system32comics “Printers Nowadays”

Design Objective

Designing a chair: A story about Junior vs. Senior Designers. An explainer of the famous quote:

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

— Eliel Saarinen

Norgard Important point:

If you build products it’s extremely important to understand preference falsification.

“The trouble with market research is people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say" -David Ogilvy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification

Luke Wroblewski 🔥

consistency.
it's like catnip for UX designers.

Josh Reich “… they didn’t stop to think if they should”

Thankfully the developers at Whirlpool made sure to check the time zone every night to cover the situation that we move our oven to a new continent on a regular basis.

Tools of the Trade

Can I email Like caniuse.com but for email clients.

One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Microsoft Excel That's only a 20% error rate …

The errors often arose when gene names in a spreadsheet were automatically changed to calendar dates or numerical values. For example, one gene called Septin-2 is commonly shortened to SEPT2, but is changed to 2-SEP and stored as the date 2 September 2016 by Excel. The researchers, who published their analysis in Genome Biology, say the issue can be fixed by formatting Excel columns as text and remaining vigilant—or switching to Google Sheets, where gene names are stored exactly as they’re entered.

Harrison Weinerman “The SwiftUI ‘Disable Autocorrection’ modifier icon is ‘no duck’ 😂🚫🦆🚫”

Tim Pope “when people ask me to recommend a text editor”

Lines of Code

Senior Oops Engineer Whiteboard interviews test the opposite skills you need to be successful at the job:

One of the problems with whiteboard coding in interviews (there are many) is that the whiteboard gives zero feedback -- not even syntax errors! I go to great lengths to get my computer to give me feedback on the programs I write (TDD, dependent types, etc.). This is a good thing!

Kelly Vaughn 😀 You caught me:

How I code:

1. Make it work
2. Make it pretty
3. Make it work again because I probably broke it while trying to make it pretty

Andrew Clark Truth:

"Readable" is programmer for "written by me"

Architectural

Monoliths vs Microservices is Missing the Point—Start with Team Cognitive Load h/t mikehadlow

Software architecture is largely about addressing the human constraints of developers, not the technical constraints of computers.

Norgard Yes:

One of the most powerful signals of overbuilding or poor product strategy is working on things that don’t touch the core.

Jaana B. Dogan This needs to be a t-shirt:

“But it worked on my cloud.”

Peopleware

Ben 👇 How to build a better relationship with your manager: make your goals clear, help them help you (h/t cattsmall):

1/18 I've been working as a professional programmer for ~9 years, worked at 5 companies, and had 19 managers (14 in ~4 years at Twitter). As a result, I've had a lot of experience establishing new relationships w/ a manager, and here's a thread about it.

Detritivore Biome 👇 If you're early in your career, read this thread for important perspective:

To sum up: as an entry-level dev applying for your first job you probably believe that you are entering a shining utopia of smart people doing Hard Things.

You are not.

You are applying for a better-paying job in a field that is just as fucked up as the field you are leaving.

Teamwork

Dare Obasanjo 💯

There are 3 qualities that distinguish great PMs from merely good ones

• Empathy: Ability to balance stakeholder perspectives
• Product sense: Has intuitive framework for making product decisions
• Credibility: Exudes subject matter expertise and integrity in communication

Carmel DeAmicis 👇 Thread on the constant cycle of death and rebirth that is growing a company:

1/ Twetestorm time: As Figma hits that crazy growth point, I’ve been reflecting on the role grief plays in startups. The company is shedding its skin on a daily basis, a constant cycle of death and rebirth. If you stick along for the ride, you’re always saying goodbye...

Tanya Reilly Why change is difficult:

If you're improving something, you're a threat to it. You're a new risk. And if you forge ahead without involving the people who care, they'll happily tell everyone "I said this was a bad idea🤷‍♀️" the first time something small goes wrong. It's an uphill struggle after that.

Locked Doors

NY Payroll Company Vanishes With $35 Million Wow:

MyPayrollHR, a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people having money drained from their bank accounts and has left nearly $35 million worth of payroll and tax payments in legal limbo.

Equifax is going to make you work for that 125 bucks it owes each of you Update on the Equifax settlement scam:

Yep, you are really going to have to work for that $125. And the truth is that even if you do jump through all the hoops Equifax has put in the way, you are still unlikely to get the $125 promised.

What is going on? Put simply, Equifax and the FTC are embarrassed that their smoke-and-mirrors approach to settling a massive data breach has been exposed as such.

None of the Above

JohnBelski “In Wyoming a tornado warning has been issued for a population of 1 person and we are not sure if that person is even at home.”

ruby 😭

Tea:

• calming
• many flavours
• the answer to all problems

Coffee:

• Anxiety Juice™
• 3 heartbeats for the price of 1
• more than 4 cups and you can talk to electricity

Rachel Coldicutt 😭

Why do “morning routines of successful people” never include 15 minutes saying, “Can you get dressed now?” to a small child and involve coming back into the house to take off and put back on an entire school uniform that is somehow all in the wrong way round?

Nicola Meighan “I have read this, and read this, and read this. I’m not sure that I ever need to read anything else.”

Paraic O'Donnell 👇 Thread:

I’ve been reading some historical fiction for review, and it’s inspired me to create some writing tips for the genre.

Follow these simple guidelines, and you too can produce immersive and convincing period fiction – all without ever setting foot in the actual past.

Eve Forster “Single slit experiment”

Laurie It's easier to self-select, than to get rejected by others, still:

Don't self select out of things you want to do.

Apply to the job, submit to the CFP, submit that PR.

Let them tell you it's not a good fit. You never know, they might say yes!

MalwareTech PSA for Twitter users engaging with trolls:

The new twitter recommendation algorithm means that just replying to an account boosts their profile. When someone is being an ass, ask yourself if telling them they're an ass is worth being their PR agent for free.

jordan “Shot. Chaser.”

Remove Richard Stallman Why do we tolerate this?

Scott Galloway Definitely nothing weird going on here:

More news from WeWTF today.

i) Adam’s shares reduced from 20x to 10x voting power; ii) The board can now remove him; and iii) @Softbank to purchase $750mm in shares at IPO.

Aussies Doing Things “There are two types of dogs...”

divinetechygirl “And then there’s this accurate depiction of everything tech twitter 😂”

Design Objective

Mind the gap, user centered design in large organizations with Luke Wroblewski Why most "user-centered" design isn't, and how we can address that. (Slides)

Chris Owens Copy is UI:

"Note: Hiding a shared mailbox from address list will make it impossible for new shared mailbox members to add the hidden mailbox to their Outlook profile until the shared mailbox is again shown in the address list."

Honestly, I have more questions now than when I started.

Ha Phan You need to think deeper:

Good research doesn’t necessarily translate to good product. A novice will mistaken an extensibility problem for a need for new features or new product. Adding features without a plan to scale the system or connect the dots with data is essentially multiplying UX debt.

Jason Lemkin Related:

The customer that always complains, it's annoying.
But that probably means they care. And will renew.
The customer that has never complained in years, but is complaining now ...
That means it's a real issue.
Fix it now.
They are already looking for another vendor.

Katerina Borodina 🌖🌗🌘

the only reason the day/night cycle exists is because god said "let there be light" and developers said "where's dark mode"

Tools of the Trade

Gabriele Petronella 🤖 These robot overlords aren't all bad:

So this just happened:

• a bot found a vulnerability in a dependency
• a bot sent a PR to fix it
• the CI verified the PR
• a bot merged it
• a bot celebrated the merge with a GIF

Marcin Wichary 👇 This thread brings back memories:

I’m glad you decided to join me on this impromptu tour of a somewhat forgotten era of computing: the time when Screens Were Expensive – and so computers had no choice but to use smaller screens, small screens, and even ridiculously tiny screens.

Lines of Code

Ben Orenstein 👇 Thread:

Most commit messages are next to useless because they focus on WHAT was done instead of WHY.

This is exactly the wrong thing to focus on.

You can always reconstruct what changes a commit contains, but it's near impossible to unearth the reason it was done.

Michael Feathers I think that's correct:

I think it's good to resurrect the term "unit test." Sure, people will ask what a unit is, but unit testing gives us an answer:

- a 'unit' is whatever we can test in complete isolation without pain.

Matt Pennig 😱

Once a year, for 12 hours (7a-7p), any Pull Request will be accepted without any review whatsoever. All tech debt is legal.

Introducing: The Merge

Architectural

my engineering standards How do you codify when your software is good enough? Rich runs through a list of items, similar to what we're using at Broadly:

…

• Work was ordered to eliminate risks instead of making linear progress.
  Where possible it was built from standard technologies.
• There is sufficient instrumentation that the system is considered observable, especially in times out outage.
• It was shipped in many small releases rather than one bigger release.

…

Ryan Singer I feel like a broken record saying this, but always use the tools that are right for your project/product/company size:

This is part of a broader mistake. Small companies copy big companies. Big companies have different problems than small companies and pay extra costs to solve them. Small companies should copy what big companies did WHEN THEY WERE SMALL.

For example:

Here's another example: maintaining feature flags. Small companies don't need to do this. It's not worth the overhead. Just don't merge to master until you want a customer to see it. We don't use them at Basecamp. Only massive companies with lots of parallel projects need them.

Dan Saffer “It’s just a minor UI change.”

Devoops

agentdero Honest job posting be like …

Let's call it what it really is.

I'm officially hiring a Senior YAML Engineer to help us migrate our infrastructure into AWS.

Teamwork

Andrew Clay Shafer 😭

everyone believes collaboration means doing things their way

FLEEKNIK It does …

nobody tells you that success requires so many emails.

None of the Above

The Tylt “IT'S NOT SEPTEMBER UNTIL EARTH, WIND AND FIRE SAY SO”

Naama 😭

My dad just realized that the apartment his unmarried aunt has been living in for the past 20 years with her "best friend" Irene has one bedroom.

He's so confused.

"Does Irene sleep on the couch? She's 83! She shouldn't be sleeping on the couch!"

I'm......

dopegirlfresh 😴

i just woke up but i need a nap: a memoir.

Auckland adman hires professional clown for redundancy meeting That is one creative way to get fired:

In lieu of the usual suspects of a friend, colleague or family member, the member of the creative team at FCB hired a professional clown to attend the meeting with him.

The Herald understands that the clown blew up balloons and folded them into a series of animals throughout the meeting.

It's further understood that the clown mimed crying when the redundancy paperwork was handed over to the staffer.

The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving Re-classifying chess as an athletic sport:

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters' stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

Dana Schwartz 🔥

There should be a reality show where we all have to try to explain this news story to our parents

Jared Holt Disgraced far-right speaker Milo Yiannopoulous bought a ticket to a furry convention in December. Other attendees are predictably upset and the conference announced it was investigating its options.

'Everyone Should Have a Moral Code' Says Developer Who Deleted Code Sold to ICE My Twitter feed is debating whether that was the right action, but he took a stand, and to me that matters more:

"I was having trouble sleeping at night knowing that software—code that I personally authored—was being sold to and used by such a vile organization," he told Motherboard in an online chat. "I could not be complicit in enabling what I consider to be acts of evil and violations of our most basic human rights."

That's when he decided to delete the Chef Sugar code from his own Github and RubyGems, the main method for distributing Ruby code.

Daniel Sinclair “The AR future we deserve”

Dogs In Action Amazing photo collection! (via greywulf)

Design Objective

Cheat sheets: UI terms 👍 Super helpful:

Using professional UI terms aligns with the efficiency and accuracy of communicating your thoughts in a cross-functional team. It benefits you as a product designer in various aspects.
However, It is time-consuming of looking at different guidelines. Thus I decided to compile them into one place (UITerms Sheets). The sheet will give you a bigger picture of the UI terms in product development.

Patrick Neeman 💯

I find it amusing when heads of product or design are asked “what are you going to do to make the UX better?”

The biggest barrier to good UX in most organizations is tech debt. If there a lot of it, improving the UX is a difficult proposition.

What Makes For a Good Product Manager? “Founder’s Feel” is the one thing that's hardest to hire for:

The most effective product teams are those where the leads on Product, Design, and Engineering (and sometimes other functions like marketing, customer service, and data science) are all mutually bought in to being experts at understanding the vision, the customer, and have shared ownership of the outcome. This means that a Product Manager should often defer to Engineering or Design when key decisions need to be made, specifically when those other functions are better fit to make those decisions. And that’s often the case! I would argue that a great PM also shows “Founder’s Feel” by referring to the right person in the room to make the decision.

Alex For context, ok as time spent, makes no sense as skill level:

Designers,

■■■■■■■ please
■■■■ stop
■■■■■■■■■ using
■■ charts
■■■■■ to show
■■■■■■■ your skills
■■■■ in your
■■■■■■■ resume

Tools of the Trade

Text Rendering Hates You Random collection of weird problems you need to deal with when rendering text.

foone 👇 This thread goes in unexpected directions:

So if you want to use a USB floppy drive, you use a USB protocol called the UFI: Uniform Floppy Interface.

What's UFI? A way to embed ATAPI commands in USB.
What's ATAPI? A way to embed SCSI commands in ATA.
What's SCSI? A mass storage protocol. Floppy drives don't use it.

Tomek Sułkowski So basically a modern day defrag?

"npkill" is a nifty little tool that shows all node_modules in your system - and allows to remove the selected ones.

You can quickly free up some serious gigs by taking care of the old/demo projects!

Jason Yip 👇This:

1. Original source expresses something;
2. Cargo cultists practice without understanding;
3. Observer assumes cargo cult practice reflects original intent;
4. A new approach is proposed that corrects the problems that is just repeating the original source;
5. Go to 1.

git-blame-someone-else “Blame someone else for your bad code.”

Web-end

Tomek Sułkowski “That feeling when you first discovered document.designMode”

Kitze “webdev in a nutshell”

Lines of Code

Nick Canzoneri Always …

Always nice to see honest variable names like HALF_HEARTED_EMAIL_REGEX

Ondatra iSchoolicus Some days Twitter is amazing:

When you finish a PhD in computer science, they take you to a special room and explain that you must never use recursion in real life. Its only purpose is to make programming hard for undergrads.

RT Brendan O'Connor When you finish a PhD in computer science, they take you to a special room and explain that you must never use recursion in real life. Its only purpose is to make programming hard for undergrads.

RT Zoe When you finish a PhD in computer science …

/jojojoris “The counter was reset today, we were almost into the double digits”

Architectural

How Architecture Improved My Coding Skills Lessons learned from looking at the bigger picture:

This is the biggest change. Early on in my dev career I assumed that the best way to prove my abilities was to get my task and complete it. Yet over time I've learned that the biggest source of failure is often due to people and teams. A lack of communication and coordination can cause serious problems.

Teamwork

How to Make Meetings Less Terrible TL;DR Better agendas, smaller invite lists, and an embrace of healthy conflict:

One startling meeting fact that Rogelberg shares: 50% of meeting agendas are recycled. “When you are thinking about your agenda,” he says, “consider framing it not as topics to be discussed but as questions to be answered. By framing it as questions to be answered, it’s easier to determine who needs to be there.”

Product Team Mistakes, Part 1: Communicating Company & User Needs Applies to anyone who makes changes to the product:

Whatever you think about splitting up roles within a product team, most people agree that understanding and explaining the business side of a product is more the PM’s job than the designer’s. If they don’t understand the business or if they’re not sharing it in a way that helps everyone know what is being built, that’s a pretty serious problem. Still, let’s not let designers off the hook here. Everybody making changes to the product should understand the business needs, but it sounds like there are quite a few folks out there who don’t.

What do executives do, anyway? Good summary, that also tackles smaller companies:

Also, in a small company, strategy and values are usually not well defined yet, so a primary goal is to discover them incrementally. You learn from mistakes and refine together until the strategy (and thus the values that will produce the strategy) become clear.

Startup Life

Aaron Levie All true:

Almost everything I've learned about startups:

• Aim to get to cash flow positive early
• Don't overly optimize for private market valuations
• Build a great team and culture
• Make sure the business model works
• Focus, focus, focus. Dilution of effort will crush you

Rob Walling Consistency.

The founders I see succeeding show up every day. Even when they don't feel like it.

Many hack their own psychology using coffee, loud music, an accountability partner, or self-imposed goals.

It's not about working long hours. It's about showing up consistently.

Roof’s Take: When Does It Make Sense to Oust a Founder? TL;DR VCs consider it only as last resort:

Some venture firms, including Founders Fund, say that they will never do it. Last year, for example, the firm opted to relinquish its board seat at HQ Trivia rather than choose between feuding founders.

Benchmark, on the other hand, held board seats at both WeWork and Uber at the time of their CEO departures. In the case of Uber, Benchmark pressured then-CEO Mr. Kalanick to resign.

Locked Doors

ipwndfu Based on the checkm8 bootrom exploit, can jailbreak iPhone 4S (A5 chip) to iPhone 8/X (A11 chip). From Trail of Bits:

We strongly urge all journalists, activists, and politicians to upgrade to an iPhone that was released in the past two years with an A12 or higher CPU. All other devices, including models that are still sold — like the iPhone 8, are vulnerable to this exploit.

Alex Stamos 👇 Thread if you want more insight into the CLOUD ACT:

So anyway, the CLOUD Act is controversial in some ways but absolutely does not do what The Times and Bloomberg assumed. The fight over encryption continues, but the US/UK agreement hopefully reduces some of the pressure by giving UK LE the same options as US LE.

André Staltz 🔥

2009: uploading my data to the cloud because I don't trust my computer

2019: downloading my data to my computer because I don't trust the cloud

Pulp Librarian 👇 Pulp Librarian looks at … The Masked Hacker:

If stock photography has taught us one thing it's how to recognise a hacker! But how much do we really know about these shady characters, with their balaclava and their Windows 7 laptops?

For today's #SundayMotivation here's my essential stock photography guide to #cybersecurity

Techtopia

Standard Cognition to deploy cashierless tech at Polar Stadium It can also detect shoplifters based on … not making this up:

It’s also capable of preventing shoplifting. Standard Cognition’s AI algorithms can recognize telltale signs of theft from behaviors like trajectory, gait, gaze, and speed, all of which it helpfully flags via text message for store attendants. Learning those behaviors wasn’t easy — the bulk of sample data came from 100 actors who shopped for “hours” in a mock setup — but the result is an accuracy rate that’s above 99%.

Ben Schwarz “Add to list of things I never thought my projector would say”

None of the Above

brando “I didn’t know I needed this video till now”

Chuck Wendig Every morning I wake up to an unjust universe:

The fact that one must make coffee without having first had coffee is proof we live in an unjust, chaotic universe.

Chloe Condon (don't tell anyone, I got about 72 tabs open right now)

I like my coffee like I like my browser tabs:

An excessive amount to the point where it causes me mild anxiety ☕ 😬

Alex Cornell ☕️ Does anyone sense a theme?

Excited and humbled to announce my $4 investment in espresso this morning. Proud to be a part of such an incredible journey 🙌

Christoph Niemann “My cover for this weeks tech issue of The @NewYorker”

Thomas Limoncelli 🤔

TIL: expense reports are PRs for money

nicole_pumpkins 👀

If you were the type of child that hoarded stickers because you couldn't commit to sticking them onto something and not be able to remove them in one piece.. congrats, your now an anxious adult!

Octopus Dreaming “Watch the brilliant color changes of a sleeping octopus that indicates she may be dreaming.”

Robin Houston 👇 Thread on the cultural history of this pangram:

This tweet contains exactly four As, one B, three Cs, two Ds, thirty-two Es, six Fs, one G, five Hs, twelve Is, one J, one K, three Ls, one M, twenty-one Ns, sixteen Os, one P, one Q, five Rs, twenty-five Ss, twenty-one Ts, two Us, seven Vs, nine Ws, five Xs, six Ys, and one Z.

How aviation watchdog’s secret airline rescued stranded Thomas Cook tourists Fascinating!

“We had to put together a secret airline, with nobody else noticing, to be ready from the off,” said CAA chief executive Richard Moriarty. “You don’t actually know until the directors decide there is no hope and they file for insolvency.

“What you really don’t want to do is precipitate failure. You have no idea how much we torture ourself on a simple question: how on earth do you hide 45 planes?”

Company That Provides Tech to ICE Not Renewing Contract After Code-Deletion Protest Direct action works.

Catalin Cimpanu “Every time I visit the dark web...”

Meriel “This is amazing! Look at the last one!”

Design Objective

The Subtle Technique Mailchimp Uses to Emotionally Hook Customers Outcome selling vs feature selling:

Here’s what Outcome-Selling basically means: Don’t sell your product. Sell the best possible outcome that a customer can get from using your product. What can be achieved if your product is used to its potential.

The outcome of Tinder is not the hundreds of people I swipe, but the possibility of meeting someone special. (Please Susan, wherever you are. I’m waiting.)

Tools of the Trade

Julie 👍 How to build anything:

My design process is: me thinking for days about what I'm gonna do and finally doing it in 13 minutes and 42 seconds between two bathroom breaks.

allisongrayce … anything that matters:

Me in my 20s: but that corner radius isn’t quite right

Me in my 30s: Literally no one cares. Just get that shit out & see if anyone even uses it

Jenny Shen … to other people and to yourself …:

In my 20's:
⭐️I shipped/wrote/created a thing!
⭐️I'm starting this project!
⭐️I joined this cool thing!

In my 30's:
🧐 What problem will it solve and is it the right problem?
🧐 What's the impact this thing is going to have?
🧐 What value am I gonna get from my involvement?

Dates, Times, Calendars— The Universal Source of Data Science Trauma “A list of most of the major crazies out there, and survival tips”

Lucas Pardue “Cache invalidation is hard.”

Lines of Code

Kelly Vaughn Does this move take place in the Marvel or DC universe?

I'd love to watch a movie where programming is accurately depicted.

A team is trying to quickly build an app that will save the world. The app won't compile. Someone keeps adding to the scope. The project manager is asking for an update every 15 minutes.

Code Glitch Art Dress Generator “Get your open source code turned into cool looking glitch-art dress, with pockets!”

Architectural

James Tucker Outside perspective is useful to a point:

Periodic reminder: getting architecture or pattern advice from contractors is biased - they generally don't maintain what they write for the long term, and sounding good is part of their job.

Peopleware

Auren Hoffman 👇 Explainer of written interviews:

1/ Written interviews can help companies better hire thoughtful people.

As an interviewer, my goal is not to hear the first answer … I prefer to hear the candidate’s best answer.

To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight By analogy, our brain puts on headphones in an open office:

In effect, the network was turning the knobs on inhibitory processes, not excitatory ones, with the TRN inhibiting information that the prefrontal cortex deemed distracting.

Teamwork

Scott Belsky I'm a big fan of smaller/focused teams:

the benefits of preserving the intimacy of high performing teams - and the proximity of great product leaders to product, exceed the costs of slower scaling.

David Mimno Me too! That could be entertaining and informative!

TV people: why do all reality shows involve elimination? I want to watch a show called “Onboarding” where two teams compete and must accommodate one new member each week

Techtopia

Jared Yates Sexton For context, read the transcripts:

Tells you everything you need to know about Facebook and Big Tech that they’re unworried about election tampering, fascists harnessing their tools, and endangerment of users but are actively terrified and mobilizing against Elizabeth Warren, who might challenge their monopolies.

Elizabeth Warren This in a nutshell is the policy that got Zuckerberg scared:

Imagine Facebook and Instagram trying to outdo each other to protect your privacy and keep misinformation out of your feed, instead of working together to sell your data, inundate you with misinformation, and undermine our election security. That's why we need to #BreakUpBigTech.

Termyotter I'm going to binge watch this show like there's no tomorrow:

I want a program called "Clear Eye for the Tech Guy"

In the program 5 obviously weary people listen to tech bros pitch their new "disruptive" ideas and explain to them how they've just invented something that's already been done.

Tell me this wouldn't be fun to watch.

Business Plan

Ryan Reeves 👇 Thread:

Costco is a fascinating business.

You know all those groceries you buy?

Yeah, they basically sell those at breakeven and then make all of their profit from the $60 annual membership fees.

At What Point Does Malfeasance Become Fraud? The cost of WeWork's collapse …

We’re probably talking about several thousand people who were going to be millionaires. Now most of them are probably thinking that in the next 30 days there’s a one-in-two chance I don’t have health insurance. You want to talk about the sheer human toll? The notion that Adam Neumann was fired? My God, he got on the last helicopter out of Saigon.

Gross Domestic Product: Banksy’s New Homewares Store Banksy opens a storefront … not a store … to settle a legal dispute with a greeting card company:

GDP is the homewares brand from Banksy and this is our first and only
store. The showroom is for display purposes only and the doors will not
open. All sales will be conducted online when the website opens soon.

This shop has come about as a result of legal action. A greeting cards
company are trying to sieze legal custody of the name Banksy from
the artist, who has been advised the best way to prevent this is to sell
his own range of branded merchandise.

Locked Doors

Kurt Opsahl Context is important …

Context is important in when considering the FBI's claim of "going dark" due to encryption while in the Golden Age of Surveillance. These numbers show it's about mass surveillance, scanning all the messages, not targeted surveillance, with a warrant.

Ryan Singel: There were 1,457 federal criminal wiretaps in 2018.

74 federal wiretaps were reported as being encrypted in 2018, of which 58 could not be decrypted.

Legit-Looking iPhone Lightning Cables That Hack You Will Be Mass Produced and Sold And it looks just like the real things:

It charges phones and transfers data in the same way an Apple cable does, but it also contains a wireless hotspot that a hacker can connect to. Once they've done that, a hacker can run commands on the computer, potentially rummaging through a victim's files, for instance.

None of the Above

Mr. Meowgi “When you finally figure out why your floor is always wet”

AndrewWrites 😭

iOS 13 will be released every day until morale improves

Best of Nextdoor “Nextdoor in two posts:”

Sumanth 🔥

Don't ask me to back up my opinions with data, this is Twitter. I didn't even read the article we're talking about.

NickPitarra “This is the clearest explanation of #ToxicFandom I’ve ever heard.” This is so true in so many contexts, and debates in the software industry are no exception:

Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge … you can form an opinion with little or no actual information, and then you can go around and spout it off as if it's a real fact, when it's nothing more than theory/conjunction/assumption … real knowledge is not information, it take a matter of information and experience together that makes real knowledge

The Military Origins of Layering So apparently not invented in San Francisco:

The designers intended the jacket to be used as the outer shell in different climates around the world—global outerwear for global war. In extreme cold, a soldier would pair the M-43 with multiple thin layers underneath. In warmer climates, he (the jacket was designed for men’s bodies) could keep the outer shell but peel off the other layers.

Dogs are the best people “The only sport that matters”

“Totally here for classic muscle cars with little stuffed animals on the front grill”

I was restless this morning, so I decided to leave the house and walk a mile, grab some coffee and catch up on my emails. Not sure why I thought coffee would help with restlessness.

Didn't know it's classic car weekend in Alameda. Which means mostly well preserved muscle cars from the 60's. Like the one above.

Also, while my MacBook is getting repaired (screen issue on the 2016 models), I'm writing this week's edition on the 10" iPad. It's cramped. The multitasking is still limited and buggy. But iPadOS 13 is finally good enough as a computer replacement. Not great, but good enough.

Design Objective

10 things I learned from Jason Fried about Building Products Or listen to the episode:

You can only iterate on a shipped product
… All the revisions prior to launch are done to an unfixed, WIP version of your product, and the thinking that motivates those changes is guesswork. The first time you get actual feedback is when your product is live: that’s your threshold for iteration.

cindyalvarez 👏 How to frame a problem:

Every time I make myself write out

We are doing _____
Because we see the problem of _____
We know it's a problem because _____
If we don't fix it, we'll see _____
We'll know we've fixed it when we get _____

the rest of the conversation/project/doc goes SO much easier.

allisongrayce The skill they don't teach you in school:

A judo move you should regularly make as a designer:

Quietly mock up or sketch on a whiteboard while everyone else is relying on words to hash it out.

“So this is what I’m hearing-“ ✨

LissaKEvans When less is more:

I've spent the last two days refining a paragraph of extended metaphor - tweaking, prodding, sanding, trimming, varnishing - and now I've just deleted the whole thing and, honestly, the resultant gap is a thing of genuine beauty.

random_walker Why enterprise software is so often poorly designed:

OK, back to Blackboard! It’s actually designed to look extremely attractive to the administrators (not professors and definitely not students) who make purchase decisions. Since they can't easily test usability, they instead make comparisons based on… checklists of features. 🤦🏽‍♂️

Tools of the Trade

aschrock I endorse this recommendation:

My students often ask me what skills will help them in a job setting.

Sometimes I tell them "get really good at spreadsheets."

They think I am joking. I am 100% not joking.

Any industry. Any position. Being a spreadsheet god is transferable knowledge.

anniesqueedle These little things are big part of the job:

Had a fun pairing session last week with a dev who's familiar with coding, but just now learning JavaScript. There's little things we learn to do, like messing around in the console to see what methods are defined on an object, that aren't apparent when you first start out.

iPadOS review: The iPad is dead, long live the iPad iPadOS brings the iPad one step closer to an everyday computing device.

Architectural

mjb2kmn 🤔

How did "sandbox" come to mean something isolated and controlled? Who coined this term? Have they ever seen children playing in a sandbox?

Devoops

What is the German word for: "It only works when I try to show you how it does not work"? TIL

The word is "Vorführeffekt", which translates to "presentation effect". It's used in both cases. Something works fine all the time until you show it your boss / parents / friends. Or something broken magically works again when you are showing it the technician.

kvlly 😳

'twas the night before launch day
and all through the app
not a thing was working
so much for my nap

Teamwork

spikebrehm This is why middle management exists:

In my experience (n = 3), reporting to an executive is very much like not having a manager at all. They simply don't have the time or bandwidth for coaching. It puts more of a burden on the employee to self-manage and figure their own shit out. It's easy to feel unsupported.

ReinH 🤔

I've started saying this when helping teams define new processes:

We should expect that these rules will be broken in healthy and adaptive ways, and we can learn a lot by examining this normal and natural rule breaking behavior, rather than attempting to punish or prohibit it.

Techtopia

bratterz And the gold medal goes to Blizzard for this amazing display of mental gymnastics:

Blizzard frantically spinning the orc statue outside the main entrance, hoping it’ll land on a company value that can explain away this mess: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/23185888/regarding-last-weekend-s-hearthstone-grandmasters-tournament

soledadobrien 🔥

I wish that just one corporate entity would just say, “look we get gobs of money from China, it’s an important market for us, and that is more important than any values we pretend to hold.”

At least you’d have to give points for honesty.

monteiro Facebook isn't interested in democracy. 👇 Thread:

“…if a claim is made directly by a politician on their Page, in an ad or on their website, it is considered direct speech and ineligible for our third-party fact checking program.” https://boingboing.net/2019/10/11/facebook-and-twitter-say-they.html

Locked Doors

macOS 10.15 Vista 😭 We used to laugh at Windows for building the most annoying UI instead of a better security architecture. Well …

Ken Thompson's Unix password Cracking passwords for fun and historical lessons.

manuelkiessling "unintentionally"

I guess all my fellow developers can relate to this - when you stumble on the way back from lunch, your arm hits a lot of keys on the keyboard, and voilá, you've unintentionally written and deployed a service that matches account mail addresses with advertiser's mailing lists.

None of the Above

timsneath “You are NOT just a number. In fact, your value cannot be defined. ”

kathyra_ 😂

when we die i hope they show us cool stats. like how much time we spent in meetings that could have been slack messages, or googling things for people that could have googled it themselves

engineering_bae There's no risk in trying:

Job hunt tip: even if you don’t meet all of the criteria, still apply.

If you make an impression on the team, they may open a position just for you or hire you into the original position if they think you’re strong enough.

Rainmaker1973 “This 29.5 by 7 meter wide wall LED display has been recently installed at the Nexen University, Magok R&D Center lobby in Seoul, South Korea”

CNRush 🔥

I’m tired of y’all continuing to lie about who is working in fast food.

“The typical burger-flipper is an independent adult of about 29, with a high school diploma. Nearly a third have some college experience, and many are single parents raising families on $9 an hour.”

HelenYoung16 Part of Extinction Rebellion. Still the replies to this tweet are funny:

It's an eventful day at work. A guy has glued himself on top of a plane at London City Airport just across from me. #londoncityairport

Andy Rubin’s New Phone Thing Isn’t Just a New Phone Thing Glad to see tech journalism evolved from uncritically covering shiny objects to understanding the human toll:

In that earlier era, tech enthusiasts and journalists would have no reason not to take that statement at face value—to give the unabashed benefit of the doubt that this shiny, colorful object and new user interface might usher in a new phase of mobile computing. …

But if you happened to scroll through Rubin’s timeline, you’d see that his most recent prior tweets, from October 25, 2018, were in response to a thoroughly reported New York Times article. The story chronicled the sexual misconduct allegations made against Rubin during his time at Google, which Google reportedly investigated and found credible. …

dsquintana “Rabbits love getting stroked on their nose”

The Rise and Fall of Democracy(.com) Well, there's a metaphor for you:

The domain name Democracy.com is being auctioned off this month, and it can be yours for a hefty price. The bidding, hosted by Heritage Auctions, which specializes in the sale of collectibles, begins at $300,000 and closes at 5 p.m. on Oct. 25.

bedwardstiek 👇 This is what monopolies do:

Hello everyone who's mystified by all the blackout posts coming from California's #Powerpocalypse , here's an explainer thread:

Supreme Court hands victory to blind man who sued Domino’s over site accessibility Good news. ADA is here to stay.

“The blind and visually impaired must have access to websites and apps to fully and equally participate in modern society - something nobody disputes,” he said. “This outcome furthers that critical objective for them and is a credit to our society.”

The best Untitled Goose Game memes So that explains the random goose sightings in my timeline.

dave trott “The memo that turned Avis into a much bigger company.”

Design Objective

Maxim Leyzerovich This animation illustrates the point so well:

Never ever present just a wireframe.

Always progressively contextualize:

• Content Hierarchy
• Feature Annotation
• Tasks/Interactions
• Journey Map
• Motion Design

Andrew Chen 👇 Hit the thread for product ideas that sound good but don't perform as well:

product ideas that sound good but rarely A/B test well

• multi-step tutorials that teach you how to use the product
• asking users to pay only after they've fully experienced the product
• (same on referrals - upfront is better!)
• lots of whitespace, low-density of data/information-- that nice designery look we all like

How to design delightful dark themes It's more than black & white: “However, it is difficult to create a delightful dark theme. We cannot simply reuse our colors or invert our shades.”

Dima Spivak 😂

"What's the opposite of 'stop?'"
"Go."
"Damn. I already put 'unstop.'"

Tools of the Trade

free-for.dev “A list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) and other offerings that have free tiers for developers.”

AnnaR Like that:

Write the README you wish to see in the world

The Passion Economy and the Future of Work Marketplaces vs SaaS:

Marketplaces bring value for creators looking to be discovered and attract customers over time. SaaS tools often make sense for more established creators who already have a customer base. In response to this dynamic, many startups are building SaaS platforms that aim to poach large creators from existing marketplaces.

Nat Pryce Epic!

After reading Beowulf & the epic of Gilgamesh I’ve come to think the term epic is very well used in big-A agile. Real epics start with a compelling story, but then meander on, with random things happening, until they peter out without a satisfactory conclusion.

Lines of Code

The Lines of Code That Changed Everything Slate explores some of the most influencal pieces of software:

(define-behavior (bounce
        :start-when (or (bump?)
                      bounce-trigger? )
        :abort-when (bump-edge?)
        :onetime? t
      )
)

The Roomba proved that while our attention gravitates toward hardware—such as freaky backward-kneed, door-opening dogs—software might be even more important for a product’s wide adoption. The Asimovian-named iRobot did not create the first robotic vacuum, but the Roomba became a niche must-have not because of how well it sucks, but because of how well it navigated a room.

Test Desiderata Explores the properties of tests:

Isolated — tests should return the same results regardless of the order in which they are run.
Composable — if tests are isolated, then I can run 1 or 10 or 100 or 1,000,000 and get the same results.
Fast — tests should run quickly.
Inspiring — passing the tests should inspire confidence
…

Mihai Popescu Related:

There is a difference between the principles of test code and the principles of prod code. The way I experience it:

• prod code is concise, test code is descriptive
• prod code is general, test code is specific
• prod code is composable, test code is independent

David K. 🤔

There's a lot of confusion between what transpilers, compilers, and interpreters are.

Transpilation is compilation.

TypeScript is compiled to JavaScript

JavaScript is interpreted to Java by recruiters

Architectural

Hello, production 👍

Deploying something useless into production, as soon as you can, is the right way to start a new project. It pulls unknown risk forward, opens up parallel streams of work, and establishes good habits.

Jonnie Hallman … of those you don't regret immediately:

Every tech stack decision you make will be regretted 3-5 years later.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”

me: “Still trying to remove Angular and Coffeescript from my app’s codebase.”

Devoops

erincandescent I guess that's one way to manage infrastructure …

Today it was announced that Yahoo! Groups is shutting down, and taking with it a piece of critical national infrastructure: the Oftel Yahoo Group which is used for managing UK phone number assignments.

Yes, really: See Ofcom's website https://ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/56646/simwood.pdf

Teamwork

Asynchronous Communication: The Real Reason Remote Workers Are More Productive Not just for remote teams (caveat, written by Doist):

Because employees don’t have to stay on top of each message as it comes in, they can block off large chunks of uninterrupted time to do the work that creates the most value for your organization. They can come back to process their messages in batches 1-3 times a day instead of bouncing back and forth between work and messages or meetings.

Peopleware

Alex 🏖

Signs you need a break:

• loosing interesting in things you’re usually passionate about and bring you joy
• short temper and easy to provoke
• taking everything personally
• constant overthinking
• emotionally overwhelmed
• always exhausted/tired

Take care friends. Take a break.

YouTube ad sequencing and ad recall How ads are designed to capture your attention (cynical would say “manipulate”).

We’re all wired to remember great stories. Video ad sequencing lets marketers show ads on YouTube in an order based on the most compelling and memorable story structures. There are a lot of structures to explore, so we tested five sequences to understand their influence on three key metrics: brand awareness, ad recall, and purchase intent.

Locked Doors

Merritt Baer 🚨 Hiding electronics in the trunk:

Colleagues had a car broken into and laptops stolen in downtown Mountain View last night while we were at dinner. We wondered how they knew to break into the hatchback when it is not see- through.

They turn on bluetooth scanners and follow the beacon to find electronics.

Jane Lytvynenko “The details from his Equifax class-action suit are BONKERS”

For example, Equifax relied upon four digit pins derived from Social
Security numbers and birthdays to guard personal information, despite the fact that these weak passwords had already been compromised in previous personal information. Furthermore, Equifax employed the username “admin” and the password “admin” to protect a portal used to manage credit disputes, a password that “is a surefire way to get hacked.”

None of the Above

Chris Cox “Mom took my fridge.” — smart toilet Twitter integration

Hrothgar 🔥

Airbnb Math:

$40/night x 2 nights = $164

Best of Nextdoor “I avoided this submission for weeks bc of the subject line but then I finally read it and just trust me on this one 😂😂😂”

James Clear Ditto:

My email response time is either 3 minutes or 3 months.

ニューディスカバリー “People who take toy photos seriously 🤩”

iucounu 😂 This thread …

just had cause to send an email containing the phrase 'I am a little surprised to hear this, especially as', which fellow Britons will recognise as essentially a stabbing

Grouch (Joker Parody) - SNL I'd watch this Sesame St Joker mashup.

Manisha Agarwal Joke:

A physicist, a biologist, and a mathematician watch people enter and leave a house.They see 2 ppl enter & 3 leave

Physicist: The initial measurement wasn't accurate
Biologist: They must have reproduced
Mathematician: If one more enters, then the house will be empty again

Dak “I found a video of a duck falling asleep and I’m convinced it’s the cutest video ever”

Will McPhail Happy Halloween.

Design Objective

Steve Schoger Which of these UIs would you rather use?

🔥 When making a design responsive, don't stop at simply making things fit on smaller screens – look for ways to borrow usability patterns from native mobile apps, too.

For example, anchoring modals to the bottom of the screen instead of the center, making them easier to reach.

Enterprise Software Is Dead It’s just software for the workplace now:

If you’re an executive making a buying decision in 2019, sure, your board won’t fire you for making a conservative choice. But a mutiny in the rank-and-file will take you down just as fast. So you need to buy a tool that your employees like, and that they find useful. You need to care about design and user experience just as much as SLAs and Magic Quadrants.

I’m not sure if anyone has been fired for refusing to buy Slack, but I do know that a whole era of executives’ lives got a heck of a lot harder until they finally agreed to buy Slack.

On Small Seasons and Long Calendars Wonderful essay on a different way of connecting with time:

Where spring is our “large” season, lasting roughly from March to June, the sekki calendar breaks it down into six small seasons: start of spring, rain waters, the going-out of the worms, vernal equinox, clear and bright, and rain for harvests.2 Both describe a similar period of time, but one does so with a precision that feels much more human.

Tools of the Trade

A Guide To New And Experimental CSS DevTools In Firefox Grid and flexbox inspectors, inactive CSS, accessibility panel, and more.

Google is improving 10 percent of searches by understanding language context Interesting:

The way BERT recognizes that it should pay attention to those words is basically by self-learning on a titanic game of Mad Libs. Google takes a corpus of English sentences and randomly removes 15 percent of the words, then BERT is set to the task of figuring out what those words ought to be. Over time, that kind of training turns out to be remarkably effective at making a NLP model “understand” context, according to Jeff Dean, Google senior fellow & SVP of research.

IBM Says Google’s Quantum Leap Was a Quantum Flop Alternate headline: Google Discovers a Superposition of Leap and Flop.

Manisha Agarwal 50:50

Darrell Huff on how to lie with Statistics:

It's like the tale of the roadside merchant who was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap.
"Well," he explained, "I have to put some horse-meat in too. But I mix them 50:50. One horse, one rabbit."
😁

Ben Lesh Points for accuracy:

6 out of 5 people on Twitter misuse statistics.

Yvonne Lam “My cat opened a file in VSCode and started “helping”.”

Web-end

Playing Beat Saber in the browser with body movements using PoseNet & Tensorflow.js Browsers came a long way since VRML.

Ryan Florence 👇 Thread, on where and how SPA lost their way:

There’s a chance I believe client side routing on the web is usually not preferred. Which is ironic.

Might be best for screens where the majority of the UI persists, which is the edge case.

Browsers handle page transitions really well.

Still working through my thoughts 🤔

Introducing Concurrent Mode (Experimental) Looks very powerful. And deeply confusing.

Lines of Code

Jenn Wallis What about code review?

As an editor, I can spot the exact moment in your copy where you basically said "fuck it".

Amjad Masad This explains why developers are so eager to add dark mode to every app:

Architectural

HeyChelseaTroy 💯

90% of engineering decisions I make, from the architectural to the semantic, start here:

"How is another developer going to try to extend and maintain this code?"

That's all about people, and my skill at it directly translates to the longevity and impact of the code I write.

Jaana B. Dogan 🤔

There are two types of systems: those you can’t restart and those you don’t want to restart.

Tomasz Łakomy “Is this Docker?”

Peopleware

Malware Unicorn Time management is everything:

One thing I've learned over the years is knowing how to manage time for your brain to switch subjects. Context switching is hard. Staying organized, writing lots of notes, and blocking out calendar time helps.

Gabe Yes.

All of the talented and successful people I know agree on the following:

1. There isn’t any secret to what they do.
2. Getting the basics right provides the most value over time.
3. Nobody got to where they are without help.
4. Luck plays a massive role in success.

calico_patches 🙄

It's called executive dysfunction but I'm not sure there's actually any executives in my brain. Highest ranked in there is probably an overworked assistant store manager existing entirely on energy drinks and cinnamon rolls.

Tom Gauld “Please tick the box”

Teamwork

betsythemuffin 👇 That question got me thinking. Check the replies for more double-sided phrases:

"You are not your code":

• in toxic environments, it's an excuse to tear people down.
• in supportive environments, it's a tool that encourages a growth mindset.

What are some other phrases like that that y'all have seen?

Locked Doors

Valerie Aurora Friendly reminder:

Y’all, keep work/personal email separate if for NO OTHER REASON that when the lawyers are going through your emails for the lawsuit involving your employer, they won’t be making jokes about your taste in sex toys

And it's not something you can actively avoid. You don't have to be a party to the lawsuit to have your work emails included in discovery.

gduffy Admire the honesty:

Former co-founder & CEO of Dropcam (Nest cam) here.

There's no way to say this humbly, but imo stuff like this is the reason that companies lose their way when they lose an empowered "buck stops here" product-oriented CEO with enough engineering chops to modulate product decisions.

...

This whole privacy mess in home & so-called "IoT" is a result of people who don't even know what would be required to operate ethically with such powerful technology in the first place. I believe they are mostly good people, they just don't have the mindset or philosophy to know what to do. It kinda makes me misty-eyed. They know where to find me if it sounds like some of this could help... I'd be happy to try and get the band back together again.

Grim Reaper

Happy halloween 🎃👻🧟‍♀️

UnrealAlexander “Just found out you can buy real human remains on Amazon and it just acts like it's super normal like "Hey you want some human fingers to go with those ribs?"”

CascadianSolo “It's always a wild ride reading the voters pamphlet for local elections. See if you can tell what's wrong with this...”

Will McPhail Again because his stuff is hilarious. Check out his Instagram.

None of the Above

Sam Mintz “Grim news for those of us who write for a living”

Grace Segers 👀

Me, writing an email:

I'm using an exclamation point so you know I'm friendly and excited! But now I'm using a period so that you know I'm not crazy. Here's another sentence with a period as a buffer, proving my normalness. Thanks so much!

Sophia Armen “all I see is hummus”

markpopham 🎤

one thing you forget about star wars is how much of the original trilogy is just darth vader flying in some place to chew some guy out about construction delays

Mark Serrels “Women's speed climbing record was smashed. Under 7 seconds. Inhuman.”

Chillie Franxiety 😭

Dungeons and Dragons is popular because it appeals to the human fantasy of having a group of friends who can come over at a regular time

WebMD Magazine Just saw this at the doctor's office. Weird that WebMD — emphasis on the "web" — has this print magazine … don't doctors hate people who self-diagnose using the internet?

Inside R/Relationships, the Unbearably Human Corner of Reddit “How a subreddit seemingly destined to devolve into chaos stays remarkably sane” TL;DR moderation.

The fact that these rules exist at all is a reminder of something we tend to forget about the internet, which is that we’re as responsible to one another here as anywhere else. Sometimes more. … It’s the rare place with consequences, which come from a crude system, but one created by people who actually have to live within it—not people who are simply getting paid by the people who named the app.

Migrating Russian eagles run up huge data roaming charges Okay well …

Russian scientists tracking migrating eagles ran out of money after some of the birds flew to Iran and Pakistan and their SMS transmitters drew huge data roaming charges.

Kieran Healy 😿 Context: Rats taught to drive tiny cars to lower their stress levels

In Phase 2, rats will be assigned to drive other rats in mazes. Rat drivers will be given a 1-5 star rating by rat passengers. Rat passengers must rate rat drivers or they will see their own rating go down. (This is the origin of the word "rating" btw.)

WeWork HR Invites Employees To Sign Goodbye Checks For Departing CEO Too soon.

Encouraging staffers to give him a good send-off, the WeWork human resources department reportedly invited employees Wednesday to sign goodbye checks for departing CEO Adam Neumann.

rat mic “psychologists dont want you to know this video is the cure for depression”

Jimi Fletcher “It's Halloween, 2019. This is the very last day we can refer to Blade Runner as a film that's set in the future.”

Design Objective

Perfectly Cropped Pixel perfect UX mistake.

Jonathan Waddingham “NOvember” 💡

Product people - for the next month, try to push back on those ad hoc requests, respect the work in progress limits, don't let one customer's demands ruin your carefully planned roadmap.

Let's make it a campaign. We could call it...

NOvember

A Framework for Making Better Product Decisions Starting with step 1:

If everybody just did this first step, their products would improve significantly. This is without question the most important thing you can do to make better decisions. Write down your goals and expectations before you start building.

Allison Grayce “it’s fine, lets just make a guided tour to explain it to first time users“ - 🤩 pm

Peter Lewis I want to see these levels used in job ads:

entry level designer
junior designer
designer
senior designer
principal designer
final designer
final final designer
final final final designer_v2
designer v3 FINAL
designer_v4_finalfinal_thisone_2

HELLvetica “Like helvetica, but with like, much shittier kerning for Halloween”

Tools of the Trade

What nobody tells you about documentation The four types of documentation, why you need them, and how to make them work.

cartwrightian The one tool that can do everything:

There is one feature I consistently hear that users value about big vendor IT solutions: export to spreadsheet. Whenever I see that "company X runs solution Y" type of advert I just think: "they run the whole place off of excel"

Logic gates using fluid Simply explained:

Steeeve 😭

The plural of regex is regrets

atomicthumbs “chaotic evil website”

Web-end

Alex Russell 🧵 No surprise, Apple has strong financial incentive to hold the mobile web back:

There seems to be confusion about how, exactly, Apple keeps the web second-class on iOS. Understandable! It's the interplay of several interlocking effects. Let's examine them (thread).

Lynn Fisher One! Div!

Started with a repeating bookshelf pattern and kept going with a little animation.

#divtober 26: 🔦 Dark https://a.singlediv.com

Inspect This Snake Brilliant. Open web inspector to play Snake.

Lines of Code

David Neal 📣

My most embarrassing mistakes as a programmer:

• I didn't ask for help
• I was afraid of what others would think
• I didn't follow through on a promise
• I didn't step up and take responsibility
• I avoided conflict

My biggest mistakes had nothing to do with programming.

@nekorug 😂

"so, your resume is empty here between 2014-2016. what were you doing during this time?

"bug fixes and performance improvements."

Sahil Lavingia It's kind of exactly like this:

Learn to code so you can get paid six figures to rearrange z-indexes until the problem goes away.

@ScribblingOn “Burnout visualised”

Architectural

@ErrataRob 🧵 Great thread on technical debt, and what it's not:

Building a business case for something doesn't mean using business buzzwords you don't understand. It means actually understanding the business case. "Debt", "ROI", and so on are widely misunderstood by techies.

…

Your concept of "debt" comes largely from consumer debt. Instead of studying it, you've reverse-engineered it. You observe it, and then come up with your own principles that explain to yourself what you see. These aren't the principles business types use.

Alan Dayley TIL “intensive support period” is a thing people say unironically:

“We delivered all the scope on time. We are now fixing all the escaped defects during this 3-month intensive support period.”

If you always plan intensive support periods, you didn’t actually deliver the scope, nor was it on time (whatever that means). #agile #dealwithreality

Charity Majors This is absolutely true. Infrastructure is a product with end-users and stakeholders:

if i could go back and do one thing different in my career as db/infra engineer, it would be this: build some fucking product. not only in the darkest hour of our need, but like during the day. with a PM and that culty scrum shit.

it is harrrrrrrd leveling up on this shit now.

Devoops

Adrian Sanabria 🤔

I'm consistently disappointed by how often "scaling in the cloud" involves emailing support and waiting a few days to get an artificial threshold raised.

I understand the reasons for it, but it goes hard against the kind of a lot of the cloud marketing we see.

Jake Williams “When management "helps" remediate the incident...”

Peopleware

Indi Young 👂

While in a listening session with a person, listen closely if you sense frustration. This is a marker that something is interfering with the person's purpose, keeping them from achieving what they want to get done.

Dani Donovan “Your words matter.”

Teamwork

@dxna 💯

The more senior you are on a career ladder the more the optics of small behaviors matter, eg ending a meeting on time if others are waiting. Because as inconsequential as it seems it sets optics around organizational standards around consideration and privilege

Rodolphe Dutel ☕️

Teacher: what do your parents do?
Kid: they work remotely.
Teacher: what does that mean?
Kid: they hang around the house, talking to their computer and drinking coffee.

Christopher Jones “Academics complaining that departmental service obligations interfere with their research and teaching. Assyria, mid 7th century BC:”

Locked Doors

City of Johannesburg held for ransom by hacker gang Ransomware with a new twist:

A hacker group going by the name of Shadow Kill Hackers is holding South Africa's largest city for ransom, demanding 4 bitcoins from Johannesburg authorities, or they'll upload stolen city data on the internet.

SIM-Jackers Can Empty Your Bank Account with a Single Phone Call The weakest link is customer support at scale:

"One of the reasons SIM-swap attacks are so effective is that many mobile phone carrier representatives are easy to socially engineer," explained a former black hat hacker, who dabbled in SIM swaps before going straight and becoming a white hat hacker. "An attacker can call your phone provider, pretend to be you and spin some story to get the support agent to transfer your number to a SIM. If he runs into any friction, he can hang up and try again with another agent."

Stephanie 🧵 Thread:

Doing a quick deep dive on reCAPTCHA for the @webwewantfyi session this weekend and HOLY SMOKES folks. I had no idea what was being collected from your browser when you mark that little "I'm not a robot" checkbox.

None of the Above

WeRateDogs “This is Benjamin. He is Froot Loops. 14/10”

@lavendersheeps 👏

"the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog":
-overdone
-juvenile
-has no impact or weight to it

"sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow"
-holy shit
-literally the most metal way to test out your font
-raw as hell

@higgzorz “this is so fucking funny the internet really was better 10 years ago”

@ArfMeasures Every. Single. Time.

Netflix: Should I play this movie?
Me: No no I'm just looking at it for a second
Netflix: I'll put it on
Me: I'm just literally reading what it is
Netflix: It's playing :)

Best of Nextdoor "Serious inquiries only, DALE"

stephanie 👨‍💻

light bondage but with the 10 different charging cables i need to maintain for my 3 apple products

Command Line Magic “Whoever labeled this USB-A port is having a good laugh right now.”

Anthony Ha “This is a perfect email”

Bradford Pearson 📣 “Shoutout to whoever scheduled these Deadspin tweets, changed the password, and walked out the door.”

Debbie Moon 👍

Time to remember the best voting advice I ever heard: voting isn't marriage, it's public transport. You're not waiting for "the one" who's absolutely perfect: you're getting the bus, and if there isn't one to your destination, you don't not travel- you take the one going closest.

Dave Roberts “Anyone want to buy a cat? Still in its packaging, perfect condition.”

Dare Obasanjo Sadly true:

The idea that historians will write the equivalent of mean tweets about you in the future is probably the least effective threat in the world yet turns out to have been the primary accountability mechanism for politicians in the 2nd largest democracy on Earth. 🤦🏾‍♂️

Jim Stansel 🧵

The five types of fossil fuel tweets:

1. Are you wasting too much water when you wash your hands? Use our calculator to find out!

Quinn Nelson “Best wireless in-ear charging case lid sound competition!” Watch this to the end.

Stevie Mat 💥 (in reply to)

White men did not produce great art and literature, white men produced art and literature that spoke to other white men, so they all just collectively agreed amongst themselves that it was great.

A lot of it ain't that great.

@HerDreadsRock “And whoever added the background music is going to hell” 😭

How could I not buy a beer called main frame that also looks like a CSS Grid tutorial?

Design Objective

How Uber uses psychology to perfect their customer experience Don't like the company, but the app is pretty good:

There’s no doubt that a large part of Uber’s revenue comes from optimizing their experience using science. When an experiment was run with Uber Pool that applied Idleness Aversion, Operational Transparency, and the Goal Gradient Effect, the results were impressive.

How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit This indirect question is my favorite trick:

With this in mind, I sought to pinpoint Superhuman’s HXC. We took only users who would be very disappointed without our product and analyzed their responses to the second question in our survey: “What type of people do you think would most benefit from Superhuman?”

Jonathan Shariat When the “creative process” gets in the way of progress:

Something I've been mulling over recently, would love to discuss.

Design is slowly learning lessons that engineering teams have already solved. Why don't we embrace them more?

Versioning✅, components✅, documentation🤷‍♂️, ticketing🚫, agile planning🚫, architecture reviews🚫etc

Tools of the Trade

Amanda Silver Want!

Massive progress in IntelliCode, powering your AI-pair-programmer. Our unsupervised model makes Python feel like a typed programming language. Uses GPT first developed by OpenAI.

Philip Salter Free advice that's worth more than gold:

Taavi Kotka , former CIO of Estonia, on the low £100m price tag for being the most tech-savvy government in the world: “If you don’t use Accenture or McKinsey, you’d be amazed at what you can get done.”

Shane Parrish Why I practice README Driven Development:

Writing is often the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about.

Henri Virtanen Someone needs to make a coffee table book with all the good Vim jokes:

When i get stuck in vim i just buy a new server from another vendor (easier).

Web-end

freezydorito 💯

ui is when you make the links blue and ux is when you underline them and development is when you do nothing because browsers do that already

Diana Smith Magical!

Did another CSS-only art.
Flemish/baroque inspired.
Two weekends. Made for Chrome.

Cassidy Williams Point:

Fun fact! Baby elephants are born weighing ~250 pounds, making them the world’s biggest babies, right next to the people who complain that CSS isn’t really coding 🧠✨

Jack Daniel I tried this. Works every time.

If you ever find you have too many friends in tech, try this line to resolve the problem:

"Well actually, that's a URI not a URL."

Lines of Code

Bryan Helmkamp No lie.

Programmers are the only group who gain an hour from daylight savings time then immediately lose six to debugging

Hsing-Hui Hsu “Code comments”

Devoops

wen (Chen) Shapira System reliabilty is a “guess and pray” game:

In my experience, every system has about 500 things that could be done better. You have time to fix 5 per Q. So you pick the ones most likely to grow into big problems. And sometimes you pick wrong and get outages.

A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day Distributed systems is hard. And also, this one company you never heard of is handling your text messages:

A company named Syniverse, which provides networking services, later took blame for the messages being delayed. Syniverse said a single server was at fault: that server failed on February 14th, trapping messages waiting to be sent out; the server was only brought back online on November 7th. When that happened, all of the messages were finally delivered.

Peopleware

Avoid Burnout Before You’re Already Burned Out This:

You don’t need a dream job. But in your overall life, you do need to find time to take care of your health, do things you find refreshing and have a sense of purpose. The closer you are to living your truth, the less likely you are to burnout.

mykola 🧵 For people on the spectrum who don't know it:

Hey, how's this for autism 'awareness' month: some percentage of you who are reading this tweet are #actuallyAutistic and aren't aware of it.

I'm going to post a bunch of questions I wish I had been asked in this context, years ago. This is not diagnosis! But it's instructive.

Gabriel Szatan A lesson in stereotyping.

Teamworks

Cameron Moll Stories are powerful 🎙

Tell a story. Always.

When writing, tell a story.
When presenting, tell a story.
When resolving conflict, tell a story.
When leading a meeting, tell a story.
Whenever in doubt, tell a story.

Ha Phan Related, make story telling memorable:

One of the tricks we used to use when we present synthesis & strategy was, we’d plan organic interruptions where one person would share an anecdote, bc this makes the preso memorable. We also repeat certain words, so that when people describe the product they’d use the same words

Dare Obasanjo “Almost fell over when I saw this candle on a coworker's desk ”

Locked Doors

WIP: Support Engineer Job family country-of-residence block The reality of global politics in 2019:

In e-group on Monday October 15, 2019 we took the decision to enable a "job family country-of-residence block" for team members who have access to customer data. This is at the expressed concern of several enterprise customers, and also what is becoming a common practice in our industry in the current geopolitical climate.

The countries involved are:

• China
• Russia

FakeUnicode 🧵 Was not aware. These are some serious considerations for keeping your passwords to lower code points:

Because it keeps coming up, how about a thread on Emoji in passwords. So we (and you) can link to it in the future.

Should they be allowed? For all practical purposes they can't not be. So, yes.

Should they be heavily warned against? Yes.

But why? Well...

Vulnerability In Ring Doorbells Left the Door Open for Hackers to Open the Door TL;DR They used HTTP instead of HTTPS because of course.

matt blaze The three laws …

The three most important things experts understand about software security:

1. Software is unbelievably unreliable and insecure.

2. No, really, you have no idea.

3. It’s actually even worse than that.

Techtopia

Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours Computer files are going extinct:

Files feel like a good bellwether for what’s happening. We’re in this funny in-between time right now where our phones are fully in the future: apps are services kind of by definition, and it’s really hard to access the file system. But our computers are still kind of in the past: to me, at least, the two most important navigational anchors on my computer are the desktop and the downloads folder.

David Pierce (Context)

“Without antitrust regulation we would all be using Windows Mobile” is an A+ argument in favor of antitrust regulation

How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash This is all fine.

Talia Shadwell 👇 Creepy:

Because I had forgotten to log a cycle, the app likely concluded I was pregnant and began communicating the information to third party apps and algorithms

Kelly Eng “can’t wait 2 get hunted down by one of these”

None of the Above

Steve Stewart-Williams “No big deal; just a guy playing fetch with a beluga whale... 😮”

OhNoSheTwitnt (if you don't know the meme, “OK, boomer”)

Just so we’re all clear since there’s a lot of disagreement about birth years:

Boomer = Anyone older than you that you don’t like

Millennial = Anyone younger than you that you don’t like

Bri Schwapp 😂

and quicksand. I was extremely worried about quicksand

JB as a child i thought i'd have to deal with the bermuda triangle a lot more than i have in my adult life

Pulp Librarian “Soviet. Nuclear. Zeppelins. Three words that always inspire confidence...”

richee ⛽️

gas pumps be like:
credit or debit?
do you want a car wash?
do you want a receipt?
is it stupid that i love you?
was it all just a big mistake?
do i wanna let it happen?
do you wanna just walk away?

Brett O'Connor 💥

been getting a lot of new followers lately! just wanted to welcome you all and remind you of my script that detects unfollowers and launches killdrones.

Horse Girl Autumn 🧵 The equestrian code point:

A thread of rating every horse emoji:

Apple, iOS 13.2

Total lack of withers explains lack of saddle. Back flatter than my coffee table explains lack of rider. Horse is ewe-necked, with a tiny head. Best suited for liberty training, would not recommend for performance work. 6/10

Blair Amadeus Imani 🧵 Word game Twitter is the funniest:

That’s a hierophant. A hymen is an award that the NCAA gives to outstanding college football players.

Pinboard 🧵 This thread:

Usually this happens because the EU citizen on one side of the conversation thinks they are communicating with a compliance officer in a tasteful 10-story Pinboard office complex, while the other party to the conversation is wearing pajamas and eating an off-brand hot pocket

stephanie The SoftBank 30 year vision is just …

every morning i meditate on this deck for 28 minutes to achieve a state of higher consciousness with which to start my day

I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb Something to consider before you book your next AirBnB.

Kevin Robillard All metrics will be gamed:

This is super messed up: Elite colleges are buying SAT scores, then recruiting students they know have no chance of getting in, all so they can decrease their admittance rate and look more exclusive.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-sale-sat-takers-names-colleges-buy-student-data-and-boost-exclusivity-11572976621

elatticus “They are playing tetherball and this is peak level wholesomeness”

This week you'll learn about the core narrative, how to find a UX design job, make a better Escape key, stop buying ads, and watch the best Tiktok ever.

You Had One Job “Squirrels look like superheroes when they land.”

Do you enjoy Weekend Reading?

🙏 Then do me a favor.

📣 I want to reach more people with helpful information about software design, development, and management.

📨 Forward this email and share with your friends.

✍️ Tell them to do sign up for the email.

💡 And let me know what you think. What would you like to see more of? What could I change to make better? Help me make it better.

Design Objective

Why some designs look messy, and others don’t Incredibly simple rule:

Then just visualize all of the boxes and apply the Extendabox-rule: extend their lines and see a grid appear. This way you’ll be able to really understand what the designer went through getting to that specific end result.

Sell Something Bigger Than Your Otherwise Boring Business Find your core narrative:

Your core narrative is what you sell beyond your product. It’s the broad idea behind your otherwise selfish brand.

6 SaaS Retention Strategies to Maximize Growth Incentives, onboarding, engaging with customers, and pricing.

Outcome Based Roadmaps : Unleash the Power of a Shared Vision and Purpose What is product strategy, how it differs from release roadmaps, and how to avoid the trapping of feature factory.

iOS vs. Android App UI Design: The Complete Guide Same but different.

UX Design for Boring Companies Tip for finding a job where you'll be appreciated:

Because their brand isn’t “cool,” it can be harder for these companies to attract top talent. So if you are top talent, they are really happy to have you there, and they will do more to keep you around, respect your expertise, and listen to what you have to say.

RaquelDesigns 👇 Thread for designers looking for a job:

I'll be reviewing a LOT of design / illustration job applications today, as I have been for the past few weeks, and I'd like to start a thread about things I see and notice, and recommendations to improve your applications across the board.

Sebastian Markbåge “When non-tech savy people try to use Facebook features.”

Tools of the Trade

Visual Regression Testing in Design Systems An intro to visual regression testing, and a few tools you can use to automate that.

restlesshead Software development be like:

I think non-technical professionals would be surprised at how much of my work consists of typing a line, hitting return and then watching text scroll by very, very fast

nodebestpractices The largest Node.js best practices list (November 2019). There's also a Twitter timeline.

Serverless computing with Pascal? Everything old is new again:

Want to see what 1974 (the year the program I’m using was published) looks like in Roman numerals? Just call the RESTful service via https://roman.engelke.dev/1974 to find out.

Space-grade CPUs: How do you send more computing power into space? Why do space crafts have such slow CPUs?

Curiosity, everyone’s favorite Mars rover, works with two BAE RAD750 processors clocked at up to 200MHz. It has 256MB of RAM and 2GB of SSD. As we near 2020, the RAD750 stands as the current state-of-the-art, single-core space-grade processor. It’s the best we can send on deep space missions today.

@tinymakesthings This is a better Escape key than even the new MacBook.

Web-end

Ire Aderinokun 😭 “Trying to remember the correct syntax to vertically center in flexbox”

Lines of Code

Build your own React What a great way to present code/algorithm!

Check it out, even if you don't care about React, I promise this is worth a few minutes of your time.

Ben Nadel This is how you learn about clean code and over-engineering:

Nothing makes you more humble than having to maintain a single codebase for years. Only then do you really get see the full extent of your poor choices and ill-informed thinking. I feel lucky to have this learning opportunity.

stephanie “please join me in my new tech awareness initiative, no code november”

Ben Halpern “2 unit tests. 0 integration tests.”

Teamwork

Navigating Software Engineering Career Paths Understand the different engineering career paths, and choose the one that's right for you.

Jennifer Kim 👇 Hiring is hard to get right:

Skilled hiring is not about perfection, but the ability to continually learn & improve your process—to surface relevant data, interpret it, & make decisions w/ reasonable risk.

Getting good at hiring starts with accepting you'll never be "done" and allowing room for mistakes. /3

Narcissistic CEOs Weaken Collaboration and Integrity “Some may be bold leaders, but they create a dangerous corporate culture.” From personal experience, I can attest this is true.

Emily Kager Be the Slack conversation you want to see in the world:

There are two types of people on @SlackHQ

1. People who type long, cohesive, edited messages for you to consume at one time and reply at your leisure.

2. People who
   msg u
   👋🏻
   like this
   and ask a question (edited)
   add more info 🤔
   then thank you 🤗 (edited)
   bump

Rich Rogers 🔥

“When can you do it?”

Two weeks

“We need it next week”

Then I suggest you ask again last week.

michael vazquez “whoever made this deserves a medal of honor”

Startup Life

The 4 Big Ways That “Founder” and “CEO” Are Different Jobs It's no surprise only a quarter of founders manage to hold on to the title of CEO by the time the IPO comes around. These are different skillsets.

The skill set required to imagine a product and move a small devoted team to build it is very different than the skill to successfully manage a company as a freestanding entity — comprised of hundreds (or even thousands) of brains.

Andy Johns 👇 Choose the strategy that works for your business scale:

Most startups should not have a growth team. It leads to incremental thinking at a time when you’re expected to grow 3x+ every 12-18 months. In most cases, a bunch of a/b tests won’t give you that velocity of traction. Your best bet is big bets on new feature innovation.

How raising a $2+M Seed Round really, actually went Persistence.

It took me about 10 more weeks, but I closed the round. There’s actually still money trickling in for the next week or so, and we’re “oversubscribed.” I closed three biz dev deals last week. We’ll have enough money for a while — certainly to get to our next major milestones. I’m not quitting.

Locked Doors

Five months after returning rental car, man still has remote control Sigh. One more thing to worry about when renting a car:

That's because, five months after he returned the vehicle on May 31, his app continues to have control over the vehicle. Despite multiple other people renting the SUV in the intervening months, FordPass still allows Sinclair to track the location of the vehicle, lock and unlock it, and start or stop its engine.

Catalin Cimpanu This advise doesn't come out of nowhere. Something happened. Pay attention.

LA officials publish warning about the dangers of using public USB charging stations -- as they can hide malware

Their advice:

• use the AC charging socket, not the USB one
• bring your own USB charger from home

Techtopia

Sarah Mei 👇 The classic gig economy playbook:

We’ve all heard this story before.

Gig workers start off make reasonable money doing something useful on their own schedule.

Then after workers get invested in the platform & the tools, the company drastically cuts pay rates.

TheWrongNoel 👇 AI hiring systems that are no better than a coin toss:

A friend of mine has been trying to hire a new employee for her department in a medium-sized org. After advertising several times with few applicants, and a couple of rounds of interviews, the new employee is less than great. Then she discovered there were other applicants ...

Viral Tweet About Apple Card Leads to Goldman Sachs Probe Speaking of algorithms that make the wrong decision, and companies hiding behind “but … the algorithm”:

“Goldman and Apple are delegating credit assessment to a black box,” Hansson said. “It’s not a gender-discrimination intent but it is a gender-discrimination outcome.”

How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results Related, Google's algorithm is backed up by a lot of black-box human curation.

The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising According to this article, online advertising is only effective in that it creates money for adtech companies:

The experiment continued for another eight weeks. What was the effect of pulling the ads? Almost none. For every dollar eBay spent on search advertising, they lost roughly 63 cents, according to Tadelis’s calculations.

The experiment ended up showing that, for years, eBay had been spending millions of dollars on fruitless online advertising excess, and that the joke had been entirely on the company.

None of the Above

Jon Christian “They've seized the means of production”

Celeste Labedz 👇 Make it work, or purr trying:

Hello friends, today I will be using my expertise as a seismologist to tell you how to make an earthquake early warning system out of cats.

Kontra “Volkspod”

MaryKMcKenzie That is so me:

apple watch buzzes: meeting in 10
phone calendar pop up: meeting in 10
desktop calendar pop up: meeting in 10
slack reminder: meeting in 10

YEAH OK I GOT IT, MEETING IN 10

11 minutes later:
OH FUCK MY MEETING

Tekkers So this is how you train to be a goalkeeper!

E-zrael Ani “🤣 Today’s episode of crazy things dads do 😅”

Moto Razr hands-on: the flip phone, reinvented as a folding Android phone! I didn't believe they could, but looks like Motorola managed to deliver a flip phone with folding screen. Your move … everyone else.

Big Business Is Overcharging You $5,000 a Year The argument in favor of breaking up monopolies (big tech and otherwise).

cara “it’s official this is the best tiktok to exist”

Astronomy Picture of the Day (November 19, 2019)

Design Objective

Humans of Flat Design So this design aesthetics has a name — “humans of flat design” — and a Twitter account to document it for posterity. (via Vicki Boykis)

7 Questions with CPO Gijo Mathew What's a memorable opposite of “we've always done it this way”?

One of my key principles is Always Remove Orange Cords. I remember when a colleague joined a company and noticed an orange extension cord in the office lobby. He assumed it was important and stepped over it. The cord was still there every day that week. He never questioned “why is this extension cord going across the lobby?” Another person visits and notices the extension cord. He follows the extension cord and realizes it’s not plugged into anything! I always look for these “orange cords” especially in my first couple of months at a new company.

Microsoft went all in on accessible design. This is what happened afterwards “The tech giant took a big step by developing an Xbox controller for people with disabilities. Now that work is leading to changes in the industry at large.”

Allison Grayce 👇 This thread lists the different design career tracks. Find the space that works best for you:

What kind of design gig are you going after next?

Consulting 🧐
In-house 🧐
Startups 🧐
Contracting 🧐
Freelance 🧐
Entrepreneurship 🧐

mcclure111 👇 Sun invented a lot of things ahead of their time (including cloud computing and tablets), yet couldn't make it work in the marketplace. This thread explores why that happens, what's the lesson, and why that might be the future of Google's Stadia: no compelling user story.:

A long time ago— like 15 years ago— I worked at Sun Microsystems. The company was nearly dead at the time (it died a couple years later) because they didn't make anything that anyone wanted to buy anymore. So they had a lot of strange ideas about how they'd make their comeback.

Tools of the Trade

Hero35 “1700+ educational talks on React, JavaScript, and their ecosystems … More stacks (frontend, backend, machine learning, & mobile) on the way!”

LocalStack For developing and testing applications using AWS services:

LocalStack provides an easy-to-use test/mocking framework for developing Cloud applications. It spins up a testing environment on your local machine that provides the same functionality and APIs as the real AWS cloud environment.

Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold for $$$$ to private equity firm, price caps axed FYI if you have an .org domain (I do), you have the option to extend registration up to 10 years. There's no telling if/when prices will go up.

Nuria Lago “Basic Linux commands”

Web-end

Bruno Simon Now this is a personal web site! Take it for a ride!

Jay Phelps “This is one of most noncommittal APIs to ever exist. It’s impressive.”

Mark Dalgleish “Believe it or not, but this car is made entirely out of divs.” (or a single div!!!)

Lines of Code

Delete Your Code and Other Reflections from Coderetreat Day This is a fantastic way to learn different development and testing techniques, and something you can do at home, or with coworkers:

In the version of Coderetreat that I participated in, there were 5 iterations, which were ~40 mins. chunks of time to attempt to solve the problem. For each iteration, we were provided with different constraints, deleted all of our code and switched to pair with someone new.

Great exercise, if you get to attached to your first solution:

I may want to incorporate this into my workflow by spending more time exploring various solutions to a problem and being okay doing a git reset or git stash and then trying a different approach.

amy nguyen 🙏

coworker: hey can you help me understand this code? i saw your name on the git blame from 2016...

me: docs and prayers 🙃

Peter Cooper “It says a lot about me that I found this bit on Computer Chronicles about "changing" a C program to C++ quite funny.”

Architectural

Dave Karow 👍

Don’t measure how often the build gets broken. Measure how quickly it gets fixed. That’s a better predictor of stability @RoyOsherove #GOTOcph

Peopleware

Making Work Less Stressful and More Engaging for Your Employees This is an article on how to avoid burn out. It has useful tips for contributors and their managers:

When employees connect the impact of their work back to the real world, daily tasks, which once seemed tedious, gain meaning. Start by making purpose a part of your business plan. Even if it’s not declared in your mission statement, help your team understand by showing them the impact their work has both within the company, in other departments, as well as outside the organization, on society. You should also share your purpose during recruitment, and search for candidates that support it.

Jorge Ortiz :

Burnout ratio = (how strongly you care) / (ability you have to change or influence)

Teamwork

Pointless work meetings 'really a form of therapy' Well, that seems easy enough to fix:

"Many managers don't know what to do," he says, and when they are "unsure of their role", they respond by generating more meetings.

"People like to talk and it helps them find a role," says the professor.

Many of these people can spend half of their working hours in meetings, he says.

Adam “There are only 4 types of developers in meetings.”

Startup Life

How to Design a Better Pitch Deck TL;DR

How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business – Phase 1: 🐣 Crack the Chicken-and-Egg Problem “Rare insights from 17 of today's biggest marketplaces”

Alexandre Lebrun “Breaking! Google Translate adds new language, VC Speak.” 😭

Locked Doors

Data Enrichment, People Data Labs and Another 622M Email Addresses Another day another breach. This one comes from a data enrichment vendor I've never heard of before. Until Friday … when I get the ‘have i been pwned’ alert in my email … and an Instagram ad from PDL in the timeline … creepy.

Electric Sheep

How to recognize AI snake oil Unfortunately, the people who need to see this presentation the most, are not going to read this. (Remember, from last week)

Common sense tells you this isn’t possible, and AI experts would agree. This product is essentially an elaborate random number generator.

Vicki Boykis 😭

It’s not covered much in art classes, but Van Gogh went through a period of poverty and desperation in the late 1880s that led him to sell out and paint training data for machine learning researchers.

Available To Hire

Signal boosting people looking for a job. If your company is hiring, or you know someone who is, reach out to them.

Tracy King Looking for: front-end engineering. 5+ years experience. Loves Angular and Vue. Speaker, blogger, community organizer. Based in DC. http://tracyking.me

Alejandro Oviedo Looking for: remote-first company to work on scalability, observability, and Node.js. Starting January. https://github.com/a0viedo

Kate Dameron Experience in JavaScript, React/Redux, Node.js, agile, a11y, MongoDb. Portland or remote. https://t.co/AP6cl9et74?amp=1

TaelurAlexis Interested in: developer advocate, accessibility, content creating. 1 year experience in JavaScript, React, GraphQL, Vue. Remote preferred/open to relocation. https://codeeveryday.io

None of the Above

Pablo Rochat “I made life-size AirPod stickers and stuck them on the ground, all over the city 🤡”

MsPackyetti 😭

Marriage is a lot of yelling logistical instructions across rooms and floors twice because they didn’t hear you the first time.

Molly Struve 🏖

Working remote from a vacation like destination is great for a couple hours then I'm like...

• I wish I had my extra monitor
• This chair makes my butt hurt
• My neck hurts from my laptop actually being on my lap
• I can't see my screen in this sunlight
• Where's a power outlet?

Jake Maccoby “A+ correction”

emrazz 💯

If women were allowed to get mad and men were allowed to get sad we’d all be a lot happier overall.

Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors I applaud Alexey Guzey's dedication (130 hours, 6,000 words) to debunking these oft-cited myths about sleep.

🛌 Especially, the 8 hours paradox: not everyone needs 8 hours of sleep. Paradoxically, stressing that you're not getting enough sleep could lead to insomnia. If you're not feeling sleep deprived than don't worry about it.

The Human Experience “A 72 year old retired man from Britain found out that a little mouse was tidying his tools, nobody believed him so he decided to record what happened and this was the result.”

Online Cesspool Got You Down? On the "luxury internet", offering people a better experience, for a price:

Well, check your credit-card statement. Today’s internet is full of premium subscriptions, walled gardens and virtual V.I.P. rooms, all of which promise a cleaner, more pleasant experience than their free counterparts.
…
Billions of people still use the free internet every day, of course. But it feels increasingly like wading into a sludge pit of algorithmically promoted misinformation, privacy-invading apps and subpar user experiences.

The entire issue is pretty great and appropriately designed.

How America’s Elites Lost Their Grip Time magazine predicts a backlash to American capitalism:

You can already see glimpses of how an age of reform is being dreamed up. Higher taxes on the very fortunate, to be sure; more regulation and worker protections and the like. An attack on climate change almost as dramatic as climate change itself. Programs to give workers greater security. It would be an age in which it was cooler, more thrilling, more admired, more viable to change the world democratically.

Sean Bartley “You little shit”

ding bat “Don't forget to tip your server”

Design Objective

Matthew Kobach “This is the greatest 5 minutes of storytelling of all time. 10 years later and I still get inspired by it.”

Land-book A cool website for landing page inspirations. (h/t Kuda Paradzayi)

Michelle Oh my …

“Our site is responsive. No problems.”

Me: that looks cheap for that hotel.

Turns phone landscape.

Oh. #testingmatters

Tools of the Trade

Fibery Interesting tool for building your own collaboration workflows. It's like if you could mix and match features from Asana, Trello, Notion, etc based on how your team likes to work.

One more thing to like. It has four different landing pages, and one of them is an “anxiety” landing page: it lists all the reasons not to use this product. And I'll admit, the reverse psychology worked on me.

Alan Wolfe 👇 Lots of different — some interesting and thought–provoking — replies to this thread, and in the quoted tweets:

Quote this tweet with an opinion about programming that will get you unjustly dunked on.
(I'm going first)

Now, most of these are opinions informed from personal anecdotes, no research cited. But there's something to learn from other people's experiences. Especially when it's different (language, tech, field, etc) than yours.

Tatiana Mac 😭

HTTP status codes give us all the vocab to talk about dating

300 multiple choices
303 see other
400 bad request
404 not found
408 request timeout
409 conflict
410 gone
412 precondition failed
413 request entity too large 😳
417 expectation failed
500 internal server error

Mar Hicks “holy fucking shit its a crab bubble sort”

Lines of Code

5 Things I’ve Learned in 20 Years of Programming Learning from other people's experience.

mountain_ghosts Every team needs a senior developer in this role:

hire me, a senior dev, to your team, where my main contribution will be going "I don't know" "I don't get this" "can you explain that in more detail" "why"

Mark Dalgleish 🤔

Developers during hackathon: We built an entire application in just 3 days.

Developers after hackathon: Adding that icon is going to take 3 weeks.

Contribution Throw Blanket “Snuggle up with a blanket that puts your GitHub contribution history to shame”

Architectural

Jean-Michel Lemieux 👇 What it takes to run Shopify on Black Friday:

How about some nerd stats for #BlackFriday2019 with @ShopifyEng?

128,000 Unicorn workers served 90m unique sessions at a steady 17M RPM (requests/min) throughout the day. Over 1b webhooks sent, transformed 280m webp images at the edge and 34b requests to CDNs. 74m Flows ran.

Code less, engineer more Less code > no code > bespoke:

Bespoke software development should be a last, rather than first, resort. We must set up our teams and companies to reward impact from reusing code rather resume-driven whole-cloth development. Write less code. Do more engineering.

Peopleware

Andrew Wilkinson The holiday season is good time to consider slowing down and taking it easy:

I’ve come to believe that minimizing tickers and the rate at which you have to make decisions is key to happiness.

Ticker = any indication of the current status of your goals/problems. Graphs. Charts. Red lines. Green lines. KPIs. Especially up to the minute, hour, or day.

Sandra Newman Not wrong:

THE SEVEN SECRETS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE

1. Private school
2. Legacy Ivy admission
3. Nepotism hire
4. Seed capital from family
5. Club memberships
6. Personal assistant, nanny, ghost writer
7. Journalists who ask, "What's your secret?" and uncritically publish the answer

Teamwork

increment: Teams Increment is a fantastic “magazine about how teams build and operate software systems at scale.” The latest issue is all about building, managing, and supporting teams. Highly recommended.

John Cutler How do we solve this?

observation

• vague is easy
• prescriptive is easy
• being crystal clear w/o being prescriptive is hard

Leaders often equate being vague w/empowerment, but IME ppl crave powerful, coherent context. And they want to have autonomy to solve the problem. Hard!#leadership

Laura Gao 😭 This tweet blew up like crazy:

Flight attendant: Is there a doctor onboard?

Dad: nudging me that should've been you

Me: Not now Dad

Dad: Not asking for a Product Manager to help, are they?

Me: Dad, there's a medical emergency happening right now

Dad: Go and see if “let’s have a follow-up meeting" helps

Here's to software developers, graphic designers, and many more.

Locked Doors

California DMV makes $50M a year off selling drivers’ data: Report Because, of course.

… sell personal data to the likes of the data broker LexisNexis, consumer credit reporting bureau Experian and many private investigators who advertise services trailing spouses suspected of cheating.

Techtopia

The ‘Silicon Six’ spread propaganda. It’s time to regulate social media sites. Goodwin's law and all, this has to be said:

Under this twisted logic, if Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Adolf Hitler to post 30-second ads on his “solution” to the “Jewish problem.”

That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It Just a reminder that online trolls and disinformation campaigns don't have a political view. Sowing discord is bipartisan. They play everyone. Be careful what you share:

Rather, Melanie’s audience was made up of educated, urban, left-wing Americans harboring a touch of self-righteousness. She wasn’t selling her audience a candidate or a position — she was selling an emotion. Melanie was selling disgust. The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.

WeWork Founder Adam Neumann 'Helped Kushner Craft Mideast Peace Plan' Man got a lot of con·fidence:

In this vein, the executive said, Neumann ended up “discussing the Syrian refugee crisis with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and urban planning with London Mayor Sadiq Khan.”

Available To Hire

Signal boosting people looking for a job. If your company is hiring, or you know someone who is, reach out to them.

Kumail Hunaid Looking for a full-time product engineering role. Skilled in building entire products - from visual integration testing tools, form builders, online marketplaces, and more. Remote/relocate. http://kumailht.com

Nikolay Talanov Front-end dev with 6 years of experience: React, Apollo GraphQL, CSS magic and animations. Located in Singapore, willing to relocate. https://codepen.io/suez

Swapnil Ogale If your product or system needs a Tech/API Writer, user advocate, or just someone passionate about docs. Freelancing, remote or contract.

Matt Dupree Primarily Android, but experience with React Native, React, Node, and iOS. Interested in building tech that helps people learn and/or make better decisions. https://philosophicalhacker.com

None of the Above

Rex Chapman “My man is blind. THIS is the Twitter content I’m here for...”

One Devloper Army 😭

Hi, I'm Bill gates and today I will teach you how to count to ten:

1
2
3
95
98
NT
2000
XP
VISTA
7
8
10

Good doggos Oops.

Kristofer Helgen 👇 Some good answers in this thread:

What is the wisest thing anyone has ever said to you

Like knock your socks off wise

Nic Sampson “Jesus it’s enormous”

David Spinks I do believe so. The future of brick & mortar is to zig when online retail zags. Online increases social isolation, so solve for that:

Retailers will survive Amazon by focusing on in-person community.

GameStop is converting their stores into gaming hubs.

Barnes and Nobel opened cafes.

REI is offering classes.

People are craving real connection and experience. Physical spaces offer a massive opportunity.

LEGO “The evolution of the truck is here. Guaranteed shatterproof”

Programmer Humor “days since last timezone issue”

Design Objective

Product Value: Hands, Shovel, or Tractor? “Product value is the perceived value your product adds to a user’s life.” This is a good framework for looking at products (and features) from the user's point of view.

dburka Most business models are pretty simple:

Designers are pushing each other to learn more about business, which is a great. But, keep in mind that you don't need to need an MBA or an economics degree to ask "How does my organization make money?" and work backwards from there to learn how most decisions are made. 💸

Joel Califa 😭

Less than 3 days since I started working on my new side project, and it's already almost done! Title TBD but it's a password puzzle game:

Kelly Sutton Interesting take:

Design tools are outside the critical path of a finished software product.

You can build an app without Sketch or Figma, you can’t do special effects without AE or equivalent.

Mike Rundle: The current era of UI design tools we use daily are a joke compared to the power and flexibility of other professional software like SolidWorks, RenderMan, Maya, Unity, Ableton Live, After Effects (and others) used by design professionals in other fields. Why is that?

Tools of the Trade

obiwankimberly “As all programmers know, estimating is hard.”

lemire Knuth did it: The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 5 is out!!! (Was supposed to come out in 1960.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0134671791/

Sara Vieira “GraphQL and Rest Differences explained with burgers 🍔”

axbom 👇 A reminder to calibrate your tests:

1. In 2008 a salmon (yes the fish) was put through an MRI scanner. The salmon was shown a series of photographs of humans in social situations, and asked to determine the emotion of the person in the photo (yes, really).

foone Just a reminder of how far things have come:

OK SO let's say it's 1962 and you're lucky enough to be a programmer working somewhere that has an IBM 7090.
This is a top of the line transistorized revision of the IBM 709, capable of 100,000 floating point operations per second.

But how do you code for it?

cats can have a little salami “I'm gonna tell my kids this was the cloud” (context)

Web-end

Guy Bedford How come I just learned about this?

Periodic reminder that await import('//dev.jspm.io/[pkg]') allows you to import anything from npm in the browser instantly. I often use this in the console to test things out.

Star Simpson 🤯

This is my new favorite galaxy brain stackoverflow answer: abusing double-precision float behavior to make discontinuous CSS rules. It works and I truly hate it. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40528290/how-to-implement-max-font-size/53146935#53146935

Web Bloat Score Calculator “WebBS” is such a fitting name:

Page web bloat score (WebBS for short) is calculated as follows:

WebBS = TotalPageSize / PageImageSize

TotalPageSize is the size of all requests, and PageImageSize is the size of a full-page screenshot.

Lingua Scripta

Dylan Beattie 😂

It's not that JavaScript is broken, you understand.

It's just that the language specification contains plot twists.

ES2020 Speaking of plot twists, optional chaining (foo?.bar) and nullish coalescing (foo ?? bar) are now part of ES2020, and enabled by default in Babel.js.

Architectural

Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud This is an interesting problem to solve. If anyone working on it, let me know:

The authors coin the phrase “local-first software” to describe software that retains the ownership properties of old-fashioned applications, with the sharing and collaboration properties of cloud applications.

Peopleware

Some tips for supporting friends in executive dysfunction crisis 👍

Executive function is a broad term for the cognitive system humans use to start and stop tasks, direct goal-oriented effort, and make decisions in our self-interest, among many other things. 99% of what people call "adulting" is actually an exercise of executive function.

…

There are two main ways to help a person in an executive dysfunction crisis:
• Don't put things on their plate.
• Take things off their plate.
…

Jesse Noller 👍

Random thought: I’ve stopped worrying as a (leader, person, parent) about the people who speak up and express themselves.

People who speak up are invested, mentally and emotionally. Worry about the ones who used to talk, or who simply don’t.

Ethan Mollick That's a significant sample size:

Experiment with 60,000 job applicants to Uber shows that the words used in a job description changes who applies. Optional language in descriptions appear to be taken more seriously by women then men, leading to more credentialed women than men applying. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YKifRzy_kWuIIdB3MLS4VHht3okJa8pa/view

Teamwork

The most important thing Dropbox did to scale Product Management This I find super helpful. I wish more people would operate this way:

Separated getting agreement on the problem from getting agreement on the solution.

It’s hard for me overstate the importance of getting agreement on the problem you’re trying to solve before beginning work on the solution, particularly once there are many stakeholders from different parts of the business.

Grinding 👍

If given a choice between a flashy operator or a grinder, I will take a grinder every time. It is a much higher percentage bet. It requires faith and patience and the results are sometimes hard to see. But if you look at the results from grinding it out over a long enough time frame, you can see the power of that approach.

johncutlefish

Really love this. 60+ companies represented. 150+ ppl

• Experiments that resulted in increased momentum
• Experiments that "failed", but that taught the team something new

You can explore the board here

Startup Life

Emotional Baggage Verge goes to town on the toxic work environment at ~luggage~ travel company Away. And people have opinions about it. This thread has a varied collection from founders and VCs.

My opinion? All of this can be true at the same time:

1. Away has a toxic work environment, I mean seriously, cancelling PTO is a ‘lesson in accountability‘? These Slack messages are prime example of gaslighting.
2. But also, CX is a difficult job: they make up for deficiencies in other teams (that's the job); and direct-to-consumer companies get extra busy during holiday season.
3. Not all business models are high margin, it's common to be stretched thin and way under-staffed and make bad judgement calls at 3AM.
4. This article is a hit piece — this burnout culture is an industry playbook, pinning it on a single company is exactly what a ‘hit piece‘ means.
5. This is both a takedown of Away, and indirectly a jab at Slack.
6. The lesson may well be: “Never work for your dream brand”

David Rogier 👇 Thread:

I don’t know the secret to starting a great company. I am not sure there is one. But a few things that helped me starting out:

1. Picking a few constraints. They fueled my creativity. My first one: pick an idea that even if it fails, I’ll be proud of it.

VC Starter Kit “If you assemble enough people wearing Patagonia vests, a venture fund spontaneously forms around them.”

(Don't now if anyone is buying these, but proceeds go to All Raise, so that's good)

Locked Doors

Firefox Year In Review 🔥

How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers Winner of the obfuscated HTML competition.

Available To Hire

Signal boosting people looking for a job. If your company is hiring, or you know someone who is, reach out to them.

Jessica Joy Kerr Available for consulting (or contracting, or full time work). “Help your team become a learning system of learning parts.” https://blog.jessitron.com/consulting/

Dan Klinedinst Senior security person ~20 years experience. Pittsburgh or remote. Would love to stay in robotics/AI.

None of the Above

Glitter “are you kidding me”

Andrew Myers 🤔

In mathematics, the purpose of the prefix co- is to turn something you don't really understand into something you really don't understand.

ESPN “Incredible ending! 👶”

No Quarter Will Be Given 🚌 What a story …

Oooff. Overhearing this relationship in trouble on the shuttle bus and the guy just told the girl, "I love you and I want to make us work but you're mean AS FUCK and it's wearing me down."

She's just looking at him like she knows he's right but doesn't know what to do about it.

Akki “The best use of technology is to improve the quality of life”

rands 📦 this gift doesn't cost money or add to pollution:

Early Xmas gift. Go to your TO DO list and delete that TO DO that has been there forever and is never going to happen. AhhhhhHHhh.

talia “this is so much better with sound”

jaycaspiankang 👇 This. So much this. 😬 If you're working on a podcast app that automatically edits-out the narcissist host, send link:

Someone should write an essay comparing first person journalistic intrusions in print/articles/books and first person journalistic ‘hosting’ in podcasts. Seems like there is a lot there that touches on how modern narcissism operates.

Theo “Give me fucking strength.”

mykola 👇 This thread will ressure you that every field/industry has dark secrets:

Please quote this tweet with a thing that everyone in your field knows and nobody in your industry talks about because it would lead to general chaos.

Casey Newton “Sometimes Google goes two or three months without launching a new messaging app and I get worried. So this news comes as a great relief”

Google’s Double OGs Step Down at Alphabet I mean, this happened years ago, Google only remembered to announce it publicly this week. Speaking of monopolies, did you know Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates once made an Austin Powers parody? (h/t Jon Erlichman)

James O'Malley 🔥 DC Films still doesn’t know how to make Superman “relevant to modern audiences”, well …

Lex Luthor realises he can’t physically out-match Superman, so instead uses a disinformation campaign to destroy not just Superman’s reputation, but the idea of Superman.

The twist is that it isn’t Superman that can beat Luthor… It’s journalist Clark Kent. https://twitter.com/Forbes/status/1200459413791924228

Disappearing Polymorphs Revisited - Bučar - 2015 Know the feeling when the build starts failing for no reason … imagine manufacturing a drug, and one day it changes into a different crystal form, and you can’t re-produce the old crystal again.

Someone please help the woman from Peloton's awful new ad So the Peloton ad was really … ugh … everyone's talking about it so clearly the ad got visibility but … this thread explains so of the reaction.

‘Peloton Girl’ Stars as Herself in the Greatest Sequel Ever: An Aviation Gin Ad Shout out to Aviation Gin for this delightful chaser ad 😂

Jesse Morgan “Going to tell my kids this was ABBA.”

🙌 Welcome new subscribers. Glad you signed up. You’re in good company.

Once a week I post interesting stuff I find on the internet. I hope you’ll find this edition of Weekend Reading interesting and funny.

No spam. No ads. But if you’re looking for a job in tech, email me a short “looking for” and link to your online profile, and I’ll include it in next week’s newsletter: assaf@labnotes.org

It’s free to subscribe, and did I mention no spam? So share with your friends. Link to subscribe: labnotes.org.

Design Objective

The State of UX in 2020 Another great yearly exploration from UX Collective.

It's time we stopped drawing lines around who is a designer and who is not. UX is a fast-growing discipline, and we need to enlist everyone's superpowers in order to deliver the experiences people really need.

scott belsky ‼️

for perspective on just how long it takes for product defaults to change despite how important (and time saving) proper defaults are: address book still defaults phone number field to “home,” not mobile.

when’s the last time you entered someone’s home phone number?

Nafnlaus 👀

Design Skill: A Comparison

Tesla: Cutout is sized for the cable to fit inside, sheltered, and follow its contours

Lincoln: Rips off Tesla's design, but makes the cutout a little too small for the cable, so it sticks out awkwardly.

Ford: "I'm not even going to try"

ht/PeterJA

Kelly Moran That's one way to solve design indecision …

You can not be serious. You're asking users to rate the spacing on your website? This must be a terrible place for designers to work. #badsurvey

Artëm Chistyakov “Apple iTunes is like an app designed by someobe who’s never used a computer app but read a Microsoft Access 2000 manual cover to cover. Which song is playing?”

Tools of the Trade

a ft “zipで圧縮したpdf”

Alfredo Lopez 👇 On the difficulty of contributing to open source for the very first time. Too many unwritten rules.

I've been hesitant to post this, but after contributing and attempting to contribute to a few open source projects; I've found there are several unwritten rules that prevent first-timers from contributing regardless of their level/experience. Allow me to explain...

Matthew Green 🔥

Reminder: never close someone’s Linux laptop. They may never get it to wake up again.

Amber Slack.

What would you use 1.5 TB of RAM for?

How I Eat For Free in NYC Using Python, Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Instagram Cool hack. I guess that count as “passive income”:

I was able to go about my life; work at my job, go out with friends, see a movie— never having to worry about spending any time manually growing my page. It had the formula to do its thing while I did my thing.

Andromeda Yelton 😹

Current laptop model:

• two retina screens
• crashes infrequent but hilarious
• not a lot of memory
• excellent ambient light sensors
• not much activity before power nap is required
• speakers sound staticky when multitouch in use
• very fuzzy
• actually a cat

Archillect “Computer Angel”

Web-end

Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2019 refresh What an amazing web site.

Tomasz Łakomy “Backend developer attempting to fix a CSS issue”

Devoops

Taylor Swope 👇 Fixing the elusive bug. Story time:

We released patch 1.2 of #TheOuterWorlds today, and it includes a fix for the dreaded "the game thinks my companions are dead" bug, which I believe I spent more time investigating than I have for any other individual bug in my career (1/18)

sleepy bit rot 🤔

i'm not a network engineer, i'm a relationships counsellor for computers who don't wanna talk to each other anymore

Teamwork

Emily Key “Can we get on a quick call? A workflow 👇🏼”

Startup Life

Product Zeitgeist Fit: A Cheat Code for Spotting and Building the Next Big Thing Good ideas and execution are only successful if they come at the right time. Here's a framework for understanding “product zeitgeist fit”.

Balaji S. Srinivasan This has been pretty much my 2019:

A founder starts as lead engineer and ends up chief psychologist.

Locked Doors

Failed plot to steal domain name at gunpoint brings 14-year prison term 😬

Q: “What's your threat model?”
A: “Someone will break into my home, and force me to do a domain transfer at gun point”
…

What’s yours is ours This will make for an interesting TV drama:

On Thursday, December 12, Russian law enforcement raided the Moscow office of the IT company “Nginx,” which owns the eponymous web-server used by almost 500 million websites around the world. According to several reports, Nginx co-founders Igor Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov spent several hours in police interrogation.

Christina Farr 👇 How public is your health data:

THREAD: A lot of folks are rightfully worried about tech companies like Amazon and Google gaining access to their health data.

But here are some legal, and very common, ways that health care companies are already taking advantage of your data:

Available To Hire

Signal boosting people looking for a job. If your company is hiring, or you know someone who is, reach out to them.

Amy If you’re looking for a Kubernetes application developer skilled in... • crying over client-go • reading kubebuilder & k8s docs • measuring indents & deciphering YAML • & fuqin around with gRPC / proto files https://www.youtube.com/AmyCodes

Jesús Ferretti Full-stack JavaScript dev: React.js, Next.js, GraphQL, Prisma, GraphQL Nexus, serverless deployment with ZEIT Now, API integrations, CSS-in-JS. Looking for remote work. https://github.com/jferrettiboke

Žan Anderle Consultant, full stack web engineer (Python, Django, Angular, UX), training/mentoring. https://zanderle.com/hire-me/

Elizabeth Product-obsessed start-up support expert: improve your processes from customer experience to internal training and tools. https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizposadas/

None of the Above

Ree “focus on a different child every time you watch 😂😂”

Kimberly King Parsons I'm in good company:

Took Me Eleven Minutes to do That Thing I've Been Avoiding for Three Months: A Memoir

Dad's Puns So sorry. I couldn't resist.

When does a joke become a dad joke?

When it becomes apparent.

nina jacobson “Just a little inter species wrestling match”

Catherine na Nollag 🤦‍♀️

i still think my favourite thing that's ever happened to me on the internet is the time a guy said "people change their minds when you show them facts" and I said "actually studies show that's not true" and linked TWO sources and he said "yeah well I still think it works"

Vikas Shah MBE “My goal in life is to be THIS happy”

How You Can Actually Read One Non-Fiction Book Every Week “A realistic guide to getting the most from any book you choose in record time”

Best of Nextdoor I know that dog!

How To Leave Toxic Diet Culture Behind And Pursue Actual Health You can also listen to the podcast.

The result has been nothing short of miraculous in my life. I finally felt like my body and I were a well functioning team, my weight stabilized, and I felt healthier and happier than I had ever felt both mentally and physically. I had a ton of time, money and energy to devote to things other than weight loss attempts, and I used it to do things that I had always wanted to do.

Jennifer Wright This mouse is wiser than most people.

The Other Shoe Drops: Away Fires CEO Steph Korey After Months-Long Search for Her Replacement A plot twist to the Away drama from last week. Apparently the board was looking for a new CEO, and the Verge story just happened to drop at the righ time.

Shann Biglione “Finally a brand that's right for the meme. French supermarket chain Carrefour.”

TWTR: Enough Already 🔥

Few people have benefited more from Donald Trump’s election than Jack Dorsey.

The Deep Sea Amazing visualization.

Risachantag 2019.

Design Objective

Tuhin Kumar 👇 That's some cool design chops in this thread:

Over the last year I got to work on bringing fluidity to the Airbnb app.

We looked across entire guest side and through critical journeys and established a spatial model of our “canvas” — system (account & camera), map, base and scrim (media + modality).

Frontend Focus The top articles, stories, and tutorials of 2019.

Tools of the Trade

SQL Murder Mystery Learn SQL by trying to solve this murder mystery.

A crime has taken place and the detective needs your help. The detective gave you the crime scene report, but you somehow lost it. You vaguely remember that the crime was a murder that occurred sometime on Jan.15, 2018 and that it took place in SQL City. Start by retrieving the corresponding crime scene report from the police department’s database.

Jonathan Carter “In order to make it easier to visually explore HTML/JS/CSS, directly in @code, GistPad (https://aka.ms/gistpad) now allows you to create "Web playgrounds" that are fully editable mini web apps, that provide a live preview, and are persisted as GitHub Gists 🚀”

Giuliana Taylor Every year end, I get reminded about this. Every year end, I freak out a little bit, and scan the entire codebase for rogue Y's.

It's not just Java that does this, all libraties that are based on TR35. TR35 is why we can't have nice things.

PSA: TIS THE SEASON TO CHECK YOUR FORMATTERS, PEOPLE

TIL that Java's DateTimeFormatter pattern "YYYY" gives you the week-based-year, (by default, ISO-8601 standard) the year of the Thursday of that week.

12/29/2019 formats to 2019
12/30/2019 formats to 2020

Running a Website Monitoring Service with a Boring Technology Keep it simple, stick to stuff that works, and you know well (you can always change it later):

There is nothing wrong with using an old, boring technology. It feels ridiculous to even state that, but a lot of people in this industry are practicing HDD or RDD, AKA. Hype Driven Development or Resume Driven Development. Don’t get carried away by the hype. In fact, ignore most (if not all) of it. When in doubt, avoid complexity

ML Super Resolution - Pixelmator Blog “Making this available in an app like Pixelmator Pro has only become possible in the last couple of years” Maybe CSI wasn't far-off after all?

Jonathan Tietz Patent application be like:

"A Novel and Useful System for Ruling Middle Earth."

WHAT IS CLAIMED IS:

1. A system of rings, comprising:
   (a) a plurality of lesser rings; and
   (b) a bringing-them-all-and-in-the-darkness-binding-them ring.

Tool Of The Day So this is how you cut wood!

Lingua Scripta

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs — Adapted to JavaScript The official introduction to computer science (and a really good book), now in a programming language you'll actually use.

trekhleb/nano-neuron “🤖 NanoNeuron is 7 simple JavaScript functions that will give you a feeling of how machines can actually ‘learn’”

Lines of Code

Justin Searls 💯

Nobody learns how to write good software without writing lots lots of bad software first. Don't let fear that your code will suck paralyze you.

Challenging projects every programmer should try - Austin Z. Henley Getting into programming, or want to up-level your skills?

Below is a handful of software projects that taught me a lot. In fact, they're great because you could build them multiple times and learn new things each time. So whenever I don't know what to build or I want to learn a new programming language or framework, I start with one of these:

• Text editor
• 2D game - Space Invaders
• Compiler - Tiny BASIC
• Mini operating system
• Spreadsheet (hard!)
• Video game console emulator (hard!)

The Best Linux Blog In the Unixverse “This is how act when my code doesn't work ... ”

Devoops

‏Chris Adams‎ “It’s never a bad idea to put a negative check for your test data into your production monitoring” Free trade isn’t forever: USDA tariff tracker removes fictional Wakanda as country

Deploy or Die - card game “Deploy or Die is a card game from webdevelopment environment. The goal is successfully deploy the three Deploy cards.”

Teamwork

François Chollet Not all people are the same, but do accommodate for people who work this way:

I believe deep thinking can only be done in writing. To follow an idea seriously, you must constantly pause to consider all possibilities, which takes time and care

Startup Life

First Round State of Startups 2019 Investment bubbles, diversity and inclusion, Glassdoor reviews, remote work, mental health, and the community moat.

Assaf Investors don't care what your deck looks like, but if a polished deck helps you present with confidence, worth a few $$$. Not this though … I can't even:

Jason Shuman 👟:
Founder friend just told me that SF deck designers have quoted him between $20K to $40K + the right to invest up to $250K...my mind is officially blown

Locked Doors

The Influencer and the Hit Man: How a Years-Long Domain Name Feud Ended in a Bloody Shootout I mentioned this domain heist last week. This is the full story: the people behind it, the domain, and why it mattered so much. Entertaining read.

Tom Simonite When unintended consequences hit you in the face:

Interesting things happened after San Francisco banned facial recognition:

1. Staff discovered they had made city-issued iPhones unlawful, because of Apple's Face ID.

2. SFPD had to disable a facial recognition system it had kept from public knowledge

TwistedDoodles “Cookies for Santa. #gdpr”

Techtopia

kate conger “Lyft is having a bit of a rough time with its community guidelines”

Deepfake Bot Submissions to Federal Public Comment Websites Cannot Be Distinguished from Human Submissions | Technology Science Recreating the net neutrality fake feedback.

The bot generated and submitted 1,001 deepfake comments to the public comment website at Medicaid.gov over a period of four days. … Survey respondents, who were trained and assessed through exercises in which they distinguished more obvious bot versus human comments, were only able to correctly classify the submitted deepfake comments half (49.63%) of the time … This study demonstrates that federal public comment websites are highly vulnerable to massive submissions of deepfake comments …

Also, GPT-2 — we're going to regret this piece of technology for many years to come.

Available To Hire

Signal boosting people looking for a job. If your company is hiring, or you know someone who is, reach out to them.

Lindsay Rae Grizzard Looking for part-time design contracts until April 15th. http://lindsaygrizzard.com

Wang Dan Senior web/mobile developer: Angular, React, Vue, Python, NodeJS, PHP, .Net, iOS/Android. https://portfolio-42c84.web.app/

Min and her Cat Looking for a new job/gig starting Feb/March. React, React Native, some TS.

Michał Januszewski My entire team was laid off this afternoon. Looking for iOS job once again. Warsaw/remote preferred.

None of the Above

Lynn Fisher “When you see a Baby Yoda cookie hack you try the Baby Yoda cookie hack.”

Peter Sheridan Dodds 🤣

An escape room for academics:

You have to finish your current paper. That’s it.

Glenn Moore 🤣

I quoted the line ‘They were no longer little girls. They were little women’ in a school essay and found out later it wasn’t in the book and it was just something Moe said

Jason Schwartz This does sound very Boston:

Me: People should stop caricaturing Boston.

Boston: A man from Southie stole a truck loaded with $10,000 in lobsters, prompting another lobster truck to give chase, resulting in a crash between the two lobster trucks.

Foiled Lobster Truck Heist in Charlestown “Was a Very Boston Experience for Everyone Involved”

Danny Deraney “Because you want to see a baby piggy that was raised by a Pitbull, act like a Pitbull with its mommy.”

Charles Ornstein You're probably thinking, “of course they do!” And the data says so. What's interesting about this ProPublica project, this page, where you can search is your doctor paid to prescribe? This is journalism at it's best.

1/ For 10 years, my colleagues and I have been dogged by one mammoth question:

Do doctors who receive a pharma payment linked to a particular drug prescribe more of that drug?

We finally have an answer. 👇👇

China flight systems jammed by pig farm’s African swine fever defences 🐖 What a story:

Chinese state media reported last week that gangs were exploiting the African swine fever crisis by deliberately spreading the disease by using drones to drop infected items on to pig farms. The farmers are then forced to sell meat cheaply to the gangs, who then sell it on as healthy stock, according to China Comment magazine, which is affiliated to state news agency Xinhua.

When Does the New Decade Begin: In a Month, or a Year From Now? Simple question with a simple answer. Do you want to be that person at the NY party that nobody can stand?

The Unexplained “This guy made a tiny apartment in an electrical outlet”

The Miseducation of the American Boy That's not what I hoped would happen to our youth:

Feminism may have provided girls with a powerful alternative to conventional femininity, and a language with which to express the myriad problems-that-have-no-name, but there have been no credible equivalents for boys. Quite the contrary: The definition of masculinity seems to be in some respects contracting.

Blossom “Wrapping gifts got a whole lot easier with these clever ideas!”

Chaz Hutton “Welcome to the nothing time.”

Design Objective

The Navy Installed Touch-screen Steering Systems To Save Money. Ten Sailors Paid With Their Lives. Yes, good design does save lives!

Amy “Ruins Social Media” Hoy 👇 This thread is good read, worth your time. A couple of highlights that resonated with me:

\17. design has a passion problem

it attracts people who want to Do Cool Shit which is, as the obnoxiously overbearing nerds like to say, “orthogonal” to doing a good job of the thing design ACTUALLY IS, which is caretaking &; stewardship

I've seen too many designers fall for these trappings. Which often results in working on the wrong thing:

\9. there is much that is objective about Design Quality - and it’s not stickiness, but successful task completions, time per task, fudging and going back and trying again,

but you can’t get those out of google analytics and that’s why you virtually never hear about it

Tools of the Trade

RICE Scoring Model for Prioritisation - Lazaro Ibanez A simple forumla to prioritize different features/projects/tasks. Like all formula, the weak link are the numbers you plug in, which are not entirely objective. But if you stick to one context (same PM, team, etc), then you can compare apples to apples.

Chad Loder 👇 Epic rant about technical debt and over-engineering:

One day we’ll all wake up and realize Kubernetes was a huge scam.

Doing this for 25 years, I’ve learned something:

Whatever the Thing is that you can’t get people to shut up about?

It’s invariably the Thing that creates a giant turd-polishing ecosystem.

There is utility initially, and then it turns into urban decay.

1970’s Detroit. Or EJB.

Pranay Pathole “Secrets computer developers don’t want you to know”

Teamwork

Tobi Lutke 👇 It's the holidays, so of course Twitter is debating whether people should be working 40 or 80 hours a week. Here's a good perspective, from one of the better success stories in tech:

I realize everyone's twitter feed looks different. But I'll go ahead and subtweet two conversations that I see going by right now: a) How the heck did Shopify get so big this decade and b) You have to work 80 hours a week to be successful.

Thread/

Justin Kan 👍

The most important success factor in your work is who you choose to work with.

This has been more important to my success than having the right idea, the right resources, or anything else. Having the right people around you is the difference between success and failure.

Jennifer Kim Also known as DRI, or directly responsible individual:

StartupHiringTips: For each new opening, be sure to designate a clear Hiring Manager, aka Decision Maker.

Good hiring is done not by a committee, but a single individual who owns the decision.

There are 2 main reasons for this, which I’ll explain in this short thread 👇

cgosimon 😂

Apparently assigning work to other people via an electronic tool is “collaboration”

Startup Life

Founders — Get Your Own Personal Board The personal board that will help you through challenging times: the professional mentor, the mental health coach, the bigger picture person, and the pressure release valve.

Tren Griffin 👇 Thread:

1/ People often get confused how the existence of a moat translates into a better investment return. The moat increases the probability that the business will continue to earn returns on capital that substantially exceed the opportunity cost of capital. http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/pdfiles/eqnotes/cap.pdf

Locked Doors

Bully For the people in the back …

Blockchain isn’t some magic silver bullet that will protect user privacy.

So far, it’s very much been the opposite.

An immutable public ledger doesn’t really scream “privacy!”

There’s a reason China is embracing blockchain. And it sure as hell isn’t protecting user privacy.

Adam Liaw 🌲🎅

Home security reminder. A lot of people are going away for Christmas which makes their homes easy pickings for burglars. For security reasons I strongly recommend leaving one of your children behind to construct a series of elaborate booby traps and defend your interests.

Yousef “When someone tries attacking your site but fails”

None of the Above

Owen Williams 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 “all the feels”

Susie Dent So there's a word for it:

It’s surely time for this again.

scurryfunge (verb; US dialect, 1800s): to dash around the house in a frenzied attempt to tidy up before visitors arrive.

that's not funny elle “cat's a master of physical comedy”

不変哲 “犬をもだます人形使い…” And the poor doggy is so confused …

Channa Prakash “Pedestrian crossing during the marathon race”

The 84 biggest flops, fails, and dead dreams of the decade in tech Some unexpected contenders in there, and some products I forgot even existed in the first place.

Downtown Josh Brown “Advanced Dad Skills”

Andrew Reid “This is what I think of every time someone smugly posts about all the plot holes they spotted in a popular film/TV show/book.” (The original post is here)

Cute Emergency “This video will make your day 😊😊”

Kitze “design vs dev”

Hey there Weekend Readers. I hope you’re having a great start to a fresh new year.

📆 January is the busiest month for job seekers and hiring managers everywhere.

So if you’re looking for a new job, drop me a link and I’ll include you in next week’s newsletter.

If you’re the hiring manager, please … no whiteboard interviews.

And if you’re saying goodbye to a co-worker, I know this can be rough. Hand in there.

And if you just landed a new job … good luck! 😉

Design Objective

Inside the secret world of price tag codes There is a “secret menu”, and it's part of the user experience/customer retention:

Other retailers have similar codes: At Home Depot, prices ending in $X.06 are on sale but will drop further in 6 weeks, while prices ending in $X.03 are marked down fully and will disappear forever in 3 weeks.

… But what do the retailers get out of these mind games? …

These “price vocabularies” are the secret menus of big retailers — they engage shoppers by letting them in on a “secret” and create loyalty among the frequent shoppers (who matter most to large retailers) by making them feel like they’re in the club.

Austin Petersmith 👇 Speaking of pricing, if Alice in Wonderland made too much sense, then check this thread on SaaS pricing …

For a team of 10 users, Jira costs $100/year
For a team of 11 users, it costs $1050/year

Alun Jones “Yes. Yes, that's what I meant!”

Tools of the Trade

A Recap of Frontend Development in 2019 - Level Up Coding A look back at the top events, news, and trends for frontend and web development.

Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) For when you need to transmit binary data, and want the schema-less convenience of JSON. Aaron Abramov:

i just switched data serialization in my app from JSON to CBOR and got 10x perf improvement. how did i not know about it before? took literally 10 min to migrate

Kristian Köhntopp 👀

A: dns record
AA: battery
AAA: battery
AAAA: dns record

Andrew M. Webb This applies to more than animals, eg using sample data to measure application performance:

To count an animal population if you can't catch them all: capture some, mark them, release, and capture again. The ratio of new vs already seen tells you something about the total number. Shown here is iterated mark-and-recapture with a Bayesian updates to belief about pop size

Allison Grayce “when u discover a feature that would have saved u tons of time for a project that just wrapped”

Lingua Franca

JavaScript Weekly sums their most popular links of 2019 Catch up on the best of 2019.

Michel Weststrate 🤔

I figured I'm tired of seeing const vs let vs var, so from now on I won't use any of those.

I call it "functional programming"

Lines of Code

Jef Poskanzer If you have a date-related bug, just time-shift it by a few decades. It is now “other people's problem”:

Apparently a non-trivial number of systems are experiencing #Y2020 bugs. A common Y2K "fix" just postponed things by 20 years, interpreting 00-19 as the 2000s and 20-99 as the 1900s. 20 years is now up, some of those systems are still in use, and they think it's 1920. Oooops.

Changelog “new year, same old bugs”

Peopleware

Cyd Harrell Not “untidy“, I prefer “differently organized“:

I see a ton today about resolutions, goals, self-tracking, & discipline. if those things work for you, then bless! but if you’re like me & you work through gut feelings, opportunism, & just enough order, please don’t feel bad. we untidy folks get a lot done too. be you 💪❤️

Beautiful Brains (PDF) This is one part manifesto, one part a getting started guide for improving mental health in the workplace:

Beautiful Brains is a no-nonsense roadmap that shows you how to get to the heart of what makes a true culture of wellness. It combines culture change with progressive policy so employers can stop relying on quick fixes and get to the root of this crisis. And employees can start making their workplace work for them.

Teamwork

Jason Evanish 👇 Epic thread about product management, maybe the most misunderstood profession. If you are/working with product manager, you'll want to check this out. Few picks (it was so hard to choose):

25/ Quick Wins (aka - simple things you can do to make the product better for your customers) is a great way to let your team recharge and build some momentum after shipping a big feature.

Sometimes customers are more excited by this than your big feature.

37/ The #1 skill to develop to be a better PM is to become a better writer.

49/ PMs should be tool agnostic. Whatever your engineers will actually use and keep up to date is the project management tool you want to use.

The tool you love for the burn down and gannt charts is not the hill to die on if all your engineers hate it.

Startup Life

I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea Sometimes you have a solid product idea that fills a real need, an MVP that works, yet no way to turn it into a profitable business …

All stakeholders. You can’t just create value for the user: that’s a charity. You also can’t just create value for your company: that’s a scam. Your goal is to set up some kind of positive-sum exchange, where everyone benefits, including you. A business plan, according to this textbook, starts with this simple question: how will you create value for yourself and the company?

How the Digg team was acquihired. What it's like to go through an acquihire:

About a year after the catastrophic Digg V4 launch, our last-ditch experiment to salvage the site showed a spark of hope. We’d cajoled our way into a Facebook beta that allowed us to publish each Digg users’s read articles into their Facebook newsfeed, sending every clicking friend directly to Digg’…

You'd think that when one company buys another company — team of people, culture, IP and code — they would be wiser about it. But chances, there will still be a whiteboard interview.

The 20 top reasons startups fail (2019 edition) (PDF) CB insights looks at the top reasons why startup fails, and it's very much what you imagine.

Locked Doors

Matthew Green “Remember when Facebook collected millions of phone numbers — ostensibly to secure user accounts — then used them for targeted advertising? By all means, give them your private health data.”

Techtopia

Chris Herd 👇 Chris shares some predictions on what the 2020's – the Remote Work decade — will look like:

🚜 Rural Living: World-class people will move to smaller cities, have a lower cost of living & higher quality of life

These regions must innovate quickly to attract that wealth. Better schools, faster internet connections are a must

✅ Output focus: time will be replaced as the main KPI for judging performance by productivity and output

Great workers will be the ones who deliver what they promise consistently

Advancement decisions will be decided by capability rather than who you drink beer with after work

I think all of that is likely, but in ten year's time, we'll also witness the reverse trend, towards companies that can build and maintain a strong local workforce.

Arvind Narayanan 👇This thread talks about YouTube and radicalization, but more important, about the limits of our ability to research:

A new paper has been making the rounds with the intriguing claim that YouTube has a de-radicalizing influence. https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11211

Having read the paper, I wanted to call it wrong, but that would give the paper too much credit, because it is not even wrong. Let me explain.

The key takeaway for me:

If you’re wondering how such a widely discussed problem has attracted so little scientific study before this paper, that’s exactly why. Many have tried, but chose to say nothing rather than publish meaningless results, leaving the field open for authors with lower standards.

In our data-driven world, the claim that we don’t have a good way to study something quantitatively may sound shocking. The reality even worse — in many cases we don’t even have the vocabulary to ask meaningful quantitative questions about complex socio-technical systems.

Vlad Magdalin Sometimes I miss “email and just email and nothing but email”:

My group chat stack:

• Wife+kids → iMessage
• Besties → Marco Polo
• Siblings → Telegram
• Wife’s fam → Viber
• Church friends → Messenger
• EU friends → WhatsApp
• Tech friends → Twitter
• Work → Slack

Wanted seamless communication, got annoying fragmentation.

ICE Contract With GitHub Sparks Developer Protests Open source has a moral dilemma and no easy solution.

Available To Hire

Signal boosting people looking for a job. If your company is hiring, or you know someone who is, reach out to them.

Andy Bell 👇 New year, new job. Check this thread for people looking to start 2020 with a new job.

Women Who Design 👇 This thread is specifically for woman who designs, looking for new job, speaking opportunity, or growing their design busines.

Matthew Looking for that unique glue between design and engineering? Product Designer. I design and build UIs for the Web. https://matthewmorek.com/about/

None of the Above

Daniel Sugarman “As we approach the end of the decade, let’s remember the best TV moment of the 2010s:”

Chinchillazllla 😂

If you have dirt on your boss, message me on Signal. I'm not a journalist or anything I just love drama

Crazed54678 “When the harsh sun is directly overhead in Hawaii, everything looks like a shitty video game render.”

Rowan Simpson 😂

Nobody ever asks the family if they want to spend more time with the former CEO

Kelly Vaughn 🐞 “Businesses, take note. This is how you do Google reviews.”

Nora Loreto 🤔

Remember how a decade ago we all stole music from the Internet and the only problem with it was that artists weren't being paid?

And then somehow, a decade later, we all pay for our music now but artists still aren't being paid?

Apollo Arts | COMMISSIONS OPEN “I didn’t ask to think this hard”

Steve Stewart-Williams “Holy crap, this is incredible: A dog playing Jenga. Turn-taking, fine motor control, apparent understanding of the aim of the game. I would not have guessed a dog could do this.”

This is a magic trick. The slight of hand is the person (off camera) directing the dog. It makes the dog believably human. Which makes this video so fun to watch.

Calum 😱

Dough behavior expert here. You may think it's cute, but balls of dough actually only do this when they're scared. This dough ball is terrified. Possibly because it's being repeatedly struck with a wooden spoon

The BBC Dracula billboard … that’s creative advertising 🤯

Am I the Asshole? 🧛‍♂️

Subbu Allamaraju 👏🌎

Let’s trash this planet less in the next decade.

katey 🌙 hoshboo “hate to inconvenience youse but THIS is what australia looks like today, no filter, no effect, just australian bush burning. this isn’t some dystopian novel, this is real life, this is AUSTRALIAN LIVES. #AustralianFires”

hannah “thousands of years of art, language, and cultural development led up to this exact moment”

Hey, it’s January again, the busiest hiring month, at least here in the US.

People push out interviews until after the holidays. They wait out their end-of-year bonus. Some make a new year’s resolution to find a better job.

That’s why January ends up looking like a big cross-company reshuffle. Your LinkedIn fills up with “Congratulate {insert name} on their new job!”

If you’re the hiring manager, I wrote this post for you. Or share it with your manager/HR/CEO.

Hiring is challenging. Most people I know would rate hiring somewhere on the scale between a root canal and a poison ivy rash. Loads of fun.

Hiring is not a passion project of mine. But it’s an important part of the job, and it’s something you have to get good at.

So this post is more of a personal take.

There are many articles out there on how to conduct interviews, or which questions to ask.

I wanted to cover something different. What most people don’t talk about, that hiring managers struggle with.

How do you deal with the stress of interviews? Why you should have a hiring buddy? How to see potential in candidates? Who should write the job listing?

Reading time is just under 10 minutes. So let’s get started.

Ready to Go All In?

This is generic advice you’ll find on motivational posters. You may have heard it before from colleagues, managers, teachers.

Yet, I never read an article about hiring that talks about that. But it does make a difference.

It goes by many different names. “Go all in.” “Fake it till you make it.” “Face your fears.” And “just do it.”

Whatever you want to call it, it comes down to one thing. Avoidance doesn’t work. Half-ass won’t get you better candidates, it will frustrate you more.

If you want to get better at hiring, you have to go all in.

I’m not suggesting a career change. Better, make it a concentrated effort on your part. Give it the proper time, place and attention.

Put a “🧑🏽‍💻 Hiring in Progress DND” as your Slack away message. Close your email client.

Now, do a web search for “hiring UX designers” or ”hiring remote employees” or whatever. Find and read some blog posts. Listen to some podcasts. Watch some live talks.

Be an active learner. Highlight your favorite parts, and summarize what you learned. Share that with your colleagues.

Next, go and write that job description. Do a LinkedIn search or go through Hacker News: who wants to be hired? Try to schedule at least one interview or phone screen.

Even if you have a recruiter on staff, do some of that yourself. You’ll get a better handle on it if you do it yourself, and it will help you work together with the recruiter.

The goal is to shift mindset. Instead of “I don’t like this, so I’ll half-ass it,“ get to “I still don’t love it, but I’m going to get good at it!!!“

What’s Your Cadence?

I’m going to share a few things with you that they don’t teach you in hiring school (if ever there was one).

They’re not a secret. You’ve felt that way or heard it from other people, though we don’t talk about it as much.

You will have to talk to a lot of people. Some extroverts find this energizing, but most likely you’re an introvert or ambivert . This will take up some of your energy.

Figure out how many interviews you can fit in your schedule. Be realistic with yourself. Some people can do back-to-back interviews all day long. Some people can only do two/three a week.

Trying to over-extend yourself won’t help. That’s good advice for weight lifting, or practicing for a marathon.

If you over-extend yourself, you won’t give candidates the attention they deserve. Not fair to you, and not fair to them.

If you need to exercise your inter-personal social muscles, try out conferences. Go to networking events. Parties.

They also don’t warn you that you’ll get rejected. You’ll interview a candidate and they’ll impress the hell out of you. You’re imagining how they join the team, unblock progress, lift business metrics.

Except, they end up choosing a company with a bigger brand name. Or shinier tech stack. Or better pay and easier commute. Whatever the reason, it will hurt in the feels.

So plan for that. I’ll talk about the hiring buddy later on, but that’s one way to soften the blow.

You may get lucky and hire the first candidate you interview. But also likely not. Instead, you’ll spend a lot of time scrutinizing resumes and phone screening. Asking questions, taking notes, making sense of interview feedback.

And these are all decisions. Small decisions in the larger context of life, but they do pile up. That’s the hardest part for me. Decision fatigue is a real thing.

Again, this all comes down to managing your energy reserves. Setting up a schedule that works for you, and sticking by it.

For example, when I write job listings, that’s creative deep work. I clear my schedule for 2-4 hours, disconnect from interruptions, grab a coffee, and get in the zone.

Going over a pile of resumes requires a lot of decision making. I find it easier to batch those, work in short bursts — 30 minutes to 1 hour — spread throughout the week.

That means, if you applied on Monday, I may only get to reply to you on Friday, but at least I’m giving you due attention.

For face-to-face interviews, I space those at least a day apart. Since I’m more on the introvert side, I fill the in-between days with deep work and less social interaction. Recharge cycle.

That works for me, your mileage will vary. The key point here is, find a cadence that works for you. Understand what’s involved and manage your time and energy.

Do You Have a Hiring Buddy?

Don’t run the hiring process alone. But also, don’t hire by committee.

Hiring by committee doesn’t work. It sounds great in theory, “we’re all equal partners in the decision making.” There are other, better ways, to get consensus.

In practice, a committee diffuses responsibility and accountability. And when there’s no clear accountability, it all ends up mediocre.

For each position you’re hiring for, have one direct responsible individual. That’s the hiring manager. That’s you.

But don’t go at it alone. Pair with a hiring buddy.

The hiring buddy can help you finesse the job listing. They will pair with you on interviews. They will give you a second opinion, and balance you when you get too excited about a candidate. They will listen when you get frustrated.

The hiring buddy should also take part in the first check-in with the new hire. That’s part of the feedback loop.

You do most of the work, the hiring buddy is there to help round it up. Think of it as pair programming or code review, but for hiring.

How Do You De-Stress?

Interviews are stressful. For you and the candidates.

Imagine what the candidate has to go through.

Career changes are major life decisions. Landing a job determines when and how much you get paid. You have to meet a lot of strangers, get rejected a bunch of times.

For some jobs you need to test people under stress. I’m thinking of air traffic controllers, trauma surgeons, special forces.

To make the interview more stressful, you could put the candidate in a windowless room. Preferably, a room with bright lights. Ask them to solve a tricky logic puzzle. Add whiteboard for flavor. Fill up their day with a rotating roaster of interviewers, and very short breaks.

I’m not suggesting you do any of these.

People who work in creative endeavors — like software development — work better without stress. A comfortable environment: the right chair, the text editor we spend days configuring.

We have playlists and noise-canceling headphones to block the world. We go into deep work. Or we collaborate with people we already know and feel safe around .

You can’t simulate a proper work environment in a job interview. But you can make sure the interview environment feels like a safe work environment.

Start the interview by reducing stress.

For example, I like to conduct face-to-face interviews at coffee shops. (That serve other beverages, the coffee is not the point here)

You spend the first five minutes scanning the menu, ordering a drink, grab a table. Meanwhile, we’re chatting about the weather, traffic, favorite food on a cloudy day.

It’s small talk, but it’s not forced small talk. It flows easy.

You’re making it clear that you’re not trying to maximize the extraction of information from the subject. You’re there to get to know another person.

Coffee shops also work because they’re not your office. They’re the neutral place. That also works to reduce tension.

If you’re interviewing remote workers, you can try to match their spot. If they’re at home, then interview from your home. Or both go to a coffee shop. Or get on a boat. The last one may be difficult to pull off, but why not?

Make sure it’s an environment that allows you to be present. Don’t interview while commuting, or from a sports bar on game night.

What Does Success Look Like?

I wish people would come with an instruction manual. Life would be so much easier.

Also, an episode of Black Mirror.

At the interview, you’re going to pass judgment on another person. And with limited information. It’s all too easy to get critical.

If I asked you to write down “5 things that concern me” about every candidate you met, I bet it wouldn’t be hard. We’re cautious by default. It’s called loss aversion.

I’m not saying “don’t trust your gut.” If you have a feeling you can’t shake, I would suggest erring on the side of caution.

If you start with a critical outlook, you end up with too many false negatives. You miss on great candidates when you pick up too many negative signals, and not enough positive ones.

What if you flip it around?

Start each interview by trying to answer two simple questions:

• What do I like about this candidate?
• What would make them successful?

When you frame it that way, you’re looking beyond past experience. You’ll be open to seeing potential and realizing growth opportunities.

You interview an individual contributor, only to realize they’ll make a great manager. Now you can offer them a new job, and an exciting career trajectory.

Something that can help: imagine them doing great in their first year. What would their performance review look like?

Then again, you may realize the candidate will be more successful at a Fortune 500 company. Sometimes, their path to career success means working somewhere else.

The key is, open up to discovering talent and potential.

Who Writes the Job Listing?

Recruiters will hate me for saying this, but they’re the last person you want writing a job listing.

I attribute this to the tools they use to optimize their workflow. These tools work to filter candidates.

When filters are your hammer, every job listing is a laundry list of requirements.

Filters don’t work for general and transferrable skills. There are no filters for “using the proper tools to help developers build useful products.” There is no filter for “I can boil down complex problems into simple explanations.”

There are filters for specific tools and technologies. You can filter for “React“ and “not React.”

That’s how we end up with job listings that say “the right candidate will have 10+ years of React experience.” Argh.

Also, boilerplate requirements like “good communication skills.” Waste of pixels. How do you filter for that? People who are not good communicators, but also not self-aware, will apply anyway.

So own the job description. Write it yourself. Decide which skills are valuable, and don’t worry about skills that people can pick up on the job.

Look for attitudes not technologies.

And write them in plain, easy to understand language. Use tools like Grammarly or Hemingway to help with readability.

Do You Post-mortem?

You’re doing great so far. But can you do better next time?

Is your job listing not getting you the right candidates? Is that something you can improve on?

Have you lost a promising candidate because your hiring process is too cumbersome? Are all steps and delays necessary, or can you streamline it?

Find it difficult to vet people? Is that something you can get coached on?

If you’re in the business of software development, you know how to conduct a post-mortem analysis. It’s how we identify gaps and faults, find places to optimize, and introduce new ideas.

Post-mortem, even though the name is morbid, are also useful when things go right. There may still be room for improvement.

What if you had to improvise and go off-process, but it turns out great? That’s an idea worthy of inclusion the next time you hire.

The hiring buddy is the best person to help you do a post-mortem analysis.

Also, reach out to candidates and ask them about their experience. What did they like? What they didn’t like? What could you do better next time?

We do user interviews for our products, we should do candidate interviews for our hiring.

And check out your Glassdoor reviews. Most people don’t write reviews, so when one person express their opinion, you know they’re not the only ones.

Fin

I have more to say but also running out of time, so going to stop here.

If you have any questions, drop me an email at assaf@labnotes.org.

And go out there and hire!

Cover photo by Free To Use Sounds

Karie Westermann “Good night to Indiana Bones.”

✈️ So I'm travelling next weekend to catch some sun. There will be a Weekend Reading but maybe not until late Sunday or Monday.

But this week is full of awesome stuff and I hope you enjoy it. If there's anything in particular you want to see/read, let me know.

Design Objective

Choosing the right UI component for communication with your users When should you send an email to your users? When is it better to show a popover? Use modal or push notification? This article has you covered with a handy reference of all the UI components, and the context to use them in.

Ha Phan 👇 If you're hiring a product manager or product designer:

1/10: Some interview questions I would ask Product Managers

Suz Hinton 👍

we talk about our tools to death because yes, they're important. They are what helps us build these services. But I want 2020 to be the year that conversation expands (more than now) to "but does this tool actually make an impact on the quality of our end-user experiences?"

Ben Schwarz Related. It would make a huge difference if accessibilty was a ranking factor, and everyone would benefit:

Given one in five people have vision impairment, do you think it’d be reasonable for Google to use a perceived accessibility score as an SEO ranking factor?

If 20% of people have trouble reading or interacting with content, why recommend it?

Steve Schoger Of course you can learn design. Design schools existed long before computers:

A lot of developers will tell me that you can learn to code but you can’t learn design.

Learning design requires the same skill as learning to code: the ability to sit down and focus on learning it for many hours at a time.

Jeff Morris Jr. Yes!

Product idea:

“Grammerly for product design”

A Figma & Sketch plug-in that uses AI/ML to predict performance & offer suggestions for copy, images, button placement.

We have amazing tools to help writers communicate better.

We should have the same tools for product design.

Kyle Hill True.

Tools of the Trade

Look Busy $0.99 to 10x your productivity? Sounds like a bargain to me.

Look Busy fills your work calendar with realistic-looking (but secretly fake) work events. Your co-workers won’t schedule conference calls and meetings, so you can get actual work done.

Replace Your To-Do List With Interstitial Journaling To Increase Productivity I'm digging this idea. The premise is very simple and it doesn't take much effort. Once you're done with a given task/project, you write the conclusion in the journal — dump it from mind to make room for the next task. Then you write down the first action of the next task/project — easier to jump into when you know where to start. An entry would look like this:

9:37am.
Finished email to Nik about writing another article for us. I probably don’t need to follow up. Also, part of my mind is still wondering if I should have suggested a topic to him.
Now, switching over to writing an article. What’s my next action? Oh. Just open Medium. The article is going to flow easily once I get the intro down. I should steel myself for having to rewrite that intro a few dozen times.

connor4312/cockatiel Resilience and transient fault-handling library with backoff, retry, circuit breaker, timeout, bulkhead isolation, and fallback policies. Looks great, going to give this a try.

hakluke/how-to-exit-vim A comprehensive guide to all the different ways you can exit Vim. Simpler and more complicated versions of:

The reboot way

:sudo reboot

Roy van Rijn “You've got to be shitting me...

One of our office chairs turns off monitors... we couldn't believe it, but we have it on tape.

Surprisingly, there even is a known issue for it:
https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/738618-display-intermittently-blanking-flickering-or-los”

Lines of Code

Angelina Fabbro I do look for these things in a technical interview. Delivering working software — includes design, tests, docs, etc — should be ingrained practice:

I don’t know who needs to hear this but if you’re interviewing for a position and the pipeline has a code exercise - even if it doesn’t explicitly ask for tests and a README, include tests and a README

Devhumor “Programming in a nutshell”

Peopleware

M. Shemayev Hyperfocus is good until you get stuck and need to find another path. Then hyperfocus keeps you on the treadmill. Want to get unstuck? Any distraction will do. And who doesn't like cat videos?

I'll never forget the time that while intensely frustrated debugging I asked a coworker for help who came over & starting loudly playing cat videos.

I was livid. Then got distracted by the cat videos & was awwing.

10min later, looked up -- "Oh, I see the error!" #DevDiscuss

Ben Nicholas 👇 Burn out is not the result of long hours, but lack of wins. Long hours are a co-factor, another symptom to the same underlying problem that will lead to burn out:

When we talk about burnout, we often attribute it to working long hours. But that's not the only cause. Constantly shifting directions or expectations on a project wears people down. It ensures that they have no goals to work toward and sets them up to fail often. So rather than

Laziness Does Not Exist What we attribute to laziness is the result of different factors — anxiety, missing skills, lack of coping mechanism, etc:

For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it’s typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being “good enough” or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well.

So help people overcome procrastination, instead of trying to make a bad situation worse:

Students with barriers were not always treated with such kindness by my fellow psychology professors. One colleague, in particular, was infamous for providing no make-up exams and allowing no late arrivals. No matter a student’s situation, she was unflinchingly rigid in her requirements. No barrier was insurmountable, in her mind; no limitation was acceptable. People floundered in her class. They felt shame about their sexual assault histories, their anxiety symptoms, their depressive episodes. When a student who did poorly in her classes performed well in mine, she was suspicious.

Peter Brannen “You: This one untested supplement will restore balance to my body

Your body:”

For reference, here's a map of the marketing tech landscape.

Today In Business Models

Kevin Roose “Casper is a very inefficient wealth transfer from venture capitalists to prestige podcast makers and I’m here for it.“ I never bought a Casper mattress, but I appreciate that they gave us so many podcast choices to listen to:

Derek Thompson: This appears to be Casper's business:

Buy mattress at $400.
Sell at $1,000.
Refund/return 20% of them.
--> Keep $400, on avg.

... then spend $290 of that on ads/marketing.
... and $270 on admin (finance, HR, IT).
--> Lose $160.

Repeat.

Kay K. 😭

Math problems I wish I had gotten as a kid:

Sally has 30 🍎. She gives one 🍎 to Joe for free. Joe buys 5 more 🍎 as a result for $1/🍎. She sells the rest for $0.50/🍎.

What was Sally’s blended CPA, ROAS, CLV, and does she have product/market fit? If so, why? Show your work.

Startup Life

Garry() “Working on a startup feels like”

Paul Ford Alec Baldwin posting animated GIFs in Slack:

If you remade Glengarry Glen Ross today it would just be a screencast of Salesforce.

David 👇 If you want to get an introduction, make it as easy as possible. This thread expains how to do it well, and without too much effort:

1/ I love to connect people when it's a mutually beneficial intro, but I always request that the asker send me a "Clean Email" so that I can clear the intro with the prospective connection.

What is a Clean Email ™

1. Forwardable subject (i.e. not "Great to hang, DK!")
2. Focused, customized blurb explaining the purpose of this potential intro -- no mention of other topics/ideas we may have discussed
3. No strange formatting
4. Has a single email signature from the asker

Assume I am using a Gmail mobile client.

Tanay Jaipuria “People who call themselves value-add investors”

Locked Doors

Tess Rinearson 😭

my mom asked me if I use a password manager.

me, pleased she's asking: "yeah, I use 1password."
mom: "really? I thought you're not supposed to do that."
me: "really? where did you read that?"

[5 minutes later]

me: "wait, one password is the NAME OF THE PASSWORD MANAGER"

nick “Ladies take notes!

Met this girl online YESTERDAY, and she’s already trying to learn more about me, not just hook up. It’s called conversation. Learn it.”

Techtopia

Vicki Boykis “Streaming Ad Insertion sounds like a medical procedure you never want to be offered”

https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/08/spotify-brings-streaming-ad-insertion-technology-to-podcasts/

Antonio García Martínez “GDPR is working exactly as everyone who knew the first thing about ads thought it would.”

Jonathan Mendez: This is a hell of a chart. Facebook and Google each grow $80B over the next 4 years. "Rest of Online Ad Marketplace" shrinks over same period.

Available To Hire

Signal boosting people looking for a job. If your company is hiring, or you know someone who is, reach out to them. If you'd like to get included next week, email me at assaf@labnotes.org

Aditya Rao Front-end developer: ReactJS, Redux, GatsbyJS, NodeJS. Mumbai or remote. https://www.adityarao.dev

James Harris Designer and web developer looking for remote work. I love tackling complex stuff and making it easy to understand and work with.

Kevin Garcia Looking for lead/staff product design, UX, or design systems opportunities. Early stage startup in the big data/ML/enterprise space. San Jose/South Bay area. https://www.kevingarcia.me

Jesse Heady Web performance engineering, Site Reliability Engineering; DevOps with a focus on UI/UX and front-end development. https://jesseheady.com

Dom SysAdmin with experience in SQL, O365, Active Directory, HelpDesk, with a Network+ certificate and a knack for sales.

Sam Sneddon Decade+ experience with contributing to web standards and working cross-vendor to meet goals, testing complex software, and associated large test automation systems. Contract work. London/remote.

None of the Above

Figen.. “This is better than both Jurassic World movies. 😁😁”

Merrill Markoe I remember those brave times!

When I want to remind myself how much courage I actually have, I remember that when I was growing up, the phone would ring and I would just pick it right up with NO way at all of knowing who was making the call. None.

Giles Paley-Phillips “Maybe the greatest airport reunion ever”

Erinalope needs SPAAAAACE🚀 “Decipher this, I spent a good 5 mins aimlessly walking a con floor figuring this shit out.”

Sarah Skinner It's like you know me or something …

Stages of form filling:

1. Avoid
2. Avoid more
3. This isn't so bad
4. Oh no! I don't know the answers to these
5. THESE QUESTIONS ARE NOT SPECIFIC
6. I hate this
7. Write essay explaining each answer
8. Nearly done! I hope they don't ask me for tons of eviden-
9. NOOOOO!
10. Cry

Jill Biden's right index finger “this is fucking METAL"

Kakslauttanen: Herders spraying reflective paint on their reindeer's antlers to avoid road accidents leads to absolute surreal and scary pictures #Lapland #Finland

Eric Nelson “First time I’ve ever seen someone quit their family, saying it’s to spend more time with their jobs.”

NBC News: JUST IN: Harry and Meghan say they plan to step back as senior members of the British Royal family, and "carve out a progressive new role within this institution" while working "to become financially independent."

Meredith Haggerty Best use of meme to describe this week's very British drama (context):

I [38F] don't feel welcome in my husband [35M]'s home country. His family [93F, 98M, 71M, 72F, 37M, 37F] and subjects [all ages] are very demanding. How can I convince him to set boundaries?

With ingestible pill, you can track fart development in real time on your phone Ars Technica busted the thesaurus to bring you this article. That we have this miniature technology is pretty remarkable, and as close as we'll ever get to the Fantastic Voyage.

Kent Roth It's a scary place that nobody dares venture …

I consider page 2 of google results the dark web.

Sally Lait Maybe you want to think that “device-free zone“ policy:

Insulin pump apps? Autistic or extremely anxious people who use their devices to recentre? Alcoholics who want to glance at an affirmation? Those needing help with English? There are myriad reasons why a device may be incredibly important to someone.

Dr. Jacquelyn Gill 🔥 There's a huge PR machine running behind the scene, trying to deflect responsibilty for climate change away from major corporations, and often they get away with it:

I have a theory that these terrible (and often wrong) hot takes are actually designed to get people to stop caring about combatting climate change altogether. I promise climate scientists don’t actually care that you just binged The Expanse. Half of us did, too.

Big Think: Your Netflix binge-watching makes climate change worse, say experts. The emissions generated by watching 30 minutes of Netflix is the same as driving almost 4 miles: http://bit.ly/2SSrPxg

Alex Giampapa 🤔

America just needs a mom to be like, “A new war? You got new war money? You never even finished the last two. We have plenty of war at home.”

Amy 😱 oh my …

looking for an app that stabilizes time-lapse videos and i uh

i would have maybe gone with a different name. and logo. and just everything

r/gifs - If Instagram would’ve existed 20 years ago When I watch this video, I can hear the screeching modem voices in the background.

Hey Weekend Readers. Sorry for this week's delay. I spent the weekend in sunny Cabo with bunch of extroverts. 🏖 It was tons of fun, highly recommended. It also fried up all my brain circuits 🧠, so needed some time to recover.

Design Objective

Bobby Goodlatte 🤔

Design is more important than ever for startups. One theory why: almost everything else has gotten easier.

Basic tech stacks are a commodity—automation enables smaller, focused teams—capital is abundant.

Product design is a larger percentage of what’s left.

Max Wendkos 🔥

Design leader interview tip:

Nothing impresses non-designers more than casually mentioning "design thinking" and showing them a photo of a wall covered in different colored sticky notes.

It doesn't even have to be your photo. Here, use this one.

Joe Morrison That is not wrong …

So much of the world’s knowledge is hidden behind hamburger menus.

Marc Randolph “I’m an Imperfectionist. I’m always trying a cheaper, faster, easier way to test my ideas. Any time spent polishing a test is wasted time. Just get it out.”

Eryk Salvaggio “In case anyone thinks I know what I’m doing, here’s how I tell Photoshop to batch resize 1400 images when I don’t want to manually confirm the JPEG quality options for 1400 images”

Tools of the Trade

Paul Henschel This is the magic we were promised many many years ago:

first time im trying react-refresh and the experience is crazy. notice how all components stay safely mounted, counter keeps on ticking, threejs stuff just stays put. not a single page refresh i could see. hmr never felt that safe and fast. 2 lines added to my build config. 👏

LifeWork Calendar – Defend your life from work I love the title: “Defend your life from work“. A simple app that blocks time on your work calendar for personal events, but without revealing what those events are.

Don't Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: A Direct Replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer's (2014) Study 1 Plus Mini-Meta-Analyses Across Similar Studies TL;DR the latest scientific finding says that we can use our computers to take notes in class/meetings, it's just as effective as pen & paper:

Exploratory meta-analyses of k = 8 similar studies revealed large effects of note-taking condition on word count and verbatim overlap but near-zero effects on quiz performance. Results do not support the idea that longhand note-taking improves immediate learning via better encoding of information, at least not with no opportunity to study.

(Of course, only if you turn off your Slack notifications)

Castro Podcasts Love this feature. Easy way to listen to talks:

Ready for another hidden gem?

Plus subscribers can listen to audio from YouTube in Castro.

1. Open the video in Safari
2. Tap the Share button
3. Tap "Sideload to Castro"

John Cutler 👍

pmtip ...

97.5% of ideas/options/things don't need to be in a "ticketing system". The "ticketing system" is not a great place for interrelated ideas, concepts, research, maps, etc.

None of them are built for that.

Wrong tool for the job.

Kilian Valkhof “AWS accidentally sent me their email newsletter template, and it's kinda great.”

Lines of Code

Goodbye, Clean Code It's good practice and part of the learning experience. Everyone should go through this phase, but you also need to know when to stop:

Obsessing with “clean code” and removing duplication is a phase many of us go through. When we don’t feel confident in our code, it is tempting to attach our sense of self-worth and professional pride to something that can be measured. A set of strict lint rules, a naming schema, a file structure, a lack of duplication.

John Feminella 👇 2038 sounds far off, but bugs will start showing up years earlier. Is your code ready?

⏲️ As of today, we have about eighteen years to go until the Y2038 problem occurs.

But the Y2038 problem will be giving us headaches long, long before 2038 arrives.

I'd like to tell you a story about this.

Kelly Vaughn “Me trying to fix a bug for 5 hours straight”

Architectural

Daniel Vassallo “Once you realize that a monolithic app running on a few "medium" servers can get you a Top 40 website, you start seeing unnecessary complexity all around you.”

Nick Craver: If it helps, Stack Overflow is more than capable is running through one CentOS machine as load balancer (a very “medium” server and ~300-500M hits a day) without much tuning or breaking a sweat. I really don’t understand most of the “we need F5”. You’d need to be massive.

Imogen 🎡🤡

someone I work with uses "circus factor" instead of "bus factor", as in how many people would need to run away to join the circus for a project to fall apart, and it's super cute and I'm gonna steal it

Mark Dalgleish “"Don't worry about this tech debt, we'll clean it up next sprint." Senior developer:”

Peopleware

Jayson J. Phillips 👇 How do you work/life balance when working from home? This thread makes several good points, in particular take sick days!

I’ve been working remote, managing teams/projects for a couple of years now (with a brief stint back in an office at a hyper growth startup), and @kf’s tweet re: remote employees taking sick days (please do!) reminds me of a few tips I have...

Remote work will get more popular, and with it, I expect we'll witness a form of “remote work burn-out”. Don't know what we'll call it, or how we'll deal with it. For now all I can say is watch out and take care of yourself.

Mean Fat Girl 👍 You most likely have ADHD in your work/social circle:

If I could ask neurotypical people to do one thing to help people with ADHD

It would be to stop treating someone forgetting something like it is a personal and deliberate crime against you

Middle Age Misery Peaks at Age of 47.2, Economist Says So I do have a few questions: a) how did they guess my age? and b) why is the guy in the picture wearing the same shirt as me?

Middle age is miserable, according to a new economic study which pinpoints 47.2 years old as the moment of peak unhappiness in the developed world.

The medications that change who we are We use Paracetamol for pain relief, and don't think of it as psychoactive, and yet:

“Just like we should be aware that you shouldn't get in front of the wheel if you're under the influence of alcohol, you don't want to take paracetamol and then put yourself into a situation that requires you to be emotionally responsive – like having a serious conversation with a partner or co-worker.”

Turns out a lot of drugs for different conditions are psychoactive, at least for some people. Asthma medication can increase hyperactivity and the development of ADHD. People on antidepressants score more highly for extroversion (this could be a good thing). And drugs for treating Parkinson’s can have unexpected side effects:

Consequently, the drug can have life-ruining consequences, as some patients suddenly start taking more risks, becoming pathological gamblers, excessive shoppers, and sex pests. In 2009, a drug with similar properties hit the headlines, after a man with Parkinson’s committed a £45,000 ($60,000) ticket scam. He blamed it on his medication, claiming that it had completely changed his personality.

Alex “I just found a quiz called “Are you an introvert, an extrovert, or a sea monster?” and it’s the best thing I’ve read all week.”

Teamwork

Corey Quinn 👇 If you are going to speak at a conference, local meetup, or a company meeting, I suggest you read this thread and pick up from Corey's experience. It will save you time and embarassment. For example:

• Never, ever, read the comments on videos of your talks.

• The first 45 seconds of your talk are when I'm figuring out whether I'm going to listen to what you say or read Twitter instead. Are you sure you want to use those seconds to say "Hi, I'm X, I work at Y, and I'm going to talk about Z?"

• At most corporate events, if you don't charge a speaking fee you look like a rube. At most community events if you charge a speaking fee you look like an asshole.

• The key to giving a lot of great talks is to give a lot of shitty talks first. Try not to do those in front of huge audiences.

Andy Johns 👇 This has been my experience as well:

Two methods of recruiting fantastic product managers that startups commonly overlook: (1) hire founders of recently shut down startups (2) cross-functional transfers from within. Both methods often yield higher quality PMs than external recruiting of "career" PMs. Here's why...

People who run a business have a vantage view of how businesses work. People who come from a different role, bring that other part of the business with them. Ironically, career PMs are often so focused on one side of the business — their silo — that they miss the basic premise of the job: working across teams and business areas 🤷‍♂️

Allison Grayce If you really want to work for a company, increase your chances by getting to know them, and personally addressing the hiring manager:

turns out companies are flattered when you take the time to do something unique for them and show that you've put time/energy into it... remember it's a person on the other side of that screen just looking for a great reason to bring you in!

BTW this totally works on me, people who personally reached out were more likely to get interviewed/referred to hiring manager. We're all human.

Jacque Schrag Async communications is a form of accessibility:

It’s not even just potential language barriers, but differences in ways of thinking too. Some people need more time to process & get their thoughts in order. In a fast moving conversation, they can lose the opportunity to share their thoughts. Async comm helps w that. #DevDiscuss

The Remote Work Report by Zapier — predicting that office space will be obsolete by 2030 Interesting that saving money (not time) is the top reason.

Today In Business Models

Kyle Tibbitts 🤔

One reason you know product-market fit is forged and not discovered is the market almost never knows what it wants next until a team with a vision delivers it.

The Top Five Myths About Building Billion-Dollar Startups Some myth busting here, for example:

92% of companies were developing a product that was offering either incremental or radical innovation compared to incumbents, with incremental innovation comprising 58% of companies.

Locked Doors

Kashmir Hill Shady:

The privacy paranoid among us have long worried that all of our online photos would be scraped to create a universal face recognition app. My friends, it happened and it’s here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

Joel Winston 😱 It was only a matter of time before your personal finances and health data were merged together, so they could easily be leaked on the internet:

Ever wonder what credit reporting agencies are up to? “Experian Health announced today that every person in the U.S. population, of an 328 million Americans, have been assigned a unique Universal Patient Identifier, powered by Experian Health.” https://www.experian.com/healthcare/products/identity-management

Brock Wilbur 👇 OMG. This is an epic design fail!

Short Thread: staying with some friends and last night after everyone went to bed I could not figure out how to turn off the large ceiling light in their living room. There is a wall controller that seemed fairly straightforward.

Available To Hire

Signal boosting people looking for a job. If your company is hiring, or you know someone who is, reach out to them. If you'd like to get included next week, email me at assaf@labnotes.org

David Raffauf Senior Software Engineer (JavaScript, Unity C#, Ruby, Elixir). Interested in feature development with collaborative teams and possibly leading a team. Remote. https://www.youtube.com/c/DavidRaffauf

logan Decade of experience as a developer and two as a teacher. PDX or preferably remote. https://pgood.dev

Dan Levy Programmer, teacher, mentor, and leader. Over 15 years of software development experience. https://danlevy.net/

None of the Above

Vlad Magdalin “This is hands down the best movie of the year.”

Jeannette Ng 🤔

Speakeasies are apparently really easy escape rooms where the prize is a bar

Matt Haughey 😭

find someone that loves you as much as reddit loves to insist I download their mobile app before proceeding

Adrian Hon “Why does every Hacker News discussion on dating sound like it’s between a bunch of Ferengi?”

Hosuk Lee-Makiyama “Ever again”, and you must be thinking, who would try such a thing?

Yamaha (instrument makers) issue a warning on social media: “somewhat belatedly, and for reasons that cannot be mentioned, please don’t try to fit human beings into our flight cases ever again. They are made for instruments, not people. Thank you.”

Related, here's how one could escape house arrest.

Harriet Williamson 👇 Don't feel bad. Other people had worse job interviews than you:

Twitter, what’s the worst job interview you’ve ever had?

Forget Top Gun: Maverick—let’s settle Blue Thunder vs. Airwolf once and for all Ars Technica does the really really important research – watching hours of VHS tapes is dedication to the art — to find out which of our childhood helicopters would win head to head. And, just in case you thought your job lacked meaning:

In short, season 4 is not meant to be good. It's not even meant to be watched. It's just a means to more easily sell all the episodes of Airwolf that were already in the can.

There's something... if not admirable, then at least relatable about pumping out one more season of Airwolf just to reach syndication. Sometimes you gotta stay at the office until 5pm.

Jenks Peoples is weird:

Just had a very weird experience in the Post Office. It's not funny or amusing. Just weird. There's no humorous ending or anything like that, it was just...odd.

So anyway, I'm standing in the Post Office, with about 5 parcels to mail, and I've been in there for about 20 mins.

cowboy sally “anyway here’s how to get the barnacle off of your car”

What's funnier? That this unnecessarily complex device is easy to remove (with a credit card)? Or that people take it apart and use the SIM card to tether for free? 😭

Sam Barlow 😭

Just showed my son The Matrix. He loved it.
"Are there any sequels, dad?"
"No, son. They were happy to make just one great movie."

Lilith Lovett “I’m about to cry, knowing that I will never be as swagger as this man right here.”

Zoe Hong 👏

Y'ALL.
I was watching that new Netflix show "Cheer" and the coach said something like, "Practice until you get it right and then practice until you can't get it wrong" and that's my new motto.

Brian MacDonald 👇 Good to know:

Here's a story: When people find out I'm an editor, they assume I have some kind of mastery of grammar, honed through extensive training and constant practice, and that seeing grammatical errors in public is like sandpaper on my nerves.

It's actually the opposite.

...

But if you write "utilize" when you mean "use," yes, I will judge you for that. I mean, I'm not made of stone here.

𝕃𝔼𝔼 👇

There are only 10 types of movies. (A short thread)

1. Orange and blue action”