN A breakaway female cyclist was forced to stop during a prestigious race in Belgium after she started to catch up with the men's competition, which had started 10 minutes earlier.

christine røde Me:

every time i pack for a trip, i somehow convince myself that i will require 3 outfit changes a day like some sort of fashion blogger, only to get there and happily wear the same jeans and tshirt for days in a row???

Jessie Char "that wfh life"

your friend myk 👇 This thread, smh:

unpopular fantasy opinion: dragons shit gold. that's why the lairs are filled with it etc, they don't collect it they create it. Think about it - do you ever see dragons bringing sacks of gold home?

No, it's whole cows. Then time passes, then there's gold.

Not rocket science.

Andy Ryan "I'm close to breaking this whole thing wide open"

AT&T’s new HBO chief criticizes Netflix, says it ‘doesn’t have a brand’ I guess he's talking about "HBO and chill" …

Swedish Couple Builds Greenhouse Around Home to Stay Warm and Grow Food All Year Long Never too cold, and they can grow grapes, tomatoes, and cucumbers. What more do you need?

Woman reads fine print on insurance policy, wins $10,000 in hidden contest That one time reading the EULA paid off:

Hidden deep within the text of her Squaremouth insurance policy was a contest to win $10,000. The company buried instructions for claiming the grand prize in the fine print of every Tin Leg Travel Insurance contract.

"If you've read this far, then you are one of the very few Tin Leg customers to review all of their policy documentation," the fine print read. It included an email address and said the first person who replied would win the prize.

Subaru Buggy Drift Highlights Crazy fun, and you can build one yourself:

The Real Flat-Earth Conspiracy Is Selling Overpriced T-Shirts At least flat earth is harmless, and doesn't spread measles:

Apart from the charge to engage seriously with this movement — something I haven’t managed to do — the best part of the film is how many times the Flat Earthers disprove their own ideas with elaborate experiments.

Well, that and the amazing T-shirts they all wear.

The Dad "Now THIS is how you spend a snow day with your kid. [Scott Theisen]"

nathanwpylestrangeplanet Love this Instagram account and merch!

Design Objective

Jared Spool 👇 Design is more than shapes and colors:

“The product’s design was excellent, but the product was buggy, so I couldn’t recommend it.”

This is used as an excuse for why design-led orgs don’t work.

Yet, that’s the heart of issue. A truly design-led org would focus on the user’s experience. Bugs are part of that.

Paul Ford 😭 "This just happened on my home screen and quarters started spraying out of my USB jack."

Tools of the Trade

THANOS JS "Reduce the file size of your project down to 50%, by randomly deleting half of the files."

Using the iPad Pro as my development machine Using Mosh, Tmux, Docker, and other cool tricks that work around the limits of iOS, and can turn an iPad into an almost MacBook replacement. But the inevitable conclusion (also my experience):

I have decided that the iPad is the perfect mobile device for most of my work, but it can’t replace my main work devices (MacBook or iMac). I know it sounds cool to use the iPad as the main development machine, however, the constant limitations you’re hitting is just frustrating. I agree with most of the people out there that iOS is still limiting in several ways.

Axel Rauschmayer "Awesome! Chrome 73 lets you install Progressive Web Apps natively on macOS."

Jen Gentleman "Cannot unsee"

x

Justin Searls 😭

PSA: a lot of Ruby web apps have been hacked by the Russians. To find out if your site is infected, look for a config.ru file in the root directory of your app.

Can't believe they named the file that. Dead giveaway.

Kenn White "I meant merkle tree not merkel tree but thanks the chuckle, google"

Web-end

Chet 🎂

30 years later... This morning a dusty but frisky Steve Jobs NeXTstation just started again and WorldWideWeb 1.0 Alpha build succeeded!!! Happy #Web30 Birthday @timberners_lee @CERN @webfoundation @jmhullot @bserlet

Brad Frost Reminder that things like account numbers and social security numbers aren't really numbers — use HTML appropriately:

Story time! Just got a call from my bank about a wire transfer. Everything seemed right except the last 3 digits of the account number.

Turns out they're using <input type="number"> for their account field, which means one up/down mouse swipe or keyboard changes the account # !

CVS Receipt Finally, a legitimate use for infinite scroll!

Lines of Code

Emma Wedekind "Just a simple fix!"

💿 Sh*t Devs Say: Greatest Hits 💿

“We can get it done this sprint”
“Just pushed please approve: No need to review my newest changes”
“It’s not that hard”
“Sure, it’s accessible”
“I forgot to push”
“Who broke the tests?”

Joop Lammerts "I love this one! I'm going to print it and put on the wall as a reminder #DDDEU @maaretp"

Hakan Yuksel "developer test vs tester test"

Architectural

Denise Yu 👇 Thread:

Just learned a real-world example of the cost of “meh, we can refactor this later”:

Japan is the only modernized country in the world to run on two independent electricity grids, by historical accident. When the 2011 tsunami happened, half the country was knocked off-grid...

Ben Burton 🍻 Beer scale!

A devops engineer walks into a bar, puts the bartender in a docker container, put kubernetes behind the bar, spins up 1000 bartenders, orders 1 beer.

Peopleware

Eugenia Zuroski 💡 Brilliant!

I’ve decided, from now on, to field hostile questions at conferences by first asking, as a point of clarification: “What is it you hope to get from my answer to this question?”

At the very least, it may make these interactions more interesting.

Sarah Federman The goal of the interview process is to hire future employees, so do whatever to help the candidate succeed:

Unpopular tech opinion. There is always going to be a better interview experience depending on who the candidate is and the only real solution is to just ask them which they prefer (and yes, I do believe this can scale).

Rika 💡 Plus you don't have to tidy up before an important meeting:

Work From Home is overrated.

Instead, I propose Work From IKEA. Go to IKEA when it’s absolutely dead during the week and join a video conference from a different mock room every hour until your team notices.

Robyn Frost "The creative process"

Techtopia

Li Jin 👇 Future marketplaces are more than aggregators of demand and supply (but likely still contributing to the erosion of income):

In the future, marketplaces may not even feel like marketplaces to the end user. Because they connect all the dots behind the scenes--and provide such a high level of standardization and quality--people feel like they’re interacting with a high-quality, concierge-level service.

Startup Life

Suhail 👍 x 1000

◾️Dark mode for founders: disappearing & getting shit done.

Joseph Ruscio 🔥

OH: "startup mantra: may we survive long enough to be forced to implement Jira"

Locked Doors

Beto O’Rourke’s secret membership in America’s oldest hacking group Remember Cult of the Dead Cow? There's a book about it coming soon, and it features a presidential candidate:

The hugely influential Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, is notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows. It’s also known for inventing the word “hacktivism” to describe human-rights-driven security work.

Laurie Voss 😭

A major international bank accidentally published a private package of their own to the public npm Registry, took 3 years to notice, and then sent DMCA takedown notices to Amazon and Cloudflare for hosting "stolen code". Now I have to pay a lawyer to explain this to them.
...
Our lawyer is also going to need to explain to a bank why a React package does not constitute "Stolen Financial Credentials" oh lord

Save the date: GPS Week Number Rollover Event – April 6th 2019 GPS experiences the Y2K problem every 19.7 years:

The week number is encoded into the data stream by a 10-bit field. A binary 10-bit word can represent a maximum of 1,024 weeks, which is approximately 19.7 years. Each 19.7 year period is known in GPS terms as an “epoch”.

At the end of each epoch the receiver resets the week number to zero and starts counting again – a new epoch begins.

None of the Above

Jason Spraitz "Hands down the best wedding invitation that I’ve ever received. Hopefully, #reviewer2 doesn’t get invited."

Ashley Mayer Where is the lie?

I've run the numbers twice and can confirm that a 60 degree day during a New York winter is 15 degrees warmer than a 60 degree day during a San Francisco summer.

Jane Manchun Wong "Null Island is definitely on my bucket list now! 😍"

LRB Bookshop 🐝 What the …???

if you were or are the friendly gent (blue coat) who was in the shop half an hour ago and left a big jar of bees on the table in the poetry section, please come back and reclaim your jar of bees. if you aren't, please rt until we find him #FindTheBeeGent
…
charlie says they're too large to be bees but i've started the hashtag now so it's too late to change it

WILD NATURE "This baby horse is so damn happy, imma have to rt for good luck"

Death of the calorie Explores the junk science behind counting calories:

Officials at the WHO also acknowledge the problems of the current system, but say it is so entrenched in consumer behaviour, public policy and industry standards that it would be too expensive and disruptive to make big changes. The experiments that Atwater conducted a century ago, without calculators or computers, have never been repeated even though our understanding of how our bodies work is vastly improved. There is little funding or enthusiasm for such work. As Susan Roberts at Tufts University says, collecting and analysing faeces “is the worst research job in the world”.

Why Machines That Bend Are Better Mighty interesting: "compliant mechanisms"!

Seattle traffic deaths and injuries down slightly last year; most of the fatalities were pedestrians Your city can do this too!

In addition, SDOT is implementing signals that give pedestrians at crosswalks a three- to seven-second head start before drivers get a green light to make turns. The system, called leading pedestrian intervals, makes pedestrians in the crosswalk more visible to drivers making turns.
...
In New York City, the transportation department has installed the technology at more than 2,000 intersections since 2014. A 2016 study found that deaths and serious injuries among pedestrians and bicyclists dropped nearly 40 percent at crossings with the systems.

Reconsidering Cinema "Mad Max Fury Road without CGI is straight insane"

Steadman USA …

This quote is actually illuminating. "Why didnt the rich people just exert their influence the socially acceptable way?"

Yashar Ali US Attorney re the Huffman/Loughlin (among others) college scam: "We're not talking about donating a building...we're talking about fraud."

Agosto o lo otro "Es viernes y tu cuerpo lo sabe"

Why Does the U.S. Tolerate So Much Risk? Rhetorical question. US values corporate profits over human lives:

Britain, which acted separately, and slightly before the Pan-European regulator, offered an even more explicit account of its reasoning, explaining that it was grounding the Boeing planes because authorities did not know the cause of the most recent crash, of an Ethiopian Airlines plane on Sunday.

The Federal Aviation Administration, by contrast, said until Wednesday that the absence of information was the reason it was letting domestic airlines keep the planes in the air.

After a Lion Air 737 Max Crashed in October, Questions About the Plane Arose This article from February has more details about the financial calculus that lead to the death of 346 people in two avoidable plance crashes. And don't blame the software for this tragedy.

Good doggos "What a professional!"

hardmaru “Pongdrian”

Design Objective

The Value of Inconvenient Design Take a cue from nature, and design your app with a healthy dose of friction:

But nature is the ultimate optimizer, having run an endless slate of A/B tests over billions of years at scale. And in nature, friction and inconvenience have stood the test of time. Not only do they remain in abundance, but they’ve proven themselves critical. Nature understands the power of friction while we have become blind to it.

Brigid Johnson ✓ Note to self:

Pro-tip: When naming a product always run it by urban dictionary. You learn so much.

Liam O "Just another day being Irish on the Internet"

Kyle Russell 👇 A thread for founders that don't come from an enterprise background:

Something technical founders often don't appreciate when building an enterprise tool for the first time is the extent to which companies outside of Silicon Valley/big cities generally buy technology as if they haven't only hired brilliant people

Pavel A. Samsonov Related:

All enterprise software competes with Excel.

All productivity software competes with emailing things to yourself.

John Cutler "I found it! I found it! I found the CUSTOMER! #agile ?"

Tools of the Trade

Generate a Chart Image from URL Replacement for Google Charts API (RIP). Useful for adding charts to email, SMS, etc where you can't use client-side charting libraries.

Howard M. Lewis Ship 🛠 These are great for scripting APIs from the command line:

The triumvirate of httpie, jq, and gron are so useful in combination with each other if you ever touch JSON. And you do.

https://httpie.org/
https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

I know I've tweeted this before, but it's worth a reminder!

John Burn-Murdoch This is captivating. Also, you can use Observable to create your own bar chart race:

A “Bar Chart Race” animation showing the changing ranks of the 10 biggest cities in the world since 1500.

Fascinating to watch giant cities vanish after falling in conquests, and amazing that three UK cities were in the top 8 in the late 1800s.

ffsend Command line tool for using Firefox Send. Firefox Send is the easiest way to send files security, with end-to-end encryption and links that expire after a few days or downloads.

Why you shouldn't use Moment.js... A thoughtful analysis of moment.js and how it compares with date-fns, Joda, and friends. I agree with the main points: moment.js is hard to debug, the mutable API is a recipe for subtle bugs, and it's not particularly fast. It is a good choice, though, is you need some of its unique features or plugins.

Bringing black and white photos to life using Colourise.sg — a deep learning colouriser trained with old Singaporean photos Interesting:

To colourise black and white images, we employed a technique in deep learning known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). This comprises:

• A first neural network — a ‘generator’ — with many mathematical parameters (> 20 million) that tries to predict the colour values at different pixels in a black and white image, based on features in the image, and
• A second neural network — the ‘discriminator’ — that tries to identify if the generated colours are photo-realistic compared to the original coloured image.

Microsoft Teams gets inventive new conference call features to make Slack users jealous Absolutel jealous!

Microsoft has developed a way to mask out someone drawing on a physical whiteboard, allowing remote meeting members to still see the physical whiteboard when it’s in use. This works by using any regular webcam, and it will even capture the physical whiteboard and import it digitally into Microsoft Teams so remote workers can participate in meetings or the contents of the whiteboard can be archived for future use.

Brian Roemmele Moore's law is alive and well:

Apple AirPods H1 chip (SOCs) has the processing power of an iPhone 4—in each ear!

Lines of Code

Elegance Explores what it means for code to be "elegant", by looking at a few game algorithms:

The workaround is certainly not elegant. “Look for an actor in this direction, twice” is not what I wanted to express. And yet it’s not a hack, either. The code above demonstrably does the correct thing in all cases, and is suitable as a permanent solution. It occupies that nebulous third category of “complete, but not pretty”.

tef of the author 🔥

programmers tend to read essays until they getting to the first line they disagree with and then tweet about it, like a compiler

Architectural

Erik Wilde The "for hipsters" jab … probably true. The "enterprise-grade GraphQL management" is a thing that already exists, and one reason I'm currently looking at GraphQL. To me, GraphQL doesn't feel like ESB, more like early Rails "RESTful APIs": easy to get started, powerful if you need it to be.

GraphQL is ESB for hipsters. for now... it also is a new opportunity for companies to sell you heavyweight centralized GraphQL management. just wait for the "enterprise-grade GraphQL management" products to appear... there, i said it first!

Mark Dalgleish Funny because it's true.

Peopleware

Chris Young Beware of long meetings in small rooms:

This is crazy. Study shoes three people in a conference room over 2 hours can result in a Co2 level that can impair cognitive functioning. Ie. If you’re making decisions at the end of the meeting, you’re mentally less qualified to do so.

Why are you not designing your day-to-day experience? I wouldn't design every moment, see benefits of friction, but I do see the appeal in applying design principles to various life tasks:

Look at the world around you with the eyes of a designer. Aren’t there too many pictures on your living room wall? Too many objects sitting on your desk? Too many apps on your phone home screen? Take a pass at every environment you interact with throughout your day and ask yourself the question: what can I eliminate from here to open up more breathing room for my eyes and brain?

Changelog "Work smart, not hard 💪

Locked Doors

The unescape() room A game to test your XSS skills.

Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing It's amazing how sophisticated adtech has grown, in the race to extract the most money from advertisers:

Advertising networks often sniff certain browser features, such as the window size to create user profiles and track users as they resize their browser and move across new URLs and browser tabs.

Called "letterboxing," this new technique adds "gray spaces" to the sides of a web page when the user resizes the browser window.

Sebastian Bicchi "We don't take your security seriously. We really don't care that much." Hey Facebook …

None of the Above

Santero "Best film I've seen in ages" #ParentOps

Elle Gato 😱

Me: I would like to go to sleep now
Brain: you can't
Me: why?
Brain: you haven't Done Enough
Me: done enough...what?
Brain: Enough
Me: enough what??
Brain: Enough. Just Enough. You have not Done Enough
Me: I'll do enough if you tell me enough what
Brain: You have not Done Enough

Geistlicherin 😭 "This hurt my feelings real bad"

kaye toal 😀

Every single episode of Queer Eye is like four of the fab five having a fun week doing makeovers and Bobby working 19 hours a day putting up drywall

Nathan W. Pyle I have a "no foreign transaction fees" credit card, and this is what happens when I try to use it while travelling outside the US.

Steven Cassidy 💌

The Patron Saint of copying people into emails is St Francis of a CC

Chris Owens "Is a router that "Works with Alexa" kind of like when all the headphones put "MP3 Compatible" on their packaging in the 2000's?"

Drive-Thru Workers Can Hear You Even When You Can't Hear Them Just a friendly reminder that the drive-thru is a hot mic. It's like Alexa, always listening. 🎙

RyansAverageLife Next time you feel like yelling at a computer, try this instead! (Watch this video with the sound on)

okay this is the funniest game I have ever played in my life

Facebook, Axios And NBC Paid This Guy To Whitewash Wikipedia Pages Masters of bureaucracy:

Sussman’s main strategy for convincing editors to make the changes his clients want is to cite as many tangentially related rules as possible (he is, after all, a lawyer). When that doesn’t work, though, his refusal to ever back down usually will.

He often replies to nearly every single bit of pushback with walls of text arguing his case. Trying to get through even a fraction of it is exhausting, and because Wikipedia editors are unpaid, there’s little motivation to continue dealing with Sussman’s arguments. So he usually gets his way.

Rob Hunt "I have exactly one iOS feature request." 👍

France’s EU minister names her cat ‘Brexit’ because ‘he meows loudly to be let out but won’t go through the door’ Troll level: 11.

رنا محمد TIL there’s an “oh snap” kitten

On the Hunt for Japan’s Elaborate, Colorful Manhole Covers Street art.

Design Objective

How to simplify your design 👍 This article itself is well designed, with 21 illustrated examples and just the right amount of text.

Rules for Autocomplete If you're doing any work on autocomplete UI, this is a fantastic list:

• Exact matches always come first. If the user types in an option exactly, other options must always go below the one matching what they typed.
• Besides exact matches, prefix matches come first. If I type “Fr” I want “Fresno” not “San Francisco.”
• After prefix matches, it can fall back to substring matches. Starting with substring matches would almost always be the wrong thing to do since users start typing words at the beginning not somewhere in the middle.
  …

Speak Human "Generate human centric microcopy for all purposes."

Dawnstar Australis 🤔

I believe I just overheard a software bug being described as an "unexpected user story"

Tools of the Trade

Announcing Lucet: Fastly’s native WebAssembly compiler and runtime The future of serverless is instant startup, and running code in the same metro area as the user:

Lucet is designed to take WebAssembly beyond the browser, and build a platform for faster, safer execution on Fastly’s edge cloud. WebAssembly is already supported by many languages including Rust, TypeScript, C, and C++, and many more have WebAssembly support in development.
…
Lucet can instantiate WebAssembly modules in under 50 microseconds, with just a few kilobytes of memory overhead. By comparison, Chromium’s V8 engine takes about 5 milliseconds, and tens of megabytes of memory overhead, to instantiate JavaScript or WebAssembly programs.

Karl Stratos Well, that explains it …

Request’s Past, Present and Future Good bye request. You did great for Node developers everywhere. 👋

Jeff Forcier I feel ya:

Also: examining old image files marked as 'wallpapers' which are almost literally postage stamp sized on a modern (not-even-HiDPI!) display is, uh.

It makes a body feel old, is what.

clean slate True, true:

[inserting row in excel]
Excel: copy font format from the row above?
Me: no I’ll handle it
Excel: and copy border from below?
Me: no why?
Excel: idk :/
Me: *typing number* w-why did you make 31,320 a date?
Excel: it’s my birthday :)

Samsung just unveiled the widest computer monitor you can buy Apropos Excel, you can now view spreadsheets thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis wide!

Web-end

Nicolas Goutay 👇 Web Performance metrics explained in a single tweet each. Good, quick reference.

amy nguyen "this whole interaction is why i am still on twitter"

Lines of Code

Sindre Sorhus I support this linting rule:

The prevent-abbreviations rule encourages you to write variable names like error instead of err and event instead of e. Of course, all of this is configurable. You can even use it as a general variable name blocker/replaces. Default replacements: https://github.com/sindresorhus/eslint-plugin-unicorn/blob/2f8f3d38e1c8058ac9bacb8bc318a66cda006307/rules/prevent-abbreviations.js#L17-L172

In the end, the biggest time efficiency happens between the ears:

The "writing" part of the code should not be the constraint. I personally spend much more time thinking about code than writing.

Jason Karns 😭 (the responses are funny as well)

Bought a mechanical keyboard with more resistance so my code will be strongly typed.

Sebastian McKenzie I'm going on 30 years …

This has been my debugging strategy for the past 10 years and I don't see it changing

Meowlivia_ How to ace a job interview:

Interviewer: Tell me about a time when you had to solve a difficult problem

Me: I had a bug in my code and couldn't find any helpful answers on stackoverflow. I persevered and eventually found the solution from a link on the second page of Google search

Architectural

Kent Beck 👍 I couldn't agree more:

If there’s one lesson I would like the next generation of developers to learn, it is to spend less time doing hard things and more time making hard things easy. Customers benefit from the former. Customers and peers and we ourselves benefit from the latter.

Aaron Patterson The Big Sort:

I like to take bad code, mix it with good code, turn it in to AAA rated technical debt, then sell insurance on the debt

cyberglot "most tech discussions in a nutshell"

Teamwork

Sophie Alpert How is that not "a product team"? Product needs ops and infrastructure to work, roadmaps and design specs by themselves don't deliver value to customers.

anyone have a good name for the combined roles of

• software engineering
• product design
• UX research
• product management?

“eng” sounds like just coders; “product” can sound like PM only (and excludes infra work).

“tech”? something else?

On second thought, this is a much better name jimthe.dev:

A group of these people is called a Jira.

None of the Above

Katie Mack "#TimeManagement"

Kimberly Blessing ☎️ This is the friendly thing to do:

I practically weep anytime anyone uses the one tap format (DIAL-IN,,CODE#) in a calendar invite.

TrinaCharlotte "I hate everything"

sophy wong "My new USB cable from @adafruit is reversible on BOTH ENDS! I could do this all day!"

Your AirPods Will Die Soon "The surprisingly short life of new electronic devices" Mine barely hold charges, and incidentally, started failing a week before Apple announced the 2nd generation AirPods 😤

The first iPhone prototype A look at Apple’s red M68.

The New Social Network That Isn’t New at All The NYT predicts personal email lists making a comeback. I certainly hope so, Weekend Reading readers. Meanwhile, Google wants to make email interactive.

Scientists rise up against statistical significance A must read for anyone doing research, whether into medical treatment or A/B testing link colors. Using P < 0.05 as a pass/fail test can easily lead to the wrong conclusion:

It is ludicrous to conclude that the statistically non-significant results showed “no association”, when the interval estimate included serious risk increases; it is equally absurd to claim these results were in contrast with the earlier results showing an identical observed effect.

There's no silver bullet, we need to be statistically literate:

Our call to retire statistical significance and to use confidence intervals as compatibility intervals is not a panacea. … But eradicating categorization will help to halt overconfident claims, unwarranted declarations of ‘no difference’ and absurd statements about ‘replication failure’ when the results from the original and replication studies are highly compatible.

Lizzie Swann Epic:

Me: Husband, please stop leaving empty wrappers on the kitchen surface. Husband:

dracomallfoys "actors in period costumes behind the scenes with modern technology will never fail to be the funniest thing"

Design Objective

Everything you need to know about Loading Animations I love the creative animations in this article.

Joe Schmoe Get an avatar from a link. Try https://joeschmoe.io/api/v1/jess.

Mistakes, we’ve drawn a few The Economist learning from their errors in data visualisation. Important lessons there, because we're all bound to repeat these mistakes, even if we mean to do better.

Mark Dalgleish 🤔 oh, that's a good way to build awareness!

If a developer says they don't really care about design, change their editor theme to Hot Dog Stand.

Tools of the Trade

The world’s first code-free sparkline typeface So simple and so useful, and will work with static HTML.

rvpanoz/luna "Luna - npm management through a modern UI 🌺"

The Illustrated Word2vec I still don't fully grok Word2vec, but I did learn a bunch from this article, enough to get started on a prototype.

terraform-provider-dominos When you provision new infastructure, and it's running late and you're hungry, and you end up ordering pizza …

data "dominos_store" "store" {
  address_url_object = "${data.dominos_address.addr.url_object}"
}

data "dominos_menu_item" "item" {
  store_id = "${data.dominos_store.store.store_id}"
  query_string = ["philly", "medium"]
}

resource "dominos_order" "order" {
  address_api_object = "${data.dominos_address.addr.api_object}"
  item_codes = ["${data.dominos_menu_item.item.matches.0.code}"]
  store_id = "${data.dominos_store.store.store_id}"
}

Dare Obasanjo "I was a tester for my first year at Microsoft. This reminds me a lot of that time 😆"

Web-end

Thomas Wang This is a great concept for dealing with break points:

Keep things feeling snappy using a CSS media query breakpoint and transition!

transition: 0.8s cubic-bezier(0.2, 0.8, 0.2, 1) 👌

Ian Devlin And it's friend background: red:

Fancy browser developer tools are great and all, but border: 1px solid red; has helped me figure things out more often than I can remember.

Lingua Scripta

jfet97/csp Communicating Sequential Processes in JavaScript using async and for-await-of.

Cassidy Williams The JavaScript life:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Unexpected token ',' on line 32

Lines of Code

93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs I always suspected there's a relationship between Perl and LSD:

In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?

Storing UTC is Not a Silver Bullet TL;DR UTC is good for times past, but timezone changes make it less than ideal for future time:

Part of the point of writing this blog post is to raise awareness, so that even if people do still recommend storing UTC, they can add appropriate caveats rather than treating it as a universal silver bullet.

jwcarroll 👍

Alternative Big O notation:

O(1) = O(yeah)
O(log n) = O(nice)
O(n) = O(ok)
O(n²) = O(my)
O(2ⁿ) = O(no)
O(n!) = O(mg!)

Architectural

Sahil Lavingia This is ballpark similar to our costs, and I imagine other startups as well:

The rough cost behind shipping a product like Gumroad:
Fixing a bug costs about $1,000-$5,000.
A small feature improvement costs about $2,000-$8,000.
Shipping a major feature like product ratings costs $60,000-$100,000.

Graham Lea 👇 The case that was NOT prematurely optimized:

So I applaud the simple code. The code that was based on a reasonable assumption, and continued working for years after that assumption was broken before it complained. And I applaud the developer that was mature enough to just write an O(MN) function cause it worked. It's #agile

Peopleware

A Magician Explains Why We See What’s Not There Slight of hand is our brain constantly predicting what the future should be.

Nathan W. Pyle I can relate (used to freelance on and off):

me: it’s not that I mind freelancing, I love it. It’s just that the social interaction is pretty minimal and extremely uneven day-to-day and sometimes I wonder how that will affect me long term, you know?

barista: ok are you going to order

BBC - Future - Are we close to solving the puzzle of consciousness? TL;DR No. But this is an interesting read nonetheless, on our attempt to define what separates humans from lobsters:

From these axioms, Tononi proposes that we can identify a person’s (or an animal’s, or even a computer’s) consciousness from the level of “information integration” that is possible in the brain (or CPU). According to his theory, the more information that is shared and processed between many different components to contribute to that single experience, then the higher the level of consciousness.

Why the Human Mind Can Become More Motivated After Watching Cute Animal Videos According to science, I need to watch more cat videos on the internet. Something something baby schema something but who cares … science says so!

…it turns out that taking a break to view some cuteness might actually benefit your work there’s a lot we’re still learning but according to some research looking at cute animals is associated with a boost and focus and fine motor skills.

Teamwork

How NOT to hire a software engineer Excellent article with beautiful illustrations:

Wrong directions? Delayed tickets? A questionnaire that requires installing the original Adobe Reader specifically? Cheap ultrabook with unfamiliar keyboard layout and poor web-based editor with no shortcuts whatsoever that lags even on a local machine? Excuse me, I am in the office of the most capable IT-company in the world, am I not?

Ron Jeffries Hrmmmm…

I may have invented story points. If I did, I am sorry now.

Assaf "Estimating story points"

Locked Doors

@wiredferret That punch line 🥊

I’m so interested in all these people being shocked and appalled that AirB&B hosts don’t do good accessibility, or have secret webcams, or whatever.

You know this is why we have a regulated industry for lodging, right? It’s more expensive because fire alarm checks, insurance…

I prefer to deal with people who have been sued into minimum standards.

Techtopia

Ben Cohen "This is the best text message interaction I’ve had in some time."

Dieter Bohn Oh no!

My Roomba has gone missing. It's not an outdoor Roomba either so I'm really worried about it.

None of the Above

Iron Spike 👇 Such an interesting thread about Flemish art and its symbolism.

Hey, so.

Let's talk about one of the most misunderstood genres in European, specifically Flemish, art.

Molly White "I need this button for more than just my taxes"

Qasim Rashid, Esq. "If you need a reason to smile then remember that someone built a water slide for ducklings & they are totally here for it😃"

Bruno Martin 👇 Some borders are formed by nature, some borders are formed by laws:

1/ A vulture can fly up to 400 kilometres each day in search of carrion. Little should it care whether this flight takes it from one country to another. The vultures of Spain, however, skirt around the Portuguese border with uncanny accuracy.

potch Yes, please.

There should be a hotline you can call where you can safely pronounce words you've only ever read out loud for the first time, and they say "oh sweetie" and kindly explain how it's pronounced.

saac "Some mailman had a real fucked up day"

Julian Shapiro 💡 Great tip:

I had to stop reading business books. It's aggravating to read only 20 pages of insight that's spread across 400 pages of blatant filler.

The workaround?

Listen to the author's podcast appearances. They summarize the book for you.

Then Patreon them to give back :)

Mac William Bishop 👇 If Seinfeld was reporting at the Ecuadorean Embassy:

Hello Twitter. As you may have heard, WikiLeaks is asserting that Julian Assange will be forced to leave the Ecuadorean Embassy in London within “hours to days.”

Emily Grace Buck 💯

It’s really ridiculous that we expect adult femme game devs & members of other nerd professions to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Mario, Batman, & Star Wars, but dudes are rarely criticized for not knowing the names of the Babysitter’s Club members or Barbie’s younger sisters.

This man was the only passenger on a Boeing 737 to Italy That is what my dream flight looks like (plane would have flown with or without him).

When We Say 70 Percent, It Really Means 70 Percent 538 trying to explain how statistical probabilities work, what calibration is, how to judge the success of their models (*), and also stay patient with their critics. The last part, not so successfully:

If you say there’s a 29 percent chance of event X occurring when everyone else says 10 percent or 2 percent or simply never really entertains X as a possibility, your forecast should probably get credit rather than blame if the event actually happens. But let’s leave that aside for now.

(* They have been the most accurate source for predictions, if you understand the difference between "85% chance to win" and "guranteed win")

Scott Barolo 👇 This is how you review assorted gummy bears:

12 flavors? Let’s see what this is all about

This Week’s Mail Bombs Are No Surprise TIL about stochastic terrorism — individually random, but these days, statistically predictable. (h/t Dare Obasanjo):

In recent years, a term has begun to circulate to capture this phenomenon — “stochastic terrorism,” in which mass communications, including social media, inspire random acts of violence that according to one description “are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” In other words, every act and actor is different, and no one knows by whom or where an act will happen — but it’s a good bet that something will.

Brett S. Vergara "This is the best video I’ve ever seen oh my g—"

Galit Ariel "Because – Tuesday."

Design Objective

The Design Process of “Why Do Cats & Dogs ...?” A long and thorough read, exploring the visualization of related search terms.

Mitch Goldstein What about the prequels?

Graphic Designer
Product Designer
Interaction Designer
Web Designer
Digital Designer
UX Designer
Design: Ragnarok
Episode VII: The Designer Awakens
2 Graphic 2 Design
The Lord of the Fonts
Designers: Infinity War
The Designer Identity
Digital Designer & the Prisoner of Azkaban

Tools of the Trade

Up to 20% of your application dependencies may be unmaintained This number feels like it's on the low end, I venture to guess closer to 80%. But not the point. Tidelift's business model is selling maintenance contracts to businesses, and using that money to pay open source developers to maintain their codebase. Different from Gitpay. I hope both work out, and we find a sustainable model for open source development.

Matt Galligan It works! Maybe QR codes are useful after all …

First time seeing a QR code to join a guest WiFi network w/ a password at an office. Worked great on both my iPhone and iPad…had no idea this capability existed!

Found this generator for WiFi-specific QR code. Could be useful: www.qifi.org

Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old As a child of the 70's, I find these top-of-the-line computers fascinating. Back then, massive boards with blinking lights were both science fiction, and the cutting edge. Also, Mythical Man-Month.

Web-end

Nathan Froyd I can't even …

"...the user agent string for the latest Dev Channel build of Microsoft Edge: "... Edg/74.1.96.24" We’ve selected the “Edg” token to avoid compatibility issues that may be caused by using the string “Edge,”..."

We are now deliberately misspelling words in the User-Agent string.

Rob Dodson Have you noticed it as well?

The thing about position: sticky is that it only works in articles which explain how to use position: sticky.

Lynn Fisher This thread full of awesome CSS looping videos …

Lingua Scripta

Jordan Scalesz "Friendly reminder that "o_o" is a valid identifier in JavaScript if you want little buddies to watch over your functions"

Architectural

Jeff Atwood True!

Of all the technical debt you can incur, the worst in my experience is bad names -- for database columns, variables, functions, etc. Fix those IMMEDIATELY before they metastasize all over your codebase and become extremely painful to fix later.. and they always do.

Software Maintenance, Understanding the 4 Types Not all software maintenance is the same, and it helps to know the difference:

Every time that you make changes to a software system, it is essential to identify the type of maintenance that you are performing. Keeping track of it gives excellent insights into your engineering practices. For example, the percentage of time that you spend in each of the four maintenance types gives you an idea of the maturity and skill level of your software engineering organization. It can also give you an idea of the maturity level of your product and codebase.

Reconciling GraphQL and Thrift at Airbnb So long REST, and thanks for all the fish.

Vallery Lancey The infinite cycle:

XKCD "Sandboxing Cycle" is an evergreen slide when talking about abstraction layers.

It's not just security... abstractions are inherently leaky, which means sometimes you want to access the layers below, which voids many of the benefits of the abstraction.

Locked Doors

Colm MacCárthaigh Patching in production, a thread:

I think right around this minute is just about exactly 5 years since the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL became public. I remember the day vividly, and if you're interested, allow me to tell you about how the day, and the subsequent months, and years unfolded ...

Kevin2600 "Perfect Social engineer example. Happy hacking 🤓"

Facebook Boots 74 Cybercrime Groups From Platform This is what happens to your meme data:

Researchers said a simple search on Facebook for keywords like “spam,” “CVV” or more returned results for a slew of groups carrying out these illegal services. In total, the groups had approximately 385,000 members – and some had been up on Facebook for as long as eight years, researchers said.

And, of course, the algorithm:

Ironically, when researchers joined some of these groups, Facebook’s algorithm suggested that they join other groups promoting illicit activity under its “Suggested Pages” tab.

Evan Osnos Lovely security "feature" in older iOS:

Uh, this looks fake but, alas, it’s our iPad today after 3-year-old tried (repeatedly) to unlock. Ideas?

None of the Above

Nature News & Comment "Dr. Katie Bouman, who led the creation of an algorithm that helped capture the first ever image of a black hole, tells us what this breakthrough means for science 👩‍🔬 #EHTBlackHole #BlackHole"

How to make sense of the black hole image We have turned the entire Earth into one giant telescope!

Ronan Farrow "Ah yes, the classic homeowner’s problem of checks notes bees paying off your mortgage."

What happened when Oslo decided to make its downtown basically car-free? Don't worry. It turned out for the best.

A couple of decades ago, it was perfectly normal to smoke cigarettes inside. Today, very few would do that. I think it’s the same with cars in the city center: One day we will look back and ask ourselves why we ever thought that was a good idea.

Shockingly Good Smartphones You Can Get for $350 or Less Let that video be a cautionary tale about removing your phone battery.

Luuuda You can never be too prepared:

A couple years ago in central park I saw a lady on her phone looking panicked and I overheard her say “ok what we need to do is run a chi-squared test immediately!”

I still think about that emergency chi-squared test

Ana Oppenheim "My German might be very basic but this headline is hard to disagree with"

Seth Masket "Oh, honey."

The Hill Switzerland's highest court overturns referendum for first time ever after finding voters were poorly informed

The Guardian’s nifty old-article trick is a reminder of how news organizations can use metadata to limit misinformation Simple tech tricks that can help combat misinformation.

The key to glorifying a questionable diet? Be a tech bro and call it ‘biohacking.’ Not mincing words:

It's fascinating to watch the language of food consumption mutate as it travels across genders. For decades, "dieting" was the domain of women. It looked like Weight Watchers, it looked like Snackwells, it looked like South Beach, but whatever it looked like, it was always portrayed as something simultaneously necessary, shameful, pride-inducing, hated and ever-present.

The term became a victim of “gender contamination,” as Amanda Mull wrote in the Atlantic — which is “when a product or idea becomes so female-coded that men are no longer willing to engage with it.”

Instead men — and the companies that cater to them — found new ways to describe food restriction. Not “weight loss” but “performance-enhancing.” Not “look great” but “perform better.”

Mashable "These sculptures are not what they seem"

Vinay Patel "GDPR is my therapist"

Design Objective

Why EU Regions are Redrawing Their Borders Good lesson in politics, though I'm mesmerized by the visualization. It hijacks browser scrolling, but at least puts it to good use.

58 bytes of css to look great nearly everywhere I love the simplicity of this.

main {
  max-width: 70ch;
  padding: 2ch;
  margin: auto;
}

Doug Collins 😂

Users don't usually read directions. They are a last resort. When they do, they need them to be short, easily readable, and, most importantly, accurate.

2/3 will not do the trick.

Tools of the Trade

Sortraits Visual portraits of sorting algorithms.

Assistant Developer I think not enough people consider that often new tech/tool just moves problems around:

A reasonable (according to me anyway) shorthand for evaluating a new tech/tool:

1. What problems does it solve?
2. What new problems does it create?
3. What problems does it just move around.

Hints:

• 3 is usually the largest group
• People often confuse 3. With 1.

Nikita "I’m a programmer, I build an adapter when I need one"

Web-end

Pyodide: Bringing the scientific Python stack to the browser CPython compiled to WASM and running in the browser.

jake albaugh "when your friend throws you a dumb idea like a URL-based graphic eq, don't think twice, just do it."

Line of Code

Luke Zoltan Kelley "I'm never getting those 20 minutes back"

Christina Zhu Exactly! (h/t Damien Joyce)

software engineering be like

zz z z
　 ＜⌒／ヽ-､_＿_
／＜_/＿＿＿＿／
　￣￣￣￣￣￣￣


　   ∧_∧     I FIGURED OUT
　 (　･ω･)     HOW TO FIX THAT BUG
 ＿|　⊃／(＿＿_  
／　└-(＿＿＿_／

Architectural

Giles Colborne 👇 Slow down to go fast:

Most organisations I speak to say: we can’t deliver stuff fast enough.

But when we work with their teams we cut delivery time (drastically), even though we spend more time on some activities.

What’s going on? (thread)

Rahul Goma Phulore 🤷‍♀️

"What the heck is this? You said during the interviews that you had a Kafka-based architecture?!"

"No, mate. You heard it wrong. We said we have Kafkaesque architecture."

Tom Gauld "Surprising performance outcomes"

Peopleware

Hillel 👇 TL;DR We have ample evidence that sleep and stress affect our productivity. Also, we know code reviews are very effective. The rest is opinion.

One of my most controversial software opinions is that your sleep quality and stress level matter far, far more than the languages you use or the practices you follow. Nothing else comes close: not type systems, not TDD, not formal methods, not ANYTHING.

Allow me to explain why.

Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform 💡 Always ask yourself “and then what?”

Second order thinkers ask themselves the question “And then what?” This means thinking about the consequences of repeatedly eating a chocolate bar when you are hungry and using that to inform your decision. If you do this you’re more likely to eat something healthy.

Teamwork

John Cutler 👇 Sprints are about incremental delivery, iterative development, and rapid learning. Not more frequent deadlines. Thread:

The value of “sprints” is largely misunderstood / glossed over.

Sprints are meant to be a healthy (and effective) forcing function / enabling constraint ... not a way to drive teams/individuals...not a hamster wheel ... not “breaking up a project” (1/n)

Representation Matters

Female representation matters. Colorado’s legislature proves that. 12 weeks of paid family leave, fully funded kindergarten, and an aggressive climate change bill.

TSA Agents Say They’re Not Discriminating Against Black Women, But Their Body Scanners Might Be I bet they could have designed a better algorithm with fewer false positives:

“It doesn’t feel random when it happens three times in a row. It doesn’t feel random when you see that all the people around you, who don’t look like you, aren’t asked to step aside,” Knoderer said. “I don’t want to change the way my hair grows out of my head.”

Dominique Apollon Representation matters:

It's taken me 45 trips around the sun, but for the first time in my life I know what it feels like to have a "band-aid" in my own skin tone. You can barely even spot it in the first image. For real I'm holding back tears.

Techtopia

Facebook says it 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5 million people's email contacts without their consent I'm curious, how do you "unintentionally" write code that reads data from one system, and then convert and upload it to your servers? How do you "unintentionally" deploy that to production? How do you "unintentionally" monitor that it works correctly for 1.5 million people, and "unintentionally" fix the inevitable bugs that pop up?

"… When we looked into the steps people were going through to verify their accounts we found that in some cases people's email contacts were also unintentionally uploaded to Facebook when they created their account," the spokesperson said in a statement.

The Most Measured Person in Tech Is Running the Most Chaotic Place on the Internet It turns out that solving online harassment, misinformation, and radicalization isn't all that difficult. As long as CEOs have the incentive to act.

Within a few hours, the worst Tide Pod videos were scrubbed from YouTube, and the platform changed its algorithm so anyone searching for them would be shown a safety video.

“No debate, just action,” said Mr. Pritchard. A few months later, P.&G. announced that it would resume advertising on YouTube.

Sam This is creepy! But also, what other words can I yell into my phone and have free stuff delivered to my house?

I yelled into my phone “I’m pregnant” for 5 minutes on Sunday to see which apps would start advertising baby things. Definitely NOT pregnant. Zero babies in my sphere. Didn’t get any ads, but just received these free formula samples in the mail, which is creepier.

None of the Above

Modacity This is how all cities should be designed:

You‘ll barely notice it, but this cycle track is actually crossed by two residential side streets.

Rather than treating bikes and humans as guests in the cars’ space, the opposite occurs, and the cycle and foot paths are continuous by design.

This should be standard everywhere.

Geraldine The entire thread is this funny. 😭

Inventor of the Dishwasher: I HAVE CREATED SOMETHING THAT WILL MAKE ALL YOUR LIVES EASIER.
Humanity: WHOA. So we just put dirty dishes in and it cleans them?
IoDW: Um, no. You need to wash them first.
H: Uh...
IoDW: Not thoroughly. Just, like, what you'd do if you were drunk.

Megan Stalter "If she wanna eat a burger at 16 am let her wtf"

Status as a Service (StaaS) I like the analogy of social networks as ICOs:

1. Each new social network issues a new form of social capital, a token.
2. You must show proof of work to earn the token.
3. Over time it becomes harder and harder to mine new tokens on each social network, creating built-in scarcity.
4. Many people, especially older folks, scoff at both social networks and cryptocurrencies.

Sam "This took me way too long to see it, nature knows how to do camouflage"

Megan Carpentier 😱

I actually asked the doctor this week if I needed a measles booster and he replied by rote “only if you’re traveling places with outbreaks and low vaccinations rates” and then he stopped and we looked at one another awkwardly.

Klara Sjöberg "What happens with you divide by zero on a mechanical calculator."

How the Boston Marathon Messes With Runners to Slow Them Down Heat, hills, wind, and running the tangents.

Maker Faire "We're willing to bet that Takashi Kaburagi has the coolest Rubik's Cube on the block. Scramble it, set it down on the table, and stand back in awe as it solves itself!"

Paul R "Fun fact: You can make any Wikipedia article dystopian by changing it to the past tense."

Ocean diversity "Seal accidentally scares baby polar bear 🐳"