Scott Hanselman "I have never felt so special"

Design Objective

Doug Collins Way to drive the point home:

Give your users a warning and an out before they take actions with potentially catastrophic consequences. #ux #design

Sarah Federman 💯

Your periodic reminder that design is what ships, not what you want to ship.

nicole The hardest problem in design is knowing the limits of the medium:

it takes 1 minute for a designer to add unnecessary fanciness that costs a developer hours of time, technical debt, and can even make things less accessible by not using out of the box element features

Patricia Aas "Progress bars are surprisingly hard to do well"

Lydia Nicholas Good point!

Just interrupting truism "older people don't use technology" to remind it's often because tech DOES NOT WORK FOR THEM.
Low circulation in your fingers? Touch screen won't respond. Got a tremor? Out of luck. Low contrast designs without zoomable text? It's doable but exhausting.

Doug Collins 🚀🐙

What does this button do?

A. Launch the octopus.
B. Activate the showerhead.
C. Turn on the grow light.

This is why icons need labels.

Tools of the Trade

Chaos Oh, snap!

last week i got to witness an engineering department lose a full day's work because if you put an emoji in a git commit message, Atlassian Bamboo chokes on it forever and you're forced to rebase master, like you should NEVER DO. this was of course referred to as The Emojiency

somebody asked me which emoji it was, and i didn't actually know, so i had to go find out

it was 🤦🏻‍♂️

can't see how that could have been improved upon

Hazel Clementine That explains … a lot:

math notations explained

=      equals
=/=  not equals
<      left
>      right
!       LOUD NUMBER
~     worm
π     stonehenge
√     right answer
x      wrong answer
⋯    soon…
∮      what Exactly the fuck
∝    fish
∞    fish with 2 heads
↯    lightning
:⇔   he Scream

Ken Shirriff Why don't I have this knob on my laptop?

Back when there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shilings in a pound, the IBM 1401 computer had optional hardware (i.e. transistors) to do arithmetic on pounds/shillings/pence. Of course, there were two incompatible data standards—BSI and IBM—so this knob selected the format.

Web-end

davy "I put a webcam in a favicon you're welcome Demo"

Nick Sherman "Checks out"

Lingua Scripta

Announcing WAPM: The WebAssembly Package Manager WebAssembly on the server side is an interesting development.

Chris Heilmann 🤔

It is confusing that JavaScript conferences are both events and functions.

Lines of Code

Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz: Car hire biz demands $32m+ for 'defective' cyber-revamp Not sure why they expected more out of Accenture:

Among the most mind-boggling allegations in Hertz's filed complaint is that Accenture didn't incorporate a responsive design, in which webpages automatically resize to accommodate the visitor's screen size whether they are using a phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop.
...
Accenture also failed to test the software, Hertz claimed, and when it did do tests "they were seriously inadequate, to the point of being misleading." It didn't do real-world testing, we're told, and it didn’t do error handling.

Kevin Isom Sigh. Yes.

Ah, the weekly security alert emails from @github or as I like to call them, the regular reminder of just how many unfinished ideas I've had over the years.

Peopleware

Jennifer Kim One of the trickiest part about interviews:

If you hire/interview people, keep in mind that every candidate in front of you will have either a marketing problem or a self-awareness problem. Your job is to figure out which.

I don’t remember where I first read this, but I think about it often.

In other words, under-confidence vs over-confidence.

Techtopia

Troy Hunt 😂

I’m a responsible parent so I use the controls on iOS to limit screen time on the old iPhone my 9-year old uses. A white-listed exception is iMessage; he’s worked out he can send someone a YouTube vid then watch it in iMessage to circumvent the control. So proud 😅

Danny Tuppeny We're slowly approaching the point where you need DevTools and Wireshark just to keep the lights on in your house:

The smart meter in-home-device that @bulbenergy gave us seems to do 2 DNS queries every 3 seconds. The WiFi light is continually flashing like it can't connect. 🤷🏼‍♂️

A poem about Silicon Valley, assembled from Quora questions about Silicon Valley Spot on (h/t DynamicWebPaige)

Locked Doors

Brooke Simmons The appropriate reply to the "Five X" memes:

Five jobs I’ve had:

1. Don’t
2. answer
3. security
4. questions
5. on Twitter

A 'Blockchain Bandit' Is Guessing Private Keys and Scoring Millions I guess "don't reuse your private key" is the new "don't reuse your password":

the researchers not only found that cryptocurrency users have in the last few years stored their crypto treasure with hundreds of easily guessable private keys, but also uncovered what they call a "blockchain bandit." A single Ethereum account seems to have siphoned off a fortune of 45,000 ether—worth at one point more than $50 million—using those same key-guessing tricks.

None of the Above

ScienceHex I love this new meme that's going around Twitter of people as X:

Queen Elizabeth as Turkish food: a thread

oshu C 😭

I want to see a version of Star Trek where instead of ending transmissions dramatically, everyone has to click the "confirm" button to end their Zoom calls

Steve Chambers "There is no day that can't be improved by seeing pictures of how they weigh an owl."

LEGO Joseph Smith Good point:

Nobody talks about Jesus' miracle of having 12 close friends in his 30s

aly 👇 No spoliers!

Game of Thrones but with Mean Girls subtitles.

dirtyIiar "Did you know professional tag was a thing?"

Cyrus 🔥

If you:

1. go to Google right now
2. enter "Thanos"
3. click the golden glove
   You can get a live inside look at Google's secret strategy to send fewer clicks to publishers

arstechnica "How serious does Volvo take safety research? They have a freaking fake moose for testing."

Vala Afshar "The stunning focus and balanced head of the kingfisher while hunting"

Space Explorer Mike "Neat or Cheat?"

Max. "David Bowie as Yerba Mate: a thread"

This Weekend Reading is short and not on a weekend. Just returned from vacation, road trip through beautiful Montana and Idaho.

Design Objective

How Netflix’s Customer Obsession Created a Customer Obsession This article is full of nuggets, here's one:

Based on consumer insights and learnings, do you have a product strategy that defines your hypotheses about what you hope will fulfill the trifecta of delighting customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways?

Personalisation is not the end-game of marketing Bingo:

You may find the customer’s idea of personalisation is more akin to excellent customer service, rather than a post-purchase email offering a similar-looking jumper on sale.

RaminNasibov "30 years"

Tools of the Trade

Develop, edit & deploy websites entirely in the cloud with the CodeSandbox, Contentful and Netlify trio These three are remarkable at lowering the barriers for software development.

halvarflake And maybe also the most popular database system:

Excel is the most popular functional programming language.

Disk Usage Exactly.

amy nguyen "you ever wish jira was your therapist" 😭

Web-end

Lynn Fisher z-index: -1;

Lines of Code

Sarah Frier Software development is exactly the same:

writing process, basically:

• Can't fall asleep because I have an idea for how to write an important scene or section
• Spend daytime trying to recreate midnight genius brain, only to find that on paper it sounds less genius
• repeat

taylorconor/quinesnake "A quine that plays snake over its own source!"

Josh Johnston "when I review my own code"

Peopleware

Katrina Kibben 💯

Repeat after me: Retention, then recruiting. Make sure you have built a place people want to work before you try to hire the masses to join the misery. It will make things a lot easier.

Jason Lemkin That sounds about right:

About 20% of the advice from a great mentor should make you uncomfortable and even a bit annoyed

They will know where you aren't pushing hard enough, but should be

Teamwork

John Cutler 👇 A thread:

“As a product manager...how do you earn the respect and trust of your team?”

A couple things
1/10 - Don’t hide things from your team in an effort to protect/shield them. That’s weird. It’ll come back to bite you.

Devoops

Lorin Hochstein 👇 Every single reply …

Let’s play a game: using five words or less, utter a phrase that will elicit a great story from a software engineer with years of operational experience.

I’ll start: “health checks”

Dan Veditz Noted!

Note to self: only use certificates that expire on a work day morning, early in the week. You will thank yourself later.

Locked Doors

Sindre Sorhus I had a similar issue with nodejs/security-wg. Overzealous attempts to flag expected behavior as security vulnerabilities is not helping open source security:

Many of @snyksec's vulnerability reports are bullshit. They classified all execa versions as vulnerable because it exposes childProcess.exec(). Duuh. That's kinda the point of the package. They also don't contact maintainers before publishing their reports either.

Rajiv Shah "I think the backdoor issue's been solved 🤔"

None of the Above

Les Bians Terribles "I was looking up how to clean a cat's eye boogers and I'm losing my shit"

Showerthoughts 👀

You never realize how much you use the internet until you go through your search history for 20 minutes looking for something from yesterday

Space Explorer Mike Mind blowing:

This is time lapse footage of neurons making new connections to other neurons.
This is what your thoughts look like!

Credit: to reddit user /u/AmazingScallion

Verizon is looking to sell Tumblr after squandering its potential Bury the lede:

On Thursday evening, Pornhub VP Corey Price claimed in a statement to BuzzFeed News that his company is “extremely interested” in buying Tumblr and “very much looking forward to one day restoring it to its former glory with NSFW content.”

FoxDefeated "Saw this reddit post title and got really mad but it’s actually good"

Emma Taylor 👇 Alternative title, "[How] the Allies won the war because a coder wanted his lunch sooner"

How do I know so many made-up stories about how the Enigma code was cracked and didn't know until yesterday how interesting the real story is? A volunteer at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park just casually blew my mind with a bit of the story. /1

They Want It to Be Secret: How a Common Blood Test Can Cost $11 or Almost $1,000 Broken by design:

“Some of these really simple diagnostic tests — what the heck?” Mr. Gaynor said. “It does mean, in a sense, the market is broken in terms of problems with market power.”

Silicon Valley is awash in Chinese and Saudi cash — and no one is paying attention TL;DR "You thought you’re in business. You’re actually in politics.”

with POCKETS! (h/t monkchips)

Greg Young "I had never seen this expressed in art before but brilliant!"

Design Objective

I Can Has Petz? The new Petbarn branding is brilliant.

Pavel A. Samsonov 🧼 Someone bought the wrong soap, still good advice on UX:

Your product must provide feedback to the user when a function is activated, otherwise they can't know that it's done anything.

This is true of analog products too - for example, liquid soap doesn't need to foam, but that's how we know it's working.

Brian Lovin ⭐️

This is what FB developers will see in their local sandbox when building features for the upcoming redesign. Regardless of your stance on FB the company, this is a really powerful example of how a considered developer experience can directly impact the end user experience.

Tools of the Trade

Microsoft to Ship a True Linux Kernel With Windows 10 WSL So maybe 2019 is The Year Of Linux On The Desktop! There's also a new command line terminal.

Unlike WSL1, which used a Linux-compatible kernel, WSL2 will use a genuine open-source kernel compiled from the stable 4.19 version release of Linux at Kernel.org.

While Microsoft will be providing the Linux kernel, they will not provide any Linux binaries to go with it. Instead, users will still need to download their favorite Linux distribution from the Microsoft Store or by creating a custom distribution package.

Introducing GitHub Package Registry 🚀

GitHub Package Registry is fully integrated with GitHub, so you can use the same search, browsing, and management tools to find and publish packages as you do for your repositories. … And it supports familiar package management tools: JavaScript (npm), Java (Maven), Ruby (RubyGems), .NET (NuGet), and Docker images, with more to come.

Seb Lee-Delisle "Look at this gorgeous thing. I learned to program on this in 1983. The Sharp PC-1211"

Command Line Magic 🤔

If you cat /dev/urandom forever it eventually outputs a secure version of wordpress.

AnnaR "tfw your coworker is a time traveller"

Web-end

Revisiting prefers-reduced-motion, the reduced motion media query Quick and easy hack to disable animations for users who prefer reduced motion.

kkuchta/css-only-chat Of the bonkers things you can do with CSS: async web chat using no JS whatsoever on the frontend.

Lines of Code

Kelly Vaughn 👇 This thread has all the best responses:

Oh you're a developer? Name 3 of your favorite commit messages

1. Elegant fix for tricky bug.
2. Remove fix for bug. Does not fix bug.
3. Bug fixed. TODO: find a less hacky solution!

Peopleware

Dani Donovan 👇 An illustrated thread about living with ADHD:

All or nothing.

For me, #ADHD results in a lot of black-or-white thinking. Anything less than perfect feels like a total failure. Breaking even ONE DAY of a streak immediately results in falling off the wagon.

I am 100% or 0%, and have a hard time accepting anything in between.

Robert Sweeney This post went viral because we all know it's true:

I turned down Daniel Buchmueller for a job at Netflix. After a 60 minute interview I was on the fence, so I concluded that he "wasn't senior enough." He went to Amazon instead where he co-founded Amazon Prime Air (their drone delivery service) and was #2 on Fast Company's "Most Creative People" list.

At some point, we programmers are going to have to admit that we really can't judge another programmers technical abilities in a 60 min interview. We end up hiring programmers that are good at interviewing, but not necessarily good at doing the job. And we miss out on engineers like Daniel.

Locked Doors

The inception bar: a new phishing method Makes a web page that looks like the browser, greenlock certificate and all.

Alexa has been eavesdropping on you this whole time Devices that only records when triggered by a "wake word", except they're too easily triggered to wake up and record:

I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of “Downton Abbey.” There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa’s “wake word” to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.

Matthew Green 🔥

I used to feel that tech companies competing to market “privacy” could only result in a win for consumers. Now I’m starting to wonder if it serves the same purpose as carmakers adding an “eco” mode to your SUV.

Techtopia

People Are Clamoring to Buy Old Insulin Pumps How an obsolete medical device with a security flaw became a must-have for some patients with type 1 diabetes.

These Ads Think They Know You The good news is, the data that's collected about you isn't all that accurate. The bad news is, inaccurate data is used to make decisions about you:

The accuracy of predictions made by data providers is difficult to verify. The companies release little evidence that those included in these groups actually belong there. A study from 2018 found that the gender assigned by data brokers was accurate, on average, only 42 percent of the time — that’s worse than just flipping a coin. So in the ads we bought, we expected many men would see ads aimed at women and vice versa.

Electric Sheep

Chris Harris This is such a cool effect: "First attempt at removing cars off the roads with neural nets. Will have to dream harder."

None of the Above

Kelly "I saw this on reddit and I’ve watched it a minimum of 27 times and every single time it has only gotten better and exceeded my expectations"

Charlie O'Donnell 😭

I learned from an early @Casper engineer that at least two people returned their mattresses PACKED BACK INTO ITS ORIGINAL BOX.

Legend has it that both also folded their receipts in half ten times.

Fox Benwell "Internet! May I present to you, ENTHUSIASTIC POST-CAT, who often waits by the door for our postie or those charity-bag drop offs, and stashes all her spoils upstairs."

josé morales "at no point did I know what was coming next in this sentence" 😭

VANITY FAIR: Airbnb will pivot to video with the release of its first-ever feature film, Gay Chorus Deep South, set to debut at Tribeca Film Festival

Lukas Stefanko "Teenagers trying to make phone call on ancient apparatus"

Daniel Silvermint 👇 No spoilers in this thread, other than you might care less about the last season, after reading this (I do). Also applies to many other TV shows (and some movies) that struggle to switch between plotter and pantser modes:

It has to do with the behind-the-scenes process of plotters vs. pantsers. If you’re not familiar with the distinction, plotters create a fairly detailed outline before they commit a single word to the page. /2

KRON4 News When your city has a chronic infrastructure problem, but also strong DIY ethos:

'Pothole Vigilantes' are hitting the streets of Oakland at night to fill potholes

Genetically Tweaked Viruses Just Saved a Very Sick Teen The search for new antibiotics is taking a wild turn, as we learn how to use viruses to fight bacterial infections:

It hijacks a bacteria’s machinery to make millions of copies of itself, eventually bursting the cell apart and killing it.

Alejandro Ramirez Of course!

I was curious to see if a nonsense LinkedIn account would also receive job offers. It does! :D

Why America’s New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same I love driving through the US and watching the different architectural styles, sometimes distinct to a single county or city. So that's going away. OTOH we get more housing, and more livable urban centers.

Beluga whale returns iPhone to thankful owner in wild video Just a few weeks ago, this helpful whale was a suspected Russian spy.

Jack Schaedler "A Map of the web from the perspective of an audio software developer. Complete with sea monsters. Not drawn to scale."

Design Objective

Present & Correct IRL legacy code: "A 'Thomasson' is an architectural relic which is useless yet still maintained."

Natalie Armendariz 💯

TL;DR Don't just seek out companies with beautiful products to work on—it probably won't matter anyway because there's more to it than visuals. Find companies with strong values and friendly people, that's what really matters. (4/4)

Laura Klein "Ok, how many other designers saw this and were sure those were sticky notes?" 😂

ABC News Stunning drone footage follows school of Cownose Rays swimming in crystal clear waters off the Australian coast.

Tools of the Trade

Ron Jeffries 💥

OK, experts who think story points aren't about cost, and that cost isn't essentially time, educate me. What are they, what are they good for, why do we estimate them?

In answering, show no concern for the likelihood that I invented them.

If I did, I'm sorry now.

A report from the AMP Advisory Committee Meeting This is a good perspective to have on any standards committee:

I don't like AMP. I think that Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages are a bad idea, poorly executed, and almost-certainly anti-competitive. So, I decided to join the AC (Advisory Committee) for AMP.

Simon Willison "Building a history feature is Hard. This looks like a very solid implementation."

Lines of Code

Eric Junior engineers keep the team honest:

Dear junior engineers,

Please do not always defer to senior engineers.

You are in a good position to see that something doesn't make common sense.

In fact you may be the keepers of the common sense, having not yet forgotten it.

Thank you

yαnnick grenzinger Exactly! And check out the rest of April's deck Crafting Compassionate Code:

This is why I think "the design of everyday things" is a better reading than "Clean Code" for any developer #NewCrafts

ReinH 🎯

You can tell a lot about a language by what people have snippets for.

Peopleware

alisha ramos In tech you can get paid well and stay an individual contributor:

Don't become a manager or CEO if you:

• Don't like the thought of having no tangible outputs 😳
• Don't like driving fwd initiatives for your company and resources for your team through meetings and docs 📝
• Don't like hiring/coaching 💪
• Don't like strategic planning

Locked Doors

Bloomberg Shits the Bed Again on Cybersecurity TL;DR WhatsApp had a serious security bug, but is still a solid messaging app with end-to-end encryption. Telegram is not a good alterntive. And you won't learn anything from Bloomberg about information security.

Ian Coldwater 👇 What a Tuesday!

Having trouble keeping all the CPU vulns that dropped today straight? Understandable. There's a lot.

This is going to be a thread.

Khalil Sehnaoui "This is why you need an RFID shielded wallet. Be careful !!"

Techtopia

People Are Being Arrested and Jailed Due to Hertz Erroneously Reporting Rental Cars Stolen: Report A computer "glitch":

A few people were even met with the business ends of a firearm and were taken into custody forcefully after disagreeing with police. Some actually endured the terrible experience of spending a few hours in jail—but a few either spent considerable time behind bars— once case resulting in two weeks in prison.

None of the Above

Hawksmoor Manchester Off-by-one error:

To the customer who accidentally got given a bottle of Chateau le Pin Pomerol 2001, which is £4500 on our menu, last night - hope you enjoyed your evening! To the member of staff who accidentally gave it away, chin up! One-off mistakes happen and we love you anyway 😉

That ISE guy 😭

New term my teen daughter told me that I will start working into conversations: That sounds like an issue and not an iss-me.

TechnicallyRon It kind of is …

For any Americans confused about #Eurovision, its like the superbowl half time show but on ketamine and directed by a drunk panto horse that cannot be stopped

resting bicycle face "When sewing, always remember pattern placement is key."

Rurik Bradbury 🐬🐬🐬

I bet dolphins are annoyed that fintech means finance.

Deafinitely Girly Boost!

Subtitles aren't just for deaf people. Lots of my hearing friends use them, too. If you're hearing and find yourself using subtitles on Netflix and TV and would quite like them at the cinema, please retweet to help normalise their presence! Big thanks

The Tech of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Explores the amazing and ground breaking art and animation in this movie (h/t Sujal Shah).

What We Get Wrong About Lyme Disease Interesting read about the origins of Lyme disease, and the people who invade the habitat of the blacklegged tick.

Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses about the environment Thank you!

Instead of “climate change” the preferred terms are “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” and “global heating” is favoured over “global warming”, although the original terms are not banned.

The decoy keyboard is working 😭

Adam Graham "Whatever Twitter’s intentions were, this is what it has become"

Design Objective

I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me Don Norman on how design fails older consumers:

Despite our increasing numbers the world seems to be designed against the elderly. … And when companies do design things specifically for the elderly, they tend to be ugly devices that shout out to the world “I’m old and can’t function!” We can do better.

Paul Rosania Pretty good ballpark:

Feature DAU rule of thumb for PMs:

• Not visible (long press, keyboard shortcut, pref, etc): 0.5%
• Visible, ancillary (top level UI, advanced feature, strategy tax button, etc.): 5%
• Visible, critical workflow (product is unusable w/o it): 50%

Erica "Extremely here for the new era of industrial/product design we're in. (Panic Playdate, Teenage Engineering OP-Z and PO-400, Superlative SB-1)"

Tools of the Trade

Jaana B. Dogan 💯

Why do people think simple solutions are cheap? Simple is hard. Simple requires a lot of knowledge, experience and experts. Simple is expensive.

Displaying a sponsor button in your repository Add a sponsor button in your repository to increase the visibility of funding options for your open source project.

gretchen anderson That's an idea …

I don’t exercise anymore I just accept OSX updates 30 min before a critical meting and watch the progress bar while wiping my palms on a towel

Jen Gentleman 😂

>> What do we want?

Natural language processing!

>> When do we want it?

When do we want what?

Willy Nilly "SEO optimisation is the the sincerest form of flattery"

Eric Lawrence It's a culture of search!

You can tell that Google's a search company, because the Chrome UI is not complete without four search boxes, each of which does a different thing.

Lingua Scripta

Preet Shihn "A tiny ~9 byte JavaScript property store module"

Line of Code

Dan Abramov Easy to browse and easy to search:

I used to think “clean” means code broken down in small functions, no repetition, no comments. Now I think of it more as code with few possible control flow combinations, direct style (can always trace what connects to what), doesn’t violate grep test, comments explain why.

Reginald Braithwaite 🐸

Languages tend to suffer from a “boiled frog” problem, where everyone already in the language has only ever had to deal with small increases in complexity.

Newcomers, on the other hand, experience a tremendous shock.

PopePopeRet I can't …

Today's service at 3pm will be "Requiem for a heap allocation". Prayers will be before, afterwards, or during, depending on who wins the race-condition.

Jeff Martens "I would have loved to be around for the conversation that happened right before workers replaced this utility pole..."

Tech Topia

‘MissionRacer’: How Amazon turned the tedium of warehouse work into a game The gamification of work, not just Amazon:

Target has used games to encourage cashiers to scan products more quickly, and Delta Air Lines used them to help train reservation agents, tasks that may otherwise seem rote, said Gabe Zichermann, who has consulted with companies on gamification and written three books on the topic.

Sossujrurl Related, when machines have us perform microtasks …

Traffic was so bad this morning Google Maps has asked me to review the B&B I was stopped by.

It's Getting Way Too Easy to Create Fake Videos of People's Faces They didn’t stop to think if they should: this algorithm only needs one source image to create fake videos.

None of the Above

DEE "This one meme just shit on the entire planet"

Sebastian Good 🤔

The first step in solving any problem is to dramatically underestimate its difficulty.

Repair Of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns Into Long, Strange Trip For Engineer An urban legend coming true:

He sprayed a cleaning solvent on it and started to push the dissolving crystal with his finger as he attempted to dislodge the residue and clean the area.

About 45 minutes later, Curtis began to feel a little strange. He described it as a weird, tingling sensation. He discovered this was the feeling of the beginnings of an LSD experience or trip.

Alex Konrad 💡

Pro tip: if your email starts “I hate to be a nag” you don’t have to hit send

Andrew Chen 👇 The dumb idea paradox:

In the past few years, some of the biggest wins were: An app that lets you get into strangers' cars. An app that lets you stay at random peoples' houses. Disappearing photos. A site that doesn't let you play video games, but you can watch other people play. Seriously?

Why every cyclist needs a pool noodle Learn to increase safety with this little visual trick:

Although we can’t say that the noodle eliminates road rage, we can say that every time a naysayer hollers at us now, at least they’re doing so from a safe distance.

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet We're retreating away from public platforms:

In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.
...
These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments.

Miss Wobble "I honestly have no idea why my mother has done this. 🤔"

Josh Sternberg "Wonder how Ikea came to the decision to include this disclaimer."

Design Objective

Introducing Mercury OS Interesting UX. If you like working in the flow, check it out.

Erika Hall 💯

Designers need to learn economics more than designers need to learn how to code.

Digital design is just behavioral economics with a presentation layer.

Jessica Kerr 💡💡💡

You waste a perfectly good problem by stopping at one solution.

therealtarzann This video of a Chimpanzee using Instagram …

Tools of the Trade

Dependabot So GitHub bought Dependabot and it's now free and what's your reason for not using it?

This is how our brain detects shapes An algorithm for turning hand-drawn shapes into vector graphics.

Rik van Noord 👇 "Do word embeddings really say that man is to doctor as woman is to nurse? Apparently not." This thread explains why.

Andrew Certain 👇 On measuring UI latency:

If you're wondering what "P-four-nines" means, it's the latency at the 99.99th percentile, meaning only one in 10,000 requests has a worse latency. Why do we measure latency in percentiles?

A thread about how how it came to be at Amazon...

ZDog Designer-friendly pseudo-3D engine for canvas & SVG.

Web-end

Hakim El Hattab "Started drawing dynamic SVG hit areas for this menu component 👀"

Charlie Owen Before there was CSS Grid …

Someone asking "is that React?" is a question that will haunt me to my grave.

Lingua Scripta

Nat Alison True!

Javascript is a viable candidate for a universal standard for programming languages because, like English, it is confusing and inconsistent and no one knows why we went with it in the first place.

Horse JS 😭

🤯 Unbelievable! 46% of JavaScript developers use JavaScript

Nat Alison 👇 Twitter fic for the ages:

“Elder, why is it flat instead of flatten?” the student asked, “should the method not be in the form of an action, as spoken in the Old Tongue?”
The Elder sighed deeply and spoke: “Young One, that is a dark tale. First you must understand the history of the Tools of Moo...”

Lines of Code

Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost? TL;DR "Customers do care that new features come quickly"

The difference is that the best teams both create much less cruft but also remove enough of the cruft they do create that they can continue to add features quickly. They spend time creating automated tests so that they can surface problems quickly and spend less time removing bugs. They refactor frequently so that they can remove cruft before it builds up enough to get in the way.

Bruce Williams Beautiful APIs don't age that well:

Me, 10 years ago: “I want all my tests ahem specs to be beautiful method-chained sentences; I’m a lyrically gifted TDD artist!”

Me, now: “Give me a good compiler plus a bare assert—or even pattern match that just blows up straight in my face, I’m too busy for faff.”

Move Fast

Scott Belsky Learn to delegate:

you only scale your company, team, and self when you start seeing dependencies as opportunities rather than risks.

Jason Lemkin Speed of iteration is everything:

The slower you are to release new code and new features,

The less time -- by far -- you have to reflect on what is working and what isn't

Bill the Lizard 👍

The sooner you accept that scope change is a part of your normal process, the happier you will be.

Poi Hierro 🎯

Organizations don’t run out of good ideas - they overlook them.

Rory Preddy "When everything falls apart #programming" 😱

Locked Doors

It’s the middle of the night. Do you know who your iPhone is talking to? Apple says, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” That may be true of Apple's own apps, but not the 3rd party apps installed on your phone:

And your iPhone doesn’t only feed data trackers while you sleep. In a single week, I encountered over 5,400 trackers, mostly in apps, not including the incessant Yelp traffic. According to privacy firm Disconnect, which helped test my iPhone, those unwanted trackers would have spewed out 1.5 gigabytes of data over the span of a month. That’s half of an entire basic wireless service plan from AT&T.

Techtopia

Schools Are Deploying Massive Digital Surveillance Systems. The Results Are Alarming The creepiest part: students aren't being listened to, but know they are being monitored 24/7, so they use that to communicate their concerns (h/t Benjamin Herold):

Sometimes students with a concern simply email themselves, with the expectation that algorithms will flag the message for adults, said Jessica Mays, an instructional technology specialist for Texas’s Temple Independent School District, another Gaggle client.

One student “opened a Google Doc, wrote down concerns about a boy in class acting strange, then typed every bad word they could think of,” Mays said. At the end of the note, the student apologized for the foul language, but wrote that they wanted to make sure the message tripped alarms.

None of the Above

Christopher Sebela "my favorite lifehack is NYC residents who follow the "your dog must fit in a bag to ride the subway" rule on the slimmest technicalities possible"

Raelet 📱

how I, a millennial, filter spam calls:

-if my phone rings, it's spam

PJ Donohoe "the bay area is so special 😭😭😭"

Stig Abell I wish my diary was 1/1000th as interesting:

Elton John wins the award for the best diary entry ever (quoted in today’s Observer).

“Woke up, watched Grandstand. Wrote Candle in the Wind. Went to London, bought Rolls-Royce. Ringo Starr came for dinner”.

Does the news reflect what we die from? Rhetorical question.

As we can see clearly from the chart above, there is a disconnect between what we die from, and how much coverage these causes get in the media. Another way to summarize this discrepancy is to calculate how over- or underrepresented each cause is in the media. …

The major standout here – I had to break the scale on the y-axis since it's several orders of magnitude higher than everything else – is terrorism: it is overrepresented in the news by almost a factor of 4000.

Homicides are also very overrepresented in the news, by a factor of 31. The most underrepresented in the media are kidney disease (11-fold), heart disease (10-fold), and, perhaps surprisingly, drug overdoses (7-fold). Stroke and diabetes are the two causes most accurately represented.

We love to hate the government. Then along came measles. Also on the topic of perception vs reality:

When government works, it becomes largely invisible, taken for granted, wiping out both crises and the traumatic memories of those crises. Bad government we remember and loathe and curse to our children; but good government is often a victim of its own success, the cure so effective that we forget how horrifying the ailment it eradicated was.

Russian trolls fueled anti-vaccination debate in U.S. by spreading misinformation on Twitter, study finds And the way these two (media bias and our memories) can be used to engage in cheap biological warfare.

Jose Daniel "Always make sure you give your patent application a last minute review. 🧐"

Physics & Astronomy Zone "When water flows so smoothly it looks solid, this effect is called Laminar Flow."

Julia Loewenthal, MD 👇 Interesting thread:

1/21 “Is there a nurse or doctor on board?”

Clinicians—have you ever responded to one of these?

Last week I left the hospital and boarded a flight for my vacation. I then responded to the mother of all in-flight emergencies…

blep "May we all find peace and happiness like this cat in a cat dryer"

Scott Knaster Oh snap! "I'm so old I remember dark mode on the Apple ][."

Design Objective

Why Trust Matters Short and to the point deck about trust and brands.

The one comment that turns me off when I'm interviewing designers TL;DR design is what ships:

Our role as designers is to create experiences that are easy to use, not mockups that are easy to use.

Alex Sexton Me too! 😢

My favorite instagram feature is how every time I open the app, I see a photo/video that looks interesting and then the entire application refreshes and it’s gone forever.

As a Canadian I can see this happening 😱

Tools of the Trade

My Terminal Setup: iTerm2 + Zsh Apple just announced that MacOS is switching to Zsh over creative (read: licensing) differences with Bash. Let's get ready.

Do Productivity Playlists Actually Work? If you like listening to music while working:

That could be the reason why lo-fi and ambient-sound YouTube channels have amassed such huge followings. Chillhop provides boring background noise that is just distracting enough to make work seem, well, less like work. The slight groove elevates the mood, but it’s not funky enough to warrant dancing or daydreaming. Whether it actually promotes focus and productivity is still up for debate.

Usability Hike: Find usability problems Chrome extension that highlights easy-to-fix usability issues.

Eric Lawrence "Is there some reason that Word forgot how to autosave files locally?"

ehmicky/log-process-errors A better way to console log process errors.

I Am Devloper I'm at level "crack egg single handed":

"full-stack" now means you can:

build front-ends
write back-ends
handle devops
start a podcast
curate a newsletter
crack an egg with one hand
animate a Pixar movie
dunk

Architectural

Vallery Lancey And good post-mortem is not about that last incident:

You don’t get reliability by chasing your last incidents.

You get reliability by having limited scopes, fast detection, and fast recovery.

Lines of Code

jessie frazelle 👇 Lots of good stories in this thread:

Tell me the story about the weirdest bug you’ve ever found that left you wondering how computers even worked in the first place.

Clare Liguori "This recruiter is on to me, I respect that"

Teamwork

The Power of the Elastic Product Team Pioneers, settlers, and town planners:

While building modular product teams, startups also need to staff for their stage. When you’re pushing toward product/market fit, you’ll need a very different “type” of PM than when you’re scaling or, later, when you achieve scale and move on to platform initiatives. Each of those key stages is best tackled by one of three archetypal product managers

Lenny Rachitsky 👇 Check the thread for more ideas:

Where good roadmap ideas come from:

• Talking to customers
• Talking to employees who talk to customers (eg sales, CX)
• Observing what your customers are doing (research, data)
• Thinking solo + small discussions
• Using the product yourself
• Looking at competitors
  Where else?

Move Fast

Naval That's also my number one engineering priority:

My number one predictor of whether or not a company will find product-market fit: High shipping cadence.

Tim Ottinger I respect people who give this answer:

"How long will it actually take?"
"Ask that again when it's finished."

Here’s Why All Your Projects Are Always Late — and What to Do About It Software developers are not the only ones with a chronic "over time, over budget" problem:

“Let’s say that, on average, projects go 40% over budget,” Flyvbjerg says. “You’d add 40% to the budget for your planned project. And then you would have a much more accurate budget.” The contractors are incentivized with additional profits if they meet their targets and penalties if they don’t.

Locked Doors

How does Apple (privately) find your offline devices? This is speculative, but an interesting idea on how one can share private info with a central server (GPS location of a lost device), without compromising the intermediary:

All of this leads to a final protocol idea. Each time Timmy broadcasts, he uses a fresh pseudonym and a randomized copy of Ruth‘s public key. When Lassie receives a broadcast, she encrypts her GPS coordinates under the public key, and sends the encrypted message to Apple. Ruth can send in Timmy‘s pseudonyms to Apple’s servers, and if Apple finds a match, she can obtain and decrypt the GPS coordinates.

“WHAT HAPPENED????” How a remote tech writing gig proved to be an old-school scam Fake job offers and fake electronic deposits.

Hollywood lie: Bank hacks take months, not seconds Real life hacking will make for a very long and extremely boring TV.

Apple’s Real User Indicator will tell developers when a new account may actually be a bot Interesting idea, and good luck with that:

“It uses on-device intelligence to determine if the originating device is behaving in a normal way. The device generates a value without sending any specifics to Apple,” an Apple spokesperson explained onstage during the event. The value is then “boiled down to a single value shared with your app at account setup time,” and “depending on the value you receive, you can be confident your user is a real user or get a notice you should take a second look.”

Jake Williams "Phishing illustrated :)"

None of the Above

Daniel Holland "The greatest job in the world doesn't exi...."

sixthformpoet 👇 I did not expect the story to end this way …

My dad died. Classic start to a funny story. He was buried in a small village in Sussex. I was really close to my dad so I visited his grave a lot. I still do. [DON’T WORRY, IT GETS FUNNIER.]

Your Freelancer Has Died of Exposure Fitted Scoop T-Shirt 😭 (h/t Cristina Vee)

What 10,000 Steps Will Really Get You Courtesy of the Big Industrial Pedometer Complex:

“It turns out the original basis for this 10,000-step guideline was really a marketing strategy,” she explains. “In 1965, a Japanese company was selling pedometers, and they gave it a name that, in Japanese, means ‘the 10,000-step meter.’”

Vancouver Market Uses Embarrassing Plastic Bags to Shame Customers Into Using Their Reusable Bags Except now everyone wants these plastic bags …

Peter Flax 👍 Always yield to lower-weight modes of transportation:

Fellow cyclists: Seems some of you remain confused about how to ride around pedestrians. My simple rule: People walking get the right of way. Always. Even if they're looking at a phone or crossing a street mid-block. Being aggressive or clueless around pedestrians is unacceptable

Oded Rechavi "Dry Biologist Vs. Wet Biologist"

When Grown-Ups Get Caught in Teens’ AirDrop Crossfire Several startups tried proximity based social networking apps, Apple got it done without any app:

Zhong, who is 22 years old, says she’s seen some friends AirDrop people repeatedly in an attempt to crash their phone. The humor comes from watching the poor souls’ reactions as their phone stops working, or their confusion at being bombarded with an endless stream of obscure references.

Claudia "Tram drivers just sit there like "Ah shit here we go again..."

So Long, Gay Brian 👇 For anyone watching Chernobyl on HBO, it's not just Russians that cover up nuclear disasters:

So Long, Gay Brian Retweeted Karol Markowicz
On July 16, 1979, an earthen dam burst at a uranium mill in Church Rock, New Mexico, releasing 94 million gallons of radioactive waste into the Rio Puerco. For most people reading this, this is likely the first time they’ve ever heard of the event. 1/

Edge Empress "Remember the pride flag is a symbol of resistance."

Check out Fincky for more amazing FPV drone videos.

Design Objective

Aaron Levie 💯

As a startup, always bias toward simple. Customers will tell you when your product doesn't do enough, but will never ask for fewer features when they stop using your product because it's too complex.

Tools of the Trade

Initial Thoughts on iPadOS: A New Path Forward Apple finally figured out it needs to split iOS and create an operating system specifically for tablets. The last generation iPad Pros are amazing devices, but iOS limits them to being large-sized phones. Looks like iPadOS is the operating system we're waiting for. Or maybe just me, I'm using my iPad more than my MacBook these days.

Yehuda Katz 👇 Brand name goes a long way to sustain second rate technologies (don't get me started on GWT or Angular):

It's pretty hard to tell whether many Google technologies would make it out of the starting gate without the heavy thumb that Google monopoly power places on the scale.

Ironically, Googlers all believe that their technologies are winning because they're better.

Patrick Collison 😭

Some day, AI will get so advanced that Google Docs will automatically switch to the account has access to the document.

Architectural

Amy Codes "This is a metaphor about software."

That Elise My dad had a new radiator fitted, then realised you could no longer open the drawer. So he remade the drawer like this to correct his mistake. This sort of thing explains a lot of my upbringing.

Dmitry Alexandrov "It is sometime useful to have a senior developers in the team."

Devoops

WordPress.com VIP platform outage reverts sites back to default themes For a brief moment, people in my timeline were wondering about that clean and simple TechCrunch redesign. Turns out that "redesign" was just a temporary glitch.

Matty Stratton 🤔

What 90s movie most illustrates devops principles?

My favorite response to that question comes from Dave Hahn:

Groundhog Day

• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.

Peopleware

3 Defining Features of ADHD That Everyone Overlooks Fresh take on ADHD. As Jim Stormdancer so eloquently put it:

The classic symptoms of ADHD, "inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity," describe the ways that ADHD sufferers annoy their parents, not what it's like to actually live with ADHD.

Also, this is new to me: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

Move Fast

Graham Lea 👇Fantastic responses in this thread:

Are you a tech company CTO, CIO, Head of Engineering or Operations?
What are the top 3 things you worry about in your organisation?
(Please RT for reach!)

Michael Seibel 👇 Usually goes hand in hand with title inflation. Pretending to be late stage company doesn't make you one:

I really hate when early stage startups talk about CAC / LTV. In the early stage it's almost impossible to know either. What I've realized is that way too much later stage advice is being absorbed and acted upon by early stage founders.

Bill Gross 💯

"Culture eats everything for breakfast. Culture at a company makes more different than anything else. Culture is what managers do when no one tells that what to do.." Eric Ries at #CodeCon

Locked Doors

Ian Sigalow If you remember, last week I linked to a related article:

My day:
-Impersonator took info from our website
-Posted fake jobs on Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and LI
-Interviewed candidates on Google Hangout
-Sent fake job offers on fake letterhead
-Asked for a blank check to set up payroll
We learned about it once the victims started calling

In Stores, Secret Surveillance Tracks Your Every Move TL;DR Apps from retailers exist to track your every move and shopping habits, even when the app is not running. But so do everyday apps — games, weather, meditation, etc — app developers may not realize what they're apps are doing (it's SDKs all the way down).

U.S. Customs and Border Protection says photos of travelers were taken in a data breach In news that will surprise no one, criminals steal data collected by government surveillance.

None of the Above

Ana Stanowick This tweet reaching a million likes, for all the right reasons:

my dad used to get so mad every time my mom would come home w a new coffee mug (she likes to collect them) and her new bf literally built her a wall to display her collection. this is why we don’t settle for loser boys, ladies!!!!!

Daniel Danger KISS:

my post-art plan is opening a grilled cheese cart. it will serve $1 grilled cheese made with white bread, bulk cheese, bulk butter, and thats it. greasy as hell. no options, no artisan, nothing. there will be no change. you give me $5 youre getting 5, you figure your own life out

meg 😭

Someone named Nolan is using my Netflix account, but I just think it was so nice of them to make their own profile & not mess up my recomendations, that I’m just gonna leave it

math prof The perfect comeback:

Sunday joke: Picked up a hitch-hiker. Seemed like a nice guy. After a few miles, he asked me if I wasn't afraid that he might be a serial killer. I told him the odds of two serial killers being in the same car were extremely unlikely.

Michelle Cyca "why don't people know about libraries"

Kristin Chirico 👇😭

This is a true story about the most humiliating experience I've ever had with my dad.

David Shackelford The Internet is a technology for finding people who know more than you do about the most specific subjects:

I was all proud for ID’ing the airplane and making a Star Wars pun, but I mixed up the airport and got instantly called out. There is always a bigger nerd.

Walela Nehanda Our individual actions do matter, but they're also used to pit people against people, and draw attention away from the real polluters:

Reducing environmental destruction to individual choices is done to purposefully obscure how things are produced & the relations of production. When we start talking about that shit, then we have to talk about extractive industry, capitalism, & major corps role in climate change.

moe Case in point:

I was declined a straw at a restaurant this morning. The waitress had one in her apron. As she poured the water I said “excuse me miss can I have a straw?” She said “we can’t just give them out” and walked away.

T.I.N.P "Testing the wire rigs for the hoverboards in Back to the Future Part II."

rahel aima "who is the oasis bakery spices copywriter i just want to talk"

Design Objective

How VisiCalc’s Spreadsheets Changed the World It's the 40th anniversary of the first "killer app":

Bricklin writes that he even got advice from some of his professors. Professor Barbara Jackson told him to go after simple use-case scenarios, because he’d be competing with the backs of envelopes.

Why Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles Please and thank you:

Mazda is looking to add more simple, tactile controls into the cars. A quick tilt of the volume knob to the right or left goes forward or back single tracks—or holding it left or right fast-forwards it. A tap of the button mutes the system, and holding it down quickly turns off the screen and everything if it’s currently a distraction.

Austin 💯

Content design has to be one of the most undervalued roles on a product team.

The cheapest solution to 'most' UX issues is a change to the content.

5 Rules for Choosing the Right Words on Button Labels I'm a big fan of actionable UIs. Please, do write explanatory text, but don't expect me to read it before I can use the UI. so, actionable and self-explanatory.

Josh Williams 😭

Me: 24px
Illustrator: 24.001px
Me: 24px
Illustrator: 24.001px
Me: 24px
Illustrator: 24.001px

Tools of the Trade

Time for Clockwise This is an amazing concept: a calendar defragmenter, so you can claim your focus time. I'm going to give it a try, hopefully it works in real life as well as the demo.

Pock Moves the dock into the touch bar.

At Least One VIM Trick You Might Not Know A couple I didn't know, and I've been using VIM for years.

whitequark "meet the most advanced contemporary programming language. the result of years of development and decades of industry compromise"

Architectural

Casper Beyer 👇 The micro-dependency architecture is pure nonsense and made up of false hopes:

Here's a question, why would you willingly add a dependency on a one liner in a package? think is-odd, is-windows, etc.
...
"Because they're battle tested" is something that came up. Well for example is-windows has false positives and isn't even tested on the target platform. That is, a package that tests if it's running on windows doesn't run it's tests on Windows.

Karen You can also get a stacks 4 lifo t-shirt.

Lines of Code

Dave Cheney Important distinction:

Readability vs Clarity.

Readability is how long it took you to read a book, a paper, a program, a function, and so on.

Clarity is simply; did you understand what you just read?

Math.Round opens the browser print dialog #290 Printers are evil and out to get us through our math libraries.

Kelly Vaughn 👍

if your code isn't working, try leaving it in rice overnight

Joe Groff "Going to start putting this at the beginning of all of my code snippets"

Devoops

Ryan Holdaway ⛵️

Internet went down in the middle of a Zoom call. Walk out of my office to find that my 4 year old daughter had filled up a plastic tub with water and foaming soap to give her toys a bath. She was using the router as a boat.

Peopleware

Joe Ziemer All you need to know about price and perception of value:

Have an old shed I want removed. Post it for free and get zero inquiries. Contact companies to haul it away and get bids for too much $$$. Post it for $100 and get multiple ppl wanting it while the free post is still active. 🤔

Persuasive Phrases: 9 Lines That Will Get People to Commit It may be counter-intuitive, but if it works …

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you about this proposal?”
This may sound basic, but just hear me out. Most likely, when asking someone how they feel about a proposal, you will get a safe answer. Most people’s instinct is to then follow up that answer with the standard: “What can we do to make it a 10?”

But instead of moving north, flip the script and ask them why they didn’t say a lower number.

Teamwork

Ellen Huet 🎯

hot Slack take from a friend: email sucks. new thing arrives -- better than email! and for a while, it is. more signal, less noise. but as more people use it, it feels more like a chore

turns out what's annoying isn't email, it's people asking you for stuff, which will never end

None of the Above

Klara Sjöberg "The eternal struggle." (h/t Damien Joyce)

Caity Weaver 😭

‼️URGENT‼️ My Dad still uses a flip phone and accidentally set his text notification to an audio file of himself recording his voicemail greeting, so EVERY TIME he gets a text, his own voice booms “Hey! If you’re ready to have some fun in your life, leave a message for John!”

Adrian 👇 The Char Dog Race:

The char dog was invented by Enrico Fermi in an underground laboratory beneath the University of Chicago's Stagg Field. Fermi discovered that it was possible to add more crispy surface area to a grilled hot dog but cutting its ends. (1/78)

Amazon Prime Video US Twitter was made for these exchanges (context):

Hey @netflix, we'll cancel Stranger Things if you cancel Good Omens. 😉

Robin Mazumder 👇 Electric bikes have more potential to transform transportation than electric cars:

At a cycling conference I spoke at this year, a man came up to me to tell me how an e-bike totally changed his 93 year old father's life. Prior to the bike, he was very socially isolated. Now he's out in the community every day. Think about that the next time you shit on e-bikes.

Lyrics Site Accuses Google of Lifting Its Content The cool thing is how Genius detected what Google was doing: they used apostrophes to encode "Red Handed" into song lyrics.

The New Science of Pot and Appetite We still don't know much about TCH, including the different ways in whihc it affects appetite:

Besides needing to clarify all the complex mechanisms at work in how CB1 affects appetite, medicine is still struggling to reliably put the effects to work for people who most need the help with regulating food intake: those with eating disorders and wasting illness, and perhaps even people struggling with overeating.

David Harvey "The driving forces of value in motion"

Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden Yes, men are allowed to have feelings, and to share them with other men:

A group text chain enables the men to check in with other members between meetings, and for some of these men, this is their first truly authentic relationship with a peer. “It’s super liberating to make yourself vulnerable to a group like this,” says Randy, adding that he doesn’t need Liz to be his one and only anymore.

Spoon & Tamago Worth watching through to the end:

Tobe Zoo in Aichi conducted a lion escape drill today.

Note the expression on the actual lions faces.

How to speak Silicon Valley: 53 essential tech-bro terms explained 🔥🔥🔥

Design Objective

laura olin She's not wrong:

Every forthcoming article about Jonny Ive’s design genius and legacy should be required by law to include this photo

Kim Goodwin 💯

Engineering decisions are UX decisions, exhibit 127: if there is not enough hot water, nobody cares if the shower controls are well-designed.

Ha Phan It's never as simple as "do prototype -> deploy to production":

The trajectory of a product is dependent on the team’s ability to ask the right questions about feasibility and possibility, and the product manager’s ability to make bets in scaling value, capability, system, and impact.

Jane Manchun Wong 😱

"Fun" fact: the logo of @GoogleChrome Developers YouTube channel is 1px² off from the center, revealing white background in dark theme

Enjoy the rest of your weekend 😬

Tools of the Trade

Software below the poverty line TL;DR open source projects are not making enough money to support their developers:

This is not the first time hard-working honest people are giving their all, for unfair compensation.

The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic I started my career in C/C++, and only later some projects with Visual Basic. Never thought about it as "lesser language", in spite of its limitations. If you look at tools that gained wide adoption in the real world, Visual Basic is there are the top.

Data Bear, PhD Correct:

It’s only Data Science if it’s from the Data region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling statistics.

Austin Johnsen Timezones are hard …

TIL that if you go North of the Arctic Circle in the summer and bring a MacBook with Night Shift set to be triggered by sunrise/sunset, the process will go into an infinite loop because the sun never sets...

Raspberry Pi 4 How far have computers come! This tiny card has up to 16GB of RAM, gigabit ethernet, can drive two 4K displays, and the starting price is $35.

Rory Preddy "Using the wrong tool for the job."

Web-end

State of CSS 2019 Interesting info about trends and adoption of various Web technologies (caveat, survey responders skew towards “back of the front-end” developers).

Building the most inaccessible site possible with a perfect Lighthouse score The point is, tools like Lighthouse give an arbitrary score, which doesn't tell you how many people can use your website successfully.

cjss-group/CJSS Paradigm shifting: with CSJSS you can write your JavaScript inside the CSS!!!

component {
  --html:(
    <h2>${yield}</h2>
    <p>This is a component</p>
  );
}

Lines of Code

Lanette Creamer Yet we can agree on code that would definitely be a nightmare to maintain:

I don’t think “write good code” is a clear and objective measure. You don’t even agree with your own code from years ago, let alone someone else’s. I do my best. I am sure that fails to meet the bar of good enough for some people.

magical 🅱irl Mesmerizing.

i wrote a cross-stitching cellular automata to find a path that uses the minimum amount of thread possible

Rebecca Franks "User Interface vs The Underlying Code #programming"

Architectural

Cindy Sridharan 👇Absolutely (and check the rest of the thread):

The very first thing you need to do to solve any problem is impose constraints.

Also, asking the question “is it simple to implement” makes you look at research through a whole different lens.

Peopleware

Zoe Hong 💯

People always talk about dismissing critics. Don’t. Figure out the root of their criticism. Listen. Change what really isn’t working. (Remember my long intros? I barely have intros anymore.) And then dismiss the rest, the stuff that would change the core of you.

Matthew Kobach Great take on all these "successful people" listicles:

Actual habits of successful people:

• Wake up when their body tells them to
• Read stuff that interests them
• Exercise when it best fits into their schedule
• Drink coffee if they like coffee
• Sometimes eat unhealthy food
• Tell the people they love that they love them

Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus TL;DR Concentrating for too long is counter productive. Let your brain wander a bit throughout the day.

The Science of Stir Crazy Why spending time alone drives people nuts.

Teamwork

Joshua McKenty Those are so rare to come by:

Unpopular take: A well-run meeting is one of the most productive and important activities of any team.

Pam Krengel Always be improving:

#Retro helps a team determine what’s working, what’s not. Where they need to improve, what they need to stop or double-down on. It’s a critical step to measure the teams’ velocity and progress. It can also help uncover a root cause preventing a team to get to high performing.

Devoops

Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers No one could have predicted what would happen when Boeing decided to fire their top developers:

Rabin, the former software engineer, recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature.

And replace them with a firm that would work for free:

HCL, once known as Hindustan Computers, was founded in 1976 by billionaire Shiv Nadar and now has more than $8.6 billion in annual sales. With 18,000 employees in the U.S. and 15,000 in Europe, HCL is a global company and has deep expertise in computing, said Sukamal Banerjee, a vice president. It has won business from Boeing on that basis, not on price, he said: “We came from a strong R&D background.”

Still, for the 787, HCL gave Boeing a remarkable price – free, according to Sam Swaro, an associate vice president who pitched HCL’s services at a San Diego conference sponsored by Avionics International magazine in June.

None of the Above

Assaf "You're never too big to fail at mail merge"

Alexa 😭

Reasons @Spiderman should found a tech startup:
🕸 Skilled at web design
🏢 Ability to scale businesses
🗞 Media calls him disruptive

Adam Laiacano 🔥

46lbs window unit air conditioner from Amazon: free shipping
2 digital-delivery tickets from ticketmaster: $18 fee

How to Shop for Quality Clothes For designers and shoppers who want to make smart choices with their money!

Sonja Drimmer 👇 Love this meme:

Elizabeth Warren doesn’t make everyone attend a meeting for business that can get done over email.

The U.S. Is Purging Chinese Cancer Researchers From Top Institutions If you are in the academic/research world, learn to spot the early signs of political purges, and call them out.

Scott Burke 👇 CEO choose your own adventure thread:

Being Startup CEO for a day:
DON'T LET YOUR COMPANY DIE THREAD
Time to pick a co-founder! Do you pick a) Your Stanford classmate who is heir to a mayonnaise fortune or b) The cypherpunk you met at a Brooklyn hackathon

Ikea releases free ‘Soffa Sans’ font made of couches “The world’s comfiest font”

Design Objective

User Inyerface Let me ruin your day with this “A worst-practice UI experiment”.

Sahil Lavingia 💯

Great product design is customer support at scale.

The counter argument that “best support is no support” is false. There always will be people who struggle to use the product successfully, you decide whether to support them, or exclude them.

Andy Budd Related:

Good product teams are focussed on shipping great software.

Great product teams are focussed on driving business growth.

Dan Hockenmaier 🧵 Excellent reading list!

So much of what is written about growth is noise. Here are ten of the concepts I find myself coming back to over and over again 👇

1/ The Hierarchy of Engagement by @sarahtavel
A framework for sustainable growth: (1) users completing the core action (2) accruing benefits and mounting losses to drive retention (3) virtuous loop by which user engagement fuels future growth.

Doug Collins “critical lesson in affordance” 😭

A designer is about to learn a critical lesson in affordance.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should, but if it looks like you can, someone out there will. #ux #design

Tools of the Trade

Martin Fowler A classic Type 1 tweet:

A request: don't label categories of things as "type 1" and "type 2" (etc). If you do I can't remember which is which, or indeed what is the basis of the distinction.

Emil Stenström Unfortunately, true:

The only way to know if you've chosen the right technology, is to wait a couple of years. You then sum up the maintenance cost, and if it was lower than the value created, you did well.

The Simple Genius of Checklists, from B-17 to the Apollo Missions Checklists are under-rated, so here's another post about the power of checklists.

Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly? TIL

Since the main mechanism was to rely only on the message loop and background operations were done through timer messages, moving the mouse would trigger a lot of messages, move the app up in priority, wake the app up, and get the app to process the background tasks messages. Without moving the mouse, the timer messages would be read up only at a rather slow interval.

The most famous app for this was the disk defragmenter where operations would wait for a message to update the graphic interface! so shaking the mouse would speed up the defrag.

Ben Cotton ⚾️

"I've got databases with better consistency than you" is a thing I just yelled at an umpire.

Lines of Code

Programmer Test Principles TL;DR

Summary — programmer tests should:

• Minimize programmer waiting.
• Run reliably.
• Predict deployability.
• Respond to behavior changes.
• Not respond to structure changes.
• Be cheap to write.
• Be cheap to read.
• Be cheap to change.

betsythemuffin That's an interesting and helpful perspective:

This is a good reminder that when we say “too much magic,” what we mean is “the seams and errors are unclear to me, so I don’t feel like I have agency over the code.”

“Too much magic” is something that paints the framework as terrifying, unchangeable, and at fault.

“This is unclear to me” invites us to ask why: poor documentation? Poor foundational understanding? Too few seams in the design?
— and then fix the problem.

Julia Evans “how to handle intermittent bugs”

Architectural

rivially parallELIZAble “the house always wins eventually.”

and, why I really cannot wrap my head around the "real programmers just don't write bugs" crowd. engineering is the art of building safety margins, redundancy, and tolerances into things.

How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer Software can't fix organizational issues:

But I do know that it’s indicative of a much deeper problem. The people who wrote the code for the original MCAS system were obviously terribly far out of their league and did not know it. How can they implement a software fix, much less give us any comfort that the rest of the flight management software is reliable?

Devoops

John Allspaw Well summarized:

Things that do NOT predict how your org is learning from incidents:

• frequency of incidents
• length of incidents
• customer impact of incidents

Things that MIGHT be signals that real learning is happening:

• more people reading/commenting/referencing post-incident reviews
• more people attending post-incident meetings voluntarily, because they learn things there they can’t elsewhere

Cloudflare outage caused by bad software deploy (updated) Regular expresssion goes rogue, takes down the internet:

Unfortunately, one of these rules contained a regular expression that caused CPU to spike to 100% on our machines worldwide. This 100% CPU spike caused the 502 errors that our customers saw. At its worst traffic dropped by 82%.

Rich Rogers Ops in a nutshell:

Understanding uptime:

98.12%: you have a few problems
99.65%: you have no major problems
100.00%: your monitoring is broken

Teamwork

Eric Elliott 💯

If a feature is taking longer than it should, the answer is more visibility. Pair a senior engineer. Open a WIP PR. Watch out for distractions - don't try to fix everything in one PR.

Shackleford Hurtmore 👇 Thread about outside consultants and the downward spiral:

A local beehive recently hired a wasp as their queen and they then invited management consultant wasps in to identify opportunities to improve productivity. We listened in to conversations in the workspace to understand what kind of changes had been made.

Kelly Eng 🤖 Please and thank you!

a bot that surveys everyone after a meeting “could this have been a email?” and everyone votes and results are posted to public slack channel

Marcin “Pair programming when executed correctly 😅”

Locked Doors

Track This Cool idea by Firefox. Pick a persona, and it will open 100 tabs of pure madness to fool trackers into thinking you're someone else.

Jane Manchun Wong “macOS Catalina is the new Windows Vista”

Apple just blew it with macOS 10.15. Too many unnecessary prompts popping up when you're trying to get stuff done. And they block the app from making any progress, until you press OK. This UI is conditioning people to accept all prompts.

Apple can say “we're adding security all through the OS”, but I'm so disappointed they took this approach.

Alex Stamos Alex is right, this is a bad take, yet another clickbait article:

This is bad framing and The Verge should be a bit ashamed of trying to create a little scandal out of letting blind people have a slightly better experience.

If a company has your photo THEY HAVE THE DATA OF WHAT IS IN IT. Exposing that to screen readers is only positive.

None of the Above

danee, goddess of dinosaurs “Can everybody just Please look at this cat”

Anna Debenham 👍

One of the best pieces of advice was from my Year Two teacher, on how to draw a bicycle: "Spend twice as much time looking at it than drawing it".

I apply that to so many areas. More time listening than talking. More observing than doing. The outcome will always be better.

Mikel Jollett 🤣

I love how people in LA rate earthquakes like wine.

“It was crisp with a good weight and a nice finish.”

Mark Squires A few years before Google Maps:

For this weeks #FridayFun Nokia ad we are going all the way back to '96 when the smartphone was heralded by the Nokia 9000. This was before there was GPS in phones, but there was Fax ! A big thing at the time :-)

Apple is reportedly giving up on its controversial MacBook keyboard 🕺 Finally!!! And an edge-to-edge 16" screen MacBook Pro?

25 Words That Are Their Own Opposites In English you can be running fast, but also holding fast.

Brandon Wall 👇 Reminder that some “controversial” tweets are an attempt to incite and divide. Check before you rage-tweet (and Facebook/Instagram have the same problem):

This viral tweet complaining about the Little Mermaid casting being racist has a profile pic stolen from an Instagram model. The “half black best friend” pic is taken from god knows where, but shows up in a bunch of Pinterest BFF roundups

The Neuroscience of Cravings Fascinating, even though doesn't explain my love for pickled vegetables:

“I’ve never met anyone who struggles with vegetable cravings,” says Sherry Pagoto, a PhD behavioral psychology researcher at the University of Connecticut.

sonic's orthodontist 😮 “The Washington Post’s fact check is that this is so true it somehow becomes false”

Brezina 🤔

Remote Work is to millennials what Suburban Sprawl was to boomers. Geographic arbitrage enabled by new technology. The Internet & the car respectively.

James Mackintosh Related:

WeWork vs Starbucks as office:
WeWork hotdesk cheapest in London is £200/mo, in Hackney. Free coffee and beer.
Starbucks let's say 4 coffees/day at £2/coffee (really much more) = £176.
Starbucks as an office that sells takeaway coffee, or WeWork as a coffee shop w/perks. Hmm.
Flip side of this is that Starbucks makes ~$700m/qtr selling coffee, while WeWork loses ~$700m/qtr giving it away.

We Challenged Kids to Stay Completely Still Too funny …

storyofmyfuckinglife This could be the title of my autobiography.

Design Objective

Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design The iMac's hockey puck mouse, the MacBook's butterfly keyboard, the Apple TV remote, the list goes on:

The quote often attributed to Einstein is “everything must be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” I think the trouble was that Ive often ignored the second part of that advice in the pursuit of refinement.

Norgard 👍

It’s too simple is the greatest compliment a product can ever be paid.

The time I tried to ruin Halo 2 On the difference between what users say they will do vs what they actually do, and sticking to your design instinct:

So when our participants told us that they would not enjoy the system, we as researchers then made our own mistake and conveyed those comments as accurately representing how most players would feel about the system after they’d actually played it. And after some heated arguments and back and forth, Bungie chose to push on ahead with their novel matchmaking system over our objections, which turned out to be exactly the right call.

Bill the Lizard “A new contender has emerged...”

The hidden bias in iterative product development Be aware of this:

This weakness-based mindset gets further reinforced when we start analyzing data and feedback. Because loss aversion causes us to focus on losses more than gains, we are more likely to gloss over positive signals and areas of strength and focus instead on the areas of the product that “aren’t working.”

John Cutler Everything is an opportunity for learning:

Something I’ve noticed about great product teams.

They actually talk about the stuff that didn’t work. The misses. The surprises. What they learned. How that informed future decisions.

... it is the antithesis of success theater.

RaminNasibov “fonts matter”

Tools of the Trade

101 Tips For Being A Great Programmer (& Human) This is a great list. Bookmark and revisit often.

93. Try to remain optimistic
    If something goes wrong, try and be optimistic. Tomorrow is a new day. Optimism will help your team dynamic and your mental health.

94. Continually re-assess your workflow
    Just because something works now doesn't mean it always will. Re-evaluate your workflow and make adjustments where necessary.

Email Like A Boss 👍

Justin Searls “Finally figured out a way to halve the time it takes to do an iCloud restore from backup on an iPhone”

(It works because restore from backup is very CPU intensive, and your phone slows down once it gets hot)

Lines of Code

Erin ☔️

expect(umbrellaOpens).toBe(true)

tests: 1 passed, 1 total

**all tests passed**

Jaana B. Dogan 👍

If there is one advice that fits everything in programming, it is "Change one thing at a time".

Helen 侯-Sandí “The only 10x engineer”

Architectural

Sarah Drasner 🎯

Please stop glorifying what's unnecessarily complicated. I've heard countless times people brag about how long it takes people to understand what they work on.

In my perfect world, it would be the opposite. You would brag about how quickly people can understand what you wrote.

Ben Orenstein $10K well spent:

My new consulting engagement: you pay me $10,000 and I delete your project’s backlog while explaining that nothing of value has been lost.

Baron Schwartz I wish more people would understand the first point:

True facts about testing in production:

1. You don’t have a choice; you are doing it whether you acknowledge it or not.

2. Those who say it’s a good thing (they’re right) are not telling you to stop other testing! Pre-prod testing is also, still, a good thing.

Teamwork

Scott Belsky Extraordinary achievement does require leadership:

a team can only overcome an “insurmountable” obstacle if they see that their leader believes it can be done. it’s a big difference between “managers” and “leaders” - of incremental progress vs. extraordinary achievement.

nota_bennett 👇 Short thread about team dynamics, everything checks out in my experience:

1/5 Are your leaders talking about why basically all the time?

If you just talk about what you need a team to do, the "what" tends to get distorted over time and they end up doing not-quite-what-you-meant. "Why" gives ideas heft and longevity.

Sophie Alpert How to identify unnecessary process:

Whenever a rule is added in a team, first ask:

Will the existence of this rule discourage future people from using their human judgement to make smart decisions in nuanced situations?

Michael Carusi 😭 So true:

The three stages of career development:

1. I can't wait until I'm important enough to be included in meetings.
2. I feel so important being in these meetings!
3. I will do anything legal and several illegal things to avoid these meetings.

Peopleware

Lenny Rachitsky 👇 Managing up is a skill for everyone, a short thread with tips:

1/5 Overcommunicate: Share what you plan to do, what you’re doing, and what you did. It’s nearly impossible to over-communicate. I sent a weekly “State of The Me” email to my boss, with my current priorities, things on my mind, and blockers I need help with. It worked wonders.

Blair Braverman 👇 Thread:

Y’all, having sled dogs has been so good for my body image. And not because mushing is a joy-filled, physical outdoor activity, although that’s true. It’s actually something much simpler than that.

Locked Doors

Zoom Zero Day: 4+ Million Webcams & maybe an RCE? Just get them to visit your website! TL;DR

• The MacOS Zoom app included a feature that would keep a server running on your computer, even after you un-installed Zoom
• Anyone could add you to a meeting and watch you through the camera
• Zoom ignored this security flaw until the public out cry, then issued a fix
• Apple pre-empted Zoom, and did a silent OS update to disable this "feature"
• All is good now

Chad Loder To all the people reacting to the above by switching apps:

"I never audited or paid attention to @zoom_us security, but now I'm upset, so I'm going to switch to a DIFFERENT conferencing platform whose security I will also never audit."

Steelcon Gottlieb This, not the stupid cookie policy, may lead to better security and privacy practices:

I can't overstate the significance of this #GDPR British Airways fine (1.5% of worldwide turnover / £183m) for anyone in security, privacy or senior management. You've got to get security right, with appropriate levels for your organisation, else the fines can be career changing.

None of the Above

Andy Baio “oh, to be young and online”

Josh Campbell 🌯🌯🌯🌯🌯

I was just stuck in an elevator. Everything was fine because I had a burrito in my backpack. Moral of the story: Always bring a burrito.

mrb “Lmao if you think Silicon Valley owns innovation”

Rattlesnake, uranium, whiskey found during traffic stop If you're driving a stolen vehicle, it might as well carry a venomous snakes and radioactive material.

Jen Gentleman “I've never been more invested in a random internet cat succeeding”

Tess Koman 👇 This thread is a slow burn:

name a more crushing blow than "this is a great start!" from your editor, i'll wait

Disintermediating your friends A research into how couples meet. In summary, stranger danger is trending down.

Carol Blymire This kind of behavior/attitude is one of my pet peeves:

Here is a hopefully short synopsis of something that happened this week that I still don’t understand (1/?)

Our Commitment to Lead the Fight Against Online Bullying Instagram taking some steps to stopy bullying: asking users to reconsider before posting a mean comment, and shadow bans.

The helicopter team that films the Tour de France is one of a kind They train for six months!

Annie Minoff Art meets science:

Did you know there is a legit ✨particle accelerator✨in the basement of the Louvre museum!? I heard about this a few years ago, and have been dying to see it ever since.

Well mes amis, yesterday I DID!

Join me! On y va! 1/

Stella Chuu “Winner of best cosplay at #AX2019”

Josh Constine “When people ask why I work from home so much”

Design Objective

Steve Schoger Dark mode is not simply the inverse of light mode:

🔥 When implementing dark mode, don’t throw away the visual cues in the light version by naively inverting the color scheme.

Close elements should still be lighter and distant elements should still be darker – even in a dark UI.

Maxim Leyzerovich 💯

Low fidelity design gets high-level feedback; high fidelity designs get low-level feedback.

David J Bland Yes.

Product discovery work belongs in the same backlog as your delivery work. Just put it all in there together, cry, then capacity plan for both discovery and delivery in each and every sprint.

Tools of the Trade

PlaceKeanu.com For when you need a little more Keanu in your life:

https://placekeanu.com/[width]/[height]*/[options]*

Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation These scripts are as useful and as easy to make as checklists:

This script doesn’t actually do any of the steps of the procedure. That’s why it’s called a do-nothing script. It feeds the user a step at a time and waits for them to complete each step manually.

Tatiana Mac If it works …

I’ve started telling JS devs that semantic html elements are preloaded microframeworks that ship you accessibility and performance plugins.

Erin “me revisiting old side projects”

Lines of Code

ReinH 👇 Important thread:

There's an important missing step in most TDD processes: once you have a working thing, re-evaluate your tests from a maintenance perspective. The tests you write while designing are often not the tests you want for maintenance.

Assaf When you write some code and change your mind halfway through.

Architectural

Vicki Boykis Science! 😭

The law of conservation of software energy states that, for every line of unnecessary code that is diligently deleted from a given system, a developer somewhere else reads a blog post about a new AWS service and creates an architecture for a new, over-engineered system.

Gina Trapani “Software engineers: take your children to work with you. This is pure gold

deech Funny but true:

the most powerful programming paradigm is DDT (don't do that) driven development. i am become thought leader, $20k per keynote. dms open

Cassidy Williams “Adding a feature to a legacy codebase”

Teamwork

OPP (Other People’s Problems) How do you know when to involve yourself in something, and when to stay out?

I’ve come to realize that there isn’t a job where you can fix all the things. It is true that founders have immense ability to set direction and culture, but trying to control everything happening in a company causes many other problems that are outside of the scope of this essay.

Erik Bernhardsson How to delegate:

A super useful exercise I just did was to list most things I’m doing at work in a spreadsheet sorted by my comparative advantage (can be positive/negative) compared to anyone else who could potentially do the same task. Then draw a line and delegate everything below that line.

Techtopia

Twitter Needs a Pause Button Making it too easy to publish has its downside:

Some users might also reject a cooling-off interval, or abandon a platform that imposed one. Yet many other people are already trying to count to 10 before they tweet, and would welcome help. And many tech-industry leaders are looking for ways to dial back internet-enabled pathologies. Rethinking instanticity would help us put our better selves forward, perhaps often enough to make social media more sociable.

bluewake 🤔

The only two possible options when there are recommendations powered by #AI

• Crappy. Why do you offer me that?!
• Creepy. Why do you know that much about me?!

Locked Doors

Cracking my windshield and earning $10,000 on the Tesla Bug Bounty Program Hacking cars for fun and profit.

Deep Kate 🔥

Rolling your eyes at people downloading an app "without reading the terms," acting like these concepts aren't deliberately confusing by design is not the answer. Consumers shouldn't be put in a position in the first place where enjoying an app requires becoming an IP attorney.

How Hacking Works 🏴‍☠️

Jek Hyde 👇 She's paid to break into buildings and test their security, and fun story time …

In this case, for a large office building in the middle of a major industrial part of town next to a POLICE STATION… I was given 4 days. Yeah. Not ideal. But that’s a cool part about my job. I’m not going to jail. Well… not for long.

zenalbatross “props to the amazing human who decided that one of the security questions should be ‘what is your favorite security question’”

None of the Above

Alby “Why would anyone want to study topology? It's just--”

Kramski In that case, I'm adulting correctly:

I love how being an adult is just saying "But after this week things will slow down a bit again" to yourself until you die

Assaf When recruiter firm have to mask who they represent ... I wonder which famous Emeryville animation studio that could be?

Jennifer Leggio I need to try this next time …

Was talking with a colleague about email etiquette, and we joked about writing work emails in the tone of great authors. Naturally, I proceeded to cancel a meeting in the spirit of Ernest Hemingway.
…
It is my hope, however, that we can find another time, when the clock doesn't tick so early and the sun shines with a bit less glare to discuss the impending hurdles we need to make to continue to fuel our capitalist society, and we can both breathe freely with our metrics. (5/5)

catchymemes Here are some creative things to brighten up your day (see them all).

Foone 👇 They make films, but also have their own calendar, Q clearance, and a nuclear reactor:

So, Kodak is weird. And a particular way they are weird has to do with the
International Fixed Calendar, as developed by Moses Cotsworth in 1902.
It's a calendar designed to be maximally compatible with the standard Gregorian while also fixing many of the problems of it.

Bob “You know it's hot in Canada when 👇”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus 😭

Yeah. Shit.

Pete Buttigieg Is Still Figuring This Out
“I’ve discovered that a show like ‘Veep’ is more realistic than most Americans would care to imagine.”

MonkeyWrenchGang 🔥

Want to help to stop the madness of car-centrism? It is simple!

Start crossing the road like this. Reveal the inherent design flaw of the iron cage...

Mary Robinette Kowal 🚀 Good to know:

Let's talk about peeing in space.

Several people, in response to my NY Times essay, have said that women couldn't go into space because we lacked the technology for them to pee in space.

Christian Borys “A team of people were paid to produce this”

Chris Shehan_Art “I hope there’s a post-credit scene at the end of the Mr. Rogers movie where Bob Ross shows up and teases the PBS Cinematic Universe.”

Design Objective

HaraldurThorleifsson Sigh. Yes:

1. Most businesses don't understand design very well.

2. Most designers don't understand business at all.

If you are a frustrated designer you can either moan about the first point or you can actually do something about the second point — starting with yourself.

Mini rant: Sometimes I feel like the designer I'm working with never left their high-school counter culture club — all adults are wrong, business is a dirty word, and only cool things have the right to exist.

Geoffrey Litt 👇 This is actually a thread about immediate utility and learnability:

A key superpower of spreadsheets is that a beginner can just store some data in a table without any formulas... which is actually useful for achieving real goals

Unlike, say... printing "hello world" onto a screen

Does your design support immediate utility?

Khalil Sehnaoui “I approve of this loading graphic.”

Elizabeth Yin 👇 What is product-market fit?

1. Product-market fit is one of those concepts that seems easy to understand as a concept but in practice, hard or impossible to articulate what it actually means. Most people lazily say "Product-market fit is like porn...when you see it, you just know!" But what does that mean?

Pulp Librarian 👇 Takes us down memory lane of fonts in print:

If your story is about computers then use Computer Monotone! David Moore created this in 1968 as an alphabetical extension of the E-13B font used on the bottom of cheques. It smells like Fortran an tastes of 4 bit processing, just like a real computer should.

Tools of the Trade

Lisa Braun It always amazes me that these little dongles are in fact tiny computers:

Here is my little thread about Lightning video adapters – also known as Haywire – which are actually computers that feature Apple Secure Boot and run Darwin kernel

1995parham/github-do-not-ban-us TL;DR Github restricts access to developers from Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. The US always had export restrictions, applied for political gain, and open source was one way to route around those restrictions. I was hoping Microsoft will stand up for the worldwide developet community.

Jane Manchun Wong “I didn't know JavaScript is capable of doing these... thanks Google”

Web-end

Angie Jones This meme is just 🤣

Therapist: And what do we do when CSS stresses us out?

Me: !important

Therapist: No.

Justin Potts I've been outed:

Therapist: And what do we do when we feel stressed

Me: Redesign the landing page

Therapist: No

Jesse Vincent “Feeling very old today.”

Lines of Code

Ali Spittel 💯

Why would you ever spend a few minutes reading the documentation when you can spend a few hours randomly trying things?

I'm guessing this has something to do with focus and attention. Just like we have people on the introvert-extrovert spectrum, we have people on the planner-tinkerer spectrum.

Teamwork

Amy Isikoff Newell True, but I feel like "baggage" has the wrong connotation, maybe "scar tissue"?

Nobody leaves a job until they've packed their bags. By which I mean, we all show up with baggage from previous jobs. As a manager, it's important for me to know what my own baggage is, and as I get to know new hires, to try to understand theirs.

The Most Common Type of Incompetent Leader According to research, being ignored is worse than being treated poorly:

The impact of absentee leadership on job satisfaction outlasts the impact of both constructive and overtly destructive forms of leadership. Constructive leadership immediately improves job satisfaction, but the effects dwindle quickly. Destructive leadership immediately degrades job satisfaction, but the effects dissipate after about six months. In contrast, the impact of absentee leadership takes longer to appear, but it degrades subordinates’ job satisfaction for at least two years.

mikko 💯

Rarely is anyone thanked for the work they did to prevent the disaster that didn't happen.

Our performance review does include "disaster X didn't happen", and you get to show how you contributed towards these goals.

Electric Dreams

Pranay Pathole “How AI products actually work”

Locked Doors

Welcome To The Equifax Data Breach Settlement Website Claim your Equifax settlement to make sure they feel the consequences of this breach.

Apple bleee. Everyone knows What Happens on Your iPhone Interesting to see how much information your phone broadcasts over Bluetooth:

Well, AirDrop seems to be less anonymous than we thought. It’s possible to identify you: your phone sends out SHA256 your phone number hash to all the devices around you every time you hit Share.

ErrataRob 👇 Thread about cryptography, and why it's either 0% or 100% secure, no middle ground:

In the following graph I show the time it takes to crack keys by length, using three devices, a $35 Raspberry Pi, a $1000 desktop computer, and the NSA buying a million desktops for a billion dollars.

And on the topic of "military grade security":

Your iPhone has all the latest advances in crypto. It gets updated monthly. Nuclear silos still use floppy disks. Consumer grade crypto is therefore way better than what's protecting our launch codes, simply because it's newer.

None of the Above

Jay Arnold “Am I a horrible person to get schadenfreude from this?”

Whitney Cummings 👍 (hint):

You are not a hypocrite if you change your mind after getting new information

Dick King-Smith HQ “Who knew that manatees sometimes come out of the water to graze on land?”

Open Ocean Exploration “This is your weekly reminder that baby octopus ride on jellyfish in the open ocean and it is adorable.”

Turgut “Pets doing pranks is my new favt thing”

francesc “Documentation might be outdated”

Design Objective

Erin "the UI is super intuitive"

InteractionDesignOrg “User Shadowing: Observe Behavior Rather Than Opinions”

Gavin Smith How to enterprise software:

hey I won’t be available for the next couple hours everyone, I have to study @Workday’s novel of password requirements.

*slides reading glasses up nose*

Web-end

Kitze 🔥

border: 1px solid red; is the console.log of css

Katie Santo “Flexbox versus grid, a handy visual guide courtesy of @jensimmons”

Lines of Code

Dan Abramov “The three search results for any programming term”

Architectural

apenwarr Helpful reminder:

All systems are distributed systems. The main difference is the wire length.

...and somehow the wire length matters a lot.

Teamwork

Sahil Lavingia This is true in every industry:

The best jobs aren't publicly listed.

You have to dig for them, invent them, or convince someone it's worth creating just for you.

:party-corgi: If you can't do this one simple thing …

People who send me messages fully detailing what they want as the first message are my favorite

Joe Pettersson 👇 This thread is eye opening:

I saw a tweet asking why sometimes when you unsubscribe from an email list it says it can ‘take a few days’. Buckle up, as I have a RIDICULOUS story about this happening in The Enterprise™️...

Star Simpson 👍

I want to read a Bond sequel but it's just about how M does project management and generally runs the org in the face of tough challenges such as difficulty reaching reports, coordination vs. impenetrable information silos, and general byzantine info issues.

Locked Doors

Apple contractors 'regularly hear confidential details' on Siri recordings “Workers hear drug deals, medical details and people having sex”. We learned Google is doing that earlier the month, and Amazon back in April. File under "I can't believe listening devices are listening on me". Apparently Apple is going to stop this practice.

FTC says ‘you will be disappointed’ if you choose $125 for Equifax payout Consumers voiced their opinion and demanded their $125 settlement from Equifax. The FTC decided that protecting consumers is not something it cares about:

The agency is encouraging consumers to consider taking the free credit monitoring option instead. “You can still choose the cash option on the claim form,” the agency writes in an FAQ on the settlement, “but you will be disappointed with the amount you receive and you won’t get the free credit monitoring.”

Capital One Announces Data Security Incident And so we're at the point where corporations care so little about security breaches, that we end up with press releases like this:

No bank account numbers or Social Security numbers were compromised, other than:

• About 140,000 Social Security numbers of our credit card customers
• About 80,000 linked bank account numbers of our secured credit card customers

None of the Above

Chris “THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE”

jas loves nat 🤣

if you’re arguing loudly on your phone in public please put it on speaker. i need to hear both sides of the story to know whose side i’m on.

Massimo “This cotton candy guy's wizardry is actually a brilliant application of the dynamics of vortices in fluids”

Sniper Barbie 💯

The best part about kale is not eating it.

Natalie Walker “This is distressingly easy to misread”

Gerry “A font created by your congressional districts”, to illustrate a major flaw in US elections.

BamaLu 🔥

Do y’all remember, before the internet, that people thought the cause of stupidity was the lack of access to information?
Yeah. It wasn’t that. 🤦🏼‍♀️

Lewis Wake 👇 Fun fun thread:

I have no friends so I like to take famous dance scenes from movies and put songs that are the same tempo on top of them.

A thread:

Love Actually vs Billie Eilish

Ellie Murray “Remember, just because we can get a number, doesn’t mean we have a meaningful answer.”

Design Objective

Stop designing products for random people An alternative for demographics and personas:

The High-Expectation Customer (HXC) is a 3-in-1 customer who is a benefiter (Someone who is going to benefit the most from your product), a hacker (Someone who is using multiple hacks to solve the problem), and an expert (People aspire to emulate her).

Erika Hall 🔥

If you every think to yourself "Well, a general survey isn't the right way to go about informing this decision, but the CEO really wants to run one. What's the worst that can happen?"

Brexit.

Changelog “We've found it! The only developer in the world who made their website too accessible 😆”

Tools of the Trade

GitHub Actions Github rolling out CI/CD, free for open source.

Linux, macOS, Windows, and containers
Hosted runners for every major OS make it easy to build and test all your projects. Run directly on a VM or inside a container.

lynn cyrin On building better command line tools:

• error messages are a part of your interface, perhaps the largest part. Writing good ones is hard
• clearly demarking when an error is with you, or with something else, is phenomenally important
• executing multiple commands on one line will always betray you

Sarah Drasner Casual shade:

My coding speeds:

• Fast: I already know how to do this
• Slow: I’m learning something new
• Stopped: damnit why can’t I ever remember if it’s splice or slice

Erin “ancient legend states he turned to stone waiting for his 'npm install' to complete”

Web-end

Introducing Duotone Font Awesome adds depth with two-tone fonts.

Mark Dalgleish 😭

Architectural

Mike Veerman In summary:

There are no recipes for building quality software. No framework. No step-by-step-plan. No guarantees.

A good chef continuously tastes her soup. Good devs work on feedback, not prediction.

Sebastian Markbåge 👇 Stateless programming enables time travel, and time travel enables cool UI tricks:

Using computer science magic to make the user experience magic trick work.

Devoops

Jessica Rose 👇 You know the responses to this thread are gold:

Tech Twitter: Folks often focus on posting our wins on social media.

What's the most bafflingly stupid tech mistake you've made that you're willing to share?

RT for more sympathy-cringe responses?

Here are a couple oops that definitely absolutely did not happen to me:

Nicholas Corgan:
I spent days diagnosing an issue that ended up being caused by me attempting to store 256 in an 8-bit number.

Ash Wilson:
I once nuked some data in a production database because I thought I was logged into staging. Then we discovered that instead of backing up staging and production, we’d actually just been backing up staging twice

Peopleware

tychon That's a good way to think about it:

Planning is important to me, but not in a micromanagement sense. It's important not to delude myself into believing I have control, but also important to not lose sight of the fact that hope without action is dreaming. Planning is believing there could be a future, if I act.

John Cortexiphan People not asking questions is an early sign of trouble to come:

some more hot takes, for those starting out with being a developer lead or similar... or a project manager... or even just a regular developer...

If someone isn't asking questions about a project or task, they've like not understood what is being done or what is expected of them

Teamwork

All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people Stop what you're doing and read this article. Here is one interesting takeaway:

But trust also degrades naturally over time. Italian researchers Cristiano Castelfranchi and Rino Falcone have a model of trust in which it’s observability not success that is the key factor. Under their theory an entity that is silently successful can end up seen as less trustworthy than an entity that visibly fails. If we recover from failure quickly and efficiently, trust increases. Whereas when we succeed and no one notices we become more and more unknown and uncertain. This explains what is known as the service recovery paradox, when consumers trust a service provider more after a failure than they did before the failure.

Adrian Sanabria This general principle also applies to “a better UI”, ”more reliable architecture”, etc:

If you know how to make things more secure but you can't convince people to implement it, you won't make anything more secure.

In other words, execution and feasibility are more important than ideas.

Conversation 💯

Given that tech people know what happens when CPU is 100% and RAM is full and you're hitting the swap file, it's pretty weird how many places focus on keeping everyone busy and working on more things than they have teams for.

Locked Doors

A Technical Analysis of the Capital One Hack Horrible press release aside, this is absolutely right. There's a common factor behind many data leaks, and it's one particular vendor:

While it may be easy to blame Capital One’s developers for the loss of data, the truth is that IAM role misconfigurations are likely present in nearly every single AWS account.

Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data Raise your hand if you did not see this coming:

The security expert contacted dozens of UK and US-based firms to test how they would handle a "right of access" request made in someone else's name.

In each case, he asked for all the data that they held on his fiancee.

In one case, the response included the results of a criminal activity check.

Other replies included credit card information, travel details, account logins and passwords, and the target's full US social security number.

Andy Greenberg “Things that get airdropped to you by strangers at #DEFCON27”

Techtopia

The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News Why Hacker News feels the way it does (and probably by design):

Hacker News readers who visit the site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of Yuval Noah Harari.

Section 230 Was Supposed to Make the Internet a Better Place. It Failed Section 230 of the CDA shields internet companies from liability for what their users publish. One sentence in particular, and how it shaped the internet of today, the good side and the horrors:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

freia lobo “this new Telegram groups feature is so interesting” (Slow Mode for group discussions 👍)

None of the Above

Lewis Vaughan Jones “When your drone runs out of battery over a lake, timing is everything...”

Carrick 🤣

Someone else: You’re kind of quiet and boring.
Me: Known issue, closed as duplicate.

Alex Fisch This is how we spend money in the US:

About every 7 months, Uber loses the equivalent of the cost of building a subway from UCLA to the San Fernando Valley!

relationships.txt “My (25m) bf had angered crows and magpies and now they're defecating on my car” (original post removed)

Or as Cullen says:

Murder a crow and deal with the consequences from a murder of crows. Nature is poetic.

Martin “The migration of birds in Europe traced by GPS. 😮😮😮”

A Crashed Israeli Lunar Lander Spilled Tardigrades on the Moon TIL there are no fines for littering the moon:

Fortunately for Spivack and the Arch Mission Foundation, spewing DNA and water bears across the moon is totally legal. NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection classifies missions based on the likelihood that their targets are of interest to our understanding of life. As such, missions destined for places like Mars are subject to more stringent sterilization processes than missions to the Moon, which has few of the necessary conditions for life and isn’t at risk of contamination.

Justin E. Ray Must … resist … urge … to … pet …

Hey, you.
This is important.
Cheetahs don't roar, they meow like housecats.

Erin “when the requirements change but you already finished the feature”

Design Objective

Nobi Hayashi Legacy software be like:

Why is the “Save” button on MS Excel represented by the picture of vending machine? (with purchased drink at the bottom)
— a question by young Japanese caught a buzz in Japan

Assaf “The UI is very intuitive”

Tools of the Trade

Lily Scott Cool!

I just released eslint-plugin-esquery, which lets you use CSS-like selector strings to write simple ESLint rules, right in your ESLint config.

José Miguel Arroyo Where is the lie?

We should update SemVer to have one more leading number:
<marketing>.<major>.<minor>.<patch>
Major, minor and patch keep their original meanings
Marketing: Meaningless number for libraries that don't want to change the first one because of "reasons"

Tracie W “This makes me feel less alone”

Amara Graham Related:

Me until I'm dead:

Developers are, at best, going to skim your documentation unless they have hit a problem, in which case they are going to switch to frustrated/frantic skimming.

This is why your documentation has to be extra clear and inviting.

How Things Work “This is how a mechanical binary counter works”

Web-end

Jennifer Soloway Yeah, waffle lasagna doesn't sound that appealing.

I'm making a form, so I use the form elements. You wouldn't make lasagna out of waffles, don't make forms out of divs and spans.

Architectural

Sasha Goldshtein Truth!

The hardest parts of SWE are consensus building, weighing multiple plausible alternatives, risk estimation, team coordination, expectation management, and so many other things that are not “coding”. One of the best SWEs I’ve known used to say “coding is easy and boring”.

Tim Ottinger IMO "the right way" is all about code that you can change:

There is this idea... I don't know who started it... that if you write code "the right way to begin with" that you'll never "have to" change it.

It's one of the most ridiculous ideas on software development, and the root of many dysfunctions.

annika We were promised 1,000 vacuum tubes!

"Where a calculator like the Eniac is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 tubes and perhaps only weigh one and a half tons."

• Popular Mechanics, Mar 1949

Peopleware

Tina Roth Eisenberg 💯

@scottbelsky Agreed! My friend once pointed out how negatively I spoke about sales. She looked at me and said: “Tina, selling is a transfer of enthusiasm. Nothing else.” That was a game changer for me.

Jessica Rose 👇 The replies to this thread are just …

Tech Twitter: tell me about your most memorable bosses or managers?
Best, worst or just the most baffling?

Jennifer Kim 👇 TL;DR don't hire for the stereotype:

When I think back on the best hires I’ve ever made, there’s a clear pattern of people who defy the stereotypes of their jobs, e.g.

• high EQ engineers
• thoughtful sales people
• assertive support reps
• courageous HR
• imaginative finance

I can think of 2 reasons why… 👇

Teamwork

Get your work recognized: write a brag document If you want recognition, put it out there:

It’s frustrating to have done something really important and later realize that you didn’t get rewarded for it just because the people making the decision didn’t understand or remember what you did. So I want to talk about a tactic that I and lots of people I work with have used!

Sam Jarman 👇 I think it comes down to ownership and empowering others:

What are your top 3 things you think defines senior software engineer?

Curious because everyone has a different definition of senior. And I know 280 chars isn’t enough, sorry.

Serious thread be serious, but can't argue with Amy Potter:

Airpods
All birds
Hoodie

Melissa Perri 👇 Thread:

I’ve been a part of many #agile or #prodmgmt transformations in large and small companies and there is one thing I keep coming back to.

Leadership owning the change is the biggest barrier to actually changing /1

Techtopia

Beth Dean “Guy who literally wrote the book on using behavioral psychology in tech to manipulate people now selling how not to be manipulated... life comes at you fast, etc.”

None of the Above

dulcedecommie “the newest twitter rabbit hole i’ve fallen down is the fact that amazon makes some of its employees write tweets that are not at all suspicious”

And good people followed up with their own parody posts, which is why my timeline is full of "Amazon FC Ambassador".

meera 🤔

Your salary is just your company’s monthly subscription of you

Madison Kanna How do you know me so well?

Me: Oh I’m going on a 90 minute flight

Me: Carries on laptop, 3 books, 2 journals and a movie downloaded onto my iPad

World of Engineering “It’s called a flip-flop winch and it’s a very handy piece of knowledge to keep in your memory banks”

Why speaking to yourself in the third person makes you wiser Maybe I should give this a try 🤔

If I was considering an argument that I’d had with a friend, for instance, I might start by silently thinking to myself: ‘David felt frustrated that…’ The idea is that this small change in perspective can clear your emotional fog, allowing you to see past your biases.

Mohubedu “Americans will measure with anything but the metric system”

41 Action News
A sinkhole roughly the size of six to seven washing machines has closed the northbound lanes of State Line Road near 100th Street in Kansas City, Missouri.

Bertram The Pomeranian has an Instagram and it's too cute for words

Design Objective

This is the skill most “good” designers are missing TL;DR Product Thinking

Before pushing a single pixel, open up a text editor and start by designing with words. Who is the user? What is their problem? What solutions might solve their problem? What is their journey? What are their emotions along that journey. Tell a story about the user using your product before designing it.

Eric Lawrence “The hardest problems in computer science must be delegated to the user.”

Be an Elegant Simplifier “Elegant simplifiers create designs that are crystal clear.”

If you were a connoisseur of wine, would you choose a clear, crystal goblet to drink from, or a gold, ornate one, studded with jewels? You’d choose the crystal goblet, she answers. Why? Because the design reveals the content. It elegantly and succinctly solves a purpose. It guides the user toward the objective, without distraction. Good design is transparent.

Performance Matters Performance is key to usability:

It wasn’t even that slow. Something like a quarter-second lag when you opened a dropdown or clicked a button. But it made things so unpleasant that nobody wanted to touch it. Paper was slow and annoying and easy to screw up, but at least it wasn’t that.

I think about that a lot.

4 Rules for Intuitive UX I like the squint test, simple and effective:

If you squint your eyes, the Most Important Thing should catch your eye first - and the least important elements should catch your eye last.

Apple says clean Apple Card with a microfiber cloth, avoid contact with leather and denim Only if you want your card to keep looking like new. I keep my cards in a leather wallet in the pocket of my jeans, and sure enough they wear out, and need to be replaced frequently.

But I do think Jessie Char has a great point:

Apple’s biggest strength can be its biggest weakness. Everyone’s so focused on flawless execution that they forget consumers aren’t also going treat the products with white gloves. To them it’s a sculpture, to us it’s a thing we want to use and not worry about.

Tools of the Trade

Sy Brand “I made a GitHub Action which replaces all the files in your repo with a picture of Nicholas Cage.”

SeanTAllen 🔥

Modern software tooling is amazing. I can go from zero to working thing that I don't understand at all and have zero chance of debugging in a timely fashion quicker than you can say "thank god I don't have to support this thing".

Rick Viscomi “How mad at your CSS do you have to be to add 274 zeroes to your z-index?”

Lines of Code

Chris McMahon 🎤

Two paths diverged in an app, and I—
I tested the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Wes Chow Tech parenting be like:

Kid: are we there yet?
Me: no

Kid: are we there yet?
Me: no

Kid: are we there yet?
Me: no

Kid: are we there yet?
Me: let me tell you about exponential backoff

lexaloffle 👀

┏┓ 
┃┃╱╲ in
┃╱╱╲╲ this
╱╱╭╮╲╲House
▔▏┗┛▕▔ 
╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲ 
   We do our own memory management.
╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓ ╲╲ 
▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔▕▔W} +A ┗▕▔┛┛┛r&┛9J┛2Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Architectural

Allen Holub Not everything ages well:

Think of your backlog as a refrigerator. Every so often its worth throwing out those disgusting leftovers that have been growing furry mold in the back of the top shelf. All they do is stink up the place. Don't let anything rot in there—nothing but fresh!

Teamwork

How to manage up effectively Managing up is the most important skill that no one is teaching!

However, most broadly, thinking about these 5 aspects – sharing progress, uncovering work preferences, building both trust and rapport, clarifying expectations, and sharing feedback – are things you can experiment with as you aspire to have a strong working relationship with your boss.

Marco Rogers 👇 A thread with tips on being an effective manager, and making space for yourself:

My final tip. In order to cultivate those wins, you may need change your expectations of how long things take. Changing things for the better takes time. Just like anything worth doing. Good management is more about gardening than firefighting.

Bryan Haggerty True story:

How most modern meetings end now:

“Alright we’re getting kicked out of this room...”

Locked Doors

Oliver Hough Esq. 😭

Being hacked?

Remember tell the hackers that this is out of scope.

None of the Above

DaveApnea 😭

I don’t know what’s more upsetting, that my wife uploaded my snoring to spotify, that 44,000 people have listened to it, or that she took the time to release an instrumental version!

doubletexts 110%!!!

During my interview today i poured some water into a cup and it overflowed a little bit

“Nervous?” asked the interviewer

I simply replied, “No I just always give 110%”

Brandy Jensen But without that "science", we'd have to cancel half of TV programs:

it’s weird we don’t talk more about how it turns out a ton of forensic science is bullshit. blood spatter? made up. fiber evidence? nonsense. arson investigation? basically astrology

blaine capatch “this is DoorDash for bears”

Mashable “Why camp by a river when you can camp on one?”

TikTok Is a Wake-Up Call to Silicon Valley Interesting take on how the Great Firewall has mostly limited Chinese tech to the local market. With escalating trade wars and worsening immigration laws, everything is about to change:

The Firewall started very much out of a desire for information control. But it’s almost accidentally had this larger benefit of creating a space in which Chinese companies can grow.

Opinion Leader 🔥

Just got back from the centrist rally. Amazing turnout. Thousands of people holding hands and chanting “Better things aren’t possible”

Mr. Meowgi “What is this witchcraft!?!?”

Move Over, Shareholders: Top CEOs Say Companies Have Obligations to Society File under "things I never expected to read in the Wall Street Journal":

The Business Roundtable on Monday changed its statement of “the purpose of a corporation.” No longer should decisions be based solely on whether they will yield higher profits for shareholders, the group said. Rather, corporate leaders should take into account “all stakeholders”—that is, employees, customers and society writ large.

Rex Sorgatz 👇 At least they tried to do something interesting:

Logging into my bank (Chase) this morning, the background photo caught my eye. It was my neighborhood (eerie!), which caused me to wonder, "Does everyone see this photo?"

This thread is an investigation into that question. Let's call it: BANK STOCK PHOTO REGIONALIZATION. 1/18

eric jaffe 👇 If you want to understand car culture:

1/ Today a special 20-tweet thread all about @greg_shill's fantastic law review article on how the law subsidizes driving. Finally found time to read the whole thing. Highly recommend for all urbanists and policymakers. Here are my favorite moments. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3345366

Sam Whyte 💯

People snarkily asking why the homeless have mobile phones; it's because phones are really useful and they cost much less than a house.

fearowe ☔️ That move …

Sketchplanations Delightful blog: “A weekly explanation in a sketch” (via peterritchie)

Design Objective

Why you’ve got UX and UI all mixed up My opinion as well:

You can’t divorce UI design from UX design. If you are a UI designer you are effectively impacting the user experience. The interaction design is common to both. So let’s get past the dichotomy in this arena and let’s call UI design what it is: a subset of UX design. They are not disparate and opposing professional fields. In this regard UI is UX.

Helen Tran So true:

And all her little things kind of piled up. They weren't grand gestures... they were the opposite of "tiny cuts." Tiny hugs.

If you look at luxury service, it's the same thing. It's all the tiny hugs, "oh. that's nice."

Luke Wroblewski 👇 Thread:

how can we maintain great user experiences on the Web in the face of business pressure? let's look at app install promos as an example... 1/6

Designing address forms for everyone, everywhere The nuances of designing forms for a global audience.

Adam Sedwick Design is what ships:

“The person writing the CSS is finishing the design.” - @jensimmons

Like it or not, until a web design is in code it’s not finished. Getting both devs and designers to understand new css layouts and share a lexicon is imperative to successful design.

Luke Wroblewski Shade: “your design system is a distraction.”

Tools of the Trade

Addy Osmani “Super cool. Dynamic colour picking for objects by overlaying an SVG with CSS blend-modes by @KyleWetton” https://codepen.io/kylewetton/pen/OJLmJoV

dade 😭

I wanted to know what version of react I was using. I googled "check version of react" and click a stack overflow link. Guy gives an answer that explains how to check. Someone else responds "not working for me" and the guy replies "works for me, what version of react are you on?"

chart.xkcd Every project needs some XKCD styled charts.

Goes to eleven Touch sensitive, HTML input control, goes all the way to 11!

Brooke Watson 😮

just learned with horror that deleting any of the "family" emojis in google slides does not remove the emoji, but rather kills off each individual family member one by one, starting with the children

Lines of Code

Mx. Aria Stewart 👍

In fact, the primary contribution every developer makes to software is decisions.

Code is the implementation of decisions. It's the details.

what to build and how, with and for whom are the actual contributions. They also outlive any specific piece of code.

Ben Williams “A developer copying code from @StackOverflow”

Architectural

Martin Fowler Solid fundamentals age well:

No need to be a grumpy old man to say this. The fundamentals of good software development have stayed more similar than not in my 30+ years in the industry. Details change, sure, but energy spent honing core skills will continue to pay.

Rob Graham 👇 Thread:

Yea, I've got 3 hours to kill here in this airport lounge waiting for the next leg of my flight, so let's discuss the "OSI Model". There's no such thing. What they taught you is a lie, and they knew it was a lie, and they didn't care, because they are jerks.

Devoops

Gabriel Gonzalez Where is the lie?

How to choose a logging level:

• FATAL: I need this to not fail
• ERROR: I expect this to not fail
• INFO: I am pleasantly surprised if this does not fail
• DEBUG: It failed

Connor Roberts When testing in production goes wrong:

This week's round of fake parking tickets. Testers, you can harm actual people with your careless production testing. These are all "in collections" at this point. SMH.

Teamwork

The 15-minute weekly habit that eased my work anxiety and made my boss trust me more Simple trick that will boost your career:

The approach was simple. Every Friday afternoon, I’d send my boss a short email with three categories:

• The work I had completed that week
• What I was working on, including any deadlines that may have shifted or obstacles I’d encountered
• What I was waiting on—that is, tasks that I’d completed, but require sign-off from my boss or contributions from someone else

Andrew Chen Always pick the processes that are right at your size:

Every blog post / book on business processes — OKRs, hiring, PRDs, launching, etc., etc., almost need a label to describe the stage of co the ideas are for. The workflows that are effective in the big co stages are simply not appropriate for early stage startups with <10 ppl

When to Take Initiative at Work, and When Not To Being proactive can set you for success, or failure. Learn to find the right balance:

Crucially, it is the balanced combination of the above three elements that makes proactivity truly wise. We can all think of someone who takes proactive steps to benefit themselves but rarely considers the organizational context or the needs of others. This is not wise, and is unlikely to lead to effective outcomes. Likewise, someone who carefully considers others, yet overdoes their proactivity to the point of exhaustion, is not going to be successful either.

Parker Henderson Yes.

I firmly believe that you can have the strongest top-level leadership (C-suite, VP, etc.) and A player individual contributors, but if you don't have middle management that is capable, things will fail and break no matter how hard you try.

Locked Doors

Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome When your marketing is user focused, but the product is not:

I do think that privacy can be a selling point for a web browser. Google has certainly made some user-hostile choices recently, but they aren’t visible to the average user. Firefox, on the other hand, appears to have made a number of user-hostile choices right out of the gate, by including sponsored articles on the default new tab page.

Houston astronaut accused of hacking ex-spouse's bank account from space 😮

According to Worden, in 2019, McClain broke into her bank accounts while she was on board the International Space Station. Worden gave KPRC the letter that her attorney sent to the NASA inspector general documenting the alleged breach.

Techtopia

Bloom County “Vintage Wednesday, Bloomers. In 2005, I had no idea how bad it was gonna get. -bb”

how to unsubscribe from a marketing newsletter I'm laughing and crying at the same time:

None of the Above

Marcus “I’ve never seen someone give less of a fuck.”

banana belt betty 💯

Tattoos should actually make you more employable because it shows you can sit in place for hours while tiny needles are jammed into your skin and that’s what every corporate meeting I’ve ever been in has felt like

Paul Krueger The real Game of Life:

I place "Per My Last Email" in attack position. "Per My Last Email" allows me to summon my previous email from the discard pile. I place my previous email in defensive position, then place "No Worries If Not" face down and end my turn

Dennis “Me vs All the competing items on my to-do list”

Michelle Rial When is it too late to start?

I initially didn't tweet this out myself because it was part of 70 new charts exclusive to my (recently released) book — but the internet had other ideas so here it is from me, the person who made it 😊

Danny Deraney “You guys, the otter is telling the human how to pet it and I am now deceased.”

Jeff Steck “Patented today: A heated decoy keyboard to keep your cat off your laptop. Patent No. 10398125.”

Design Objective

Design critiques at Figma Six different ways to do design critique.

Exploring the reasons for Design Thinking criticism TL;DR Design thinking brings business and design together, good framework, misleading name:

If used properly, design thinking is here to stay. It helps solve problems, brings divergent voices to the table, and carries a low risk. On the other hand, the classic design process is distinct from the design thinking process-it should remain so and continue to stand on its own.

Ha Phan That's a powerful way to say that:

Team mate: I especially like your disdain for “vomiting your database onto the page.”

Sometimes I say these things randomly and you never know what stays with people.

Tools of the Trade

Mozilla WebCompat Super useful: “Another gem from @FirefoxDevTools contextual information in the inspector.”

rickhanlonii 🥂

It’s actually only JavaScript if it’s created in the EMCA region of France. Otherwise, it’s a sparkling Java

My favorite CSS hack “Different depth of nodes will use different colour allowing you to see the size of each element on the page, their margin and their padding.”

Robb Owen I second that!

HTML Email requires such specific subset of unsemantic layout methods and workarounds that I propose we redefine it as an independent markup language - I'll float the acronym FML to the committee

Regex Crossword Test your regular expression skills.

Web-end

CSRF is (really) dead Chrome 78 is getting stricter on cross-domain cookies:

TL;DR: SameSite=Lax by default. Folks who require cross-site access can opt-into the status quo via SameSite=None, but doing so will require asserting Secure as well.

Lines of Code

Olivia Liddell If you do this one thing well, everything else seems falls into place:

With documentation, I like to take the approach of backwards design, and start with the end goals in mind first.

Ex: By the end of this section, what should someone be able to do?

This helps me to stay focused on just that single topic and not go off on tangents. #DevDiscuss

Against Method Every code I ever wrote:

A codebase is more like a wardrobe. Full of things you thought were good ideas at the time, and that you know you're going to hate in the future.

Vlad Magdalin “I'm just going to fix this lil' bug in the legacy codebase real quick...”

Architectural

nateish 🎯

Fun things to have to communicate: software isn't like making canned goods you can put on a shelf and come back to 5 years later, it's like making dairy products. If you want to be able to use it, you have to keep the farm in operation, or it goes bad quick.

Kelly Sommers 🔥

Every sci-fi movie is like a sprint estimating meeting. Nobody follows orders and nobody has a clue what’s going on and nobody agrees about anything.

Today in "IP Over Avian Carriers" news TIL

I think every day about how cable internet is IP over MPEG. this is a literal fact. DOCSIS sends downstream data in MPEG frames because that's what the cable networks are optimized for and what all the switching equipment understood when cable broadband took off.

So Netflix on Comcast is MPEG over IP over MPEG.

Peopleware

Self Portraits over the Years This graph applies to every creative professional.

Think about it next time you're going through that inevitable period of frustration. (h/t batshaped)

17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager Wondering if being a manager is the right career move? Read this first. I don't agree with all the cons listed in that article, but worth knowing what you're getting into. If nothing else, it will help you prepare for the road ahead.

Jaana B. Dogan Related:

Progression of tech careers:

• code, code, code
• code, review code, code
• review code, code, design
• design, review code, code
• design, review design, review code
• design, review design
• delegate the review work effectively

Norgard Worked every time I tried it:

The greatest management tool in history is a focused, leisurely walk and conversation.

Teamwork

Janna Bastow 👇 I learned the hard way timelines don't work, and switched instead to time horizons. Hope this thread saves you the self-learning:

Most roadmaps are setting up their product teams to fail.

That's because, even today, most roadmaps still follow the dreaded timeline roadmap format 😱

And here's why that sucks. THREAD 👇

What we get wrong about meetings – and how to make them worth attending Short, powerful essay on meetings, and how to use them effectively:

But nothing undermines a meeting more than a lack of agreement as to why it’s happening. I know a school that invites parents in for curriculum meetings. The teachers think they’re explaining their approach to the parents; the parents are under the misapprehension they’re being asked for their input. Nobody goes away happy.

Kienna 👇 How to communicate with more impact:

If there's one piece of advice I can give based on what I've learned and use in school/work/game dev/life...

Learn how to communicate your ideas in a way that is:
🌟 Clear
🌟 Concise
🌟 Compelling

(a thread by a tired knowledge development/communications trained person)

Selling data science If your job is to help drive decisions from data, then consultancy is part of your job:

How do you know you’re a bad data scientist? You never get to present to executives. Your analyses go unused. People don’t send you emails with questions about your numbers. A good in-house data scientist does a good job by putting together good data, and, just as importantly, commanding attention to that data.

See also, I love data science, but I hate consulting.

Preethi Kasireddy 👍

Surround yourself with people who will tell you how it is.

Subtlety is a waste of time.

Locked Doors

A very deep dive into iOS Exploit chains found in the wild Couple of things going on here.

First, a reminder that iOS is not the most secure operating system in the world. In fact, it has so many security holes, that attackers are willing to pay more for Android 0-day hacks than iOS. But these expensive exploits are used for targeted attacks, so not targeting you, relax.

Second, since Apple went big with "privacy first" (throwing shade at Google), Google's Project Zero has dedicated itself to exploring iOS security issues. Corporate drama at its finest.

None of the Above

Jody Avirgan “Very accurate forecast today.”

Russell Keith-Magee 😖

I really love the way that headphones have evolved from a mildly inconvenient, but 100% reliable, 100% available cable, to a never-charged-when-it-matters, buggy as all get out Bluetooth interface where the only UI is an undocumented pattern of flashing red and white lights.

Phyllis Fagell Next time you run a Q&A session (kids or adults, all the same):

Kindergarten teacher to class: “Does anyone have any questions?”

24 kids raise their hands.

Kindergarten teacher: “A question is when you need more information. If you want to tell me something about yourself, there will be time for that later.”

Lucas Zanotto “Mood-swings” (Lucas's other eyenimations are just as cool)

Leigh Honeywell Sorry, Akron …

Overheard a friend describing being a straight woman on dating apps: “It’s like Linkedin: the inbounds r always worse on average than outbounds. The guys you message are your dream job and the guys messaging you have an exciting 6-mo java contracting opportunity in Akron, Ohio.”

Celeste Brash Good business model, you'll never run out of mansplainers:

A friend wrote a well-performing tech article on Medium. It's a good article with one small error - its click success has come from dudes clicking and sharing and explaining how she's wrong. So she keeps the error in and makes roughly $100/month off of mansplaining.

Mine CetinkayaRundel Can one thing be scary and reassuring?

As a statistician I like this “I can’t report the estimate because the standard error is too large to be meaningful” attitude, as a passenger I’m thinking “oh boy, what are we in for?”

David Powell ✈️

If you told someone 15 years ago that in the future their computer would have something called “airplane mode,” they would be incredibly disappointed by what that actually did.

Best of Nextdoor “NOT FROM THE JOINT ACCOUNT 😩”

Brian Armstrong Impact takes resilience:

It's easy to bounce from one new idea to the next, exploring your intellectual curiosity. But having an impact requires a decade of moving the ball forward one yard every day, sometimes in a very mundane way, through multi-year ups and downs.

A Rare Universal Pattern in Human Languages Small sample size, but suggests the speed of information exchange is universal:

Both Pellegrino and Futrell predict that the average information rate for casual speech would be lower than 39 bits per second, but it would still be roughly the same across languages. At least in this select group of 17, exchanging one language for another shouldn’t significantly change the amount of time it takes to get across any given idea.

Billy Freeland “It’s the third anniversary of the shortest, and most correct, article in the history of the New York Times.”

Elizabeth Warren Says Talk of Light Bulbs and Straws Is a Distraction Funny story. Today in Santa Monica, I was served iced coffee in a single-use plastic cup with a lid. Had to ask for a straw, told “we only give straws on request”, and got the stinky eye for asking.

“This is exactly what the fossil fuel industry hopes we’re all talking about,” Ms. Warren said. “They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your light bulbs, around your straws and around your cheeseburgers. When 70 percent of the pollution, of the carbon that we’re throwing into the air, comes from three industries.”

Column: Hi, I’m David. I’m a drug addict No, you're not. You're taking antidepressants.

But who was I? Was I me or was I the product of chemical enhancement? If I came off the drug, what would happen?

Listen. I need to wear glasses to use the computer, shave without cutting myself, go places without bumping into things. Not to mention, I get headaches if I use the wrong prescription lens.

Am I not my true self because I wear glasses? Is it really me, or the product of ocular enhancement produced in a lab?

Bob Malak “A millennial when they get a phone call instead of text”