Chris Wallace “when you present two mockups to the client and they like both” (source)

I started Friday morning with 5 emails in my inbox(*), and finished it with 2 emails in my inbox. 💪 It was by all means a successful day, even if I only finished half of what I was hoping to get done.

Today these 2 grew up to 4. So this really resonates with me. But I'm not giving up. I will inbox zero at least once next week!

Wish me luck.

* I don't count newsletter, because I read those in the evening – or not — they don't weigh on me.

Design Objective

Ben Halpern “Open-dyslexic is now available as a font config option on http://dev.to” More of this!!! Whenever designers show me UIs with carefully chosen delicate fonts that screenshot well, I cringe. Function ahead of form.

The Onion “Man Taking Phone Out Of Case For First Time In Years Struck By Forgotten Beauty” 😭

Tools of the Trade

playwright The next version of Puppeteer, but cross-browser!

We are the same team that built Puppeteer. Puppeteer proved that there is a lot of interest in the new generation of ever-green, capable and reliable automation drivers. With Playwright, we'd like to take it one step further and offer the same functionality for all the popular rendering engines. We'd like to see Playwright vendor-neutral and shared governed.

Kevlin Henney I have to remember this the next time someone brings up DSL in a conversation:

dsl — A domain specific language, where code is written in one language and errors are given in another. — source

Erik Torenberg Microservices!

What’s the best term for the phenomenon by which people create additional complexity in order to preserve their role & importance?

Addy Osmani “TIL you can animate range slider thumbs! Nice demo using <input type="range"> & CSS variables: https://codepen.io/pwambach/pen/MWWNaJO”

Shahed Khan Brilliant business idea!

Negotiation as a Service (NaaS)

Hire a firm to negotiate all of your cloud contracts on your behalf and let them keep 25% of savings or $1k (whichever is greater).

No real downside for company.

Surprised this doesn’t exist!

Dan Hett 😱 “Yesterday my colleague called me a 'laptop murderer' because I cut my computer in half to make it more portable. Does anyone else do this? Is it just me?”

Lines of Code

Mouse Reeve “done, perfect, absolutely without flaw, the most elegant solution." Glaxay brain solution to the fizzbuzz problem.

Peopleware

Aureylian “I get people ask a lot “how do you do it all” and I always jokingly say “I cry a lot” but holy heck this explains a LOT”

Jennifer Lynn Barnes 💯

One time, I was at a Q&A with Nora Roberts, and someone asked her how to balance writing and kids, and she said that the key to juggling is to know that some of the balls you have in the air are made of plastic & some are made of glass.

Pina✨ADHD Alien Comic 🧠

Ok, 9:08 still good in time
blinks once
9:25 how!!!!!

Why procrastination is about managing emotions, not time To be on theme, I didn't read the entire article, I'm sure I'll get to it later …

Myrick’s research also highlighted another emotional aspect to procrastination. Many of those surveyed felt guilty after watching the cat videos. This speaks to how procrastination is a misguided emotional regulation strategy. While it might bring short-term relief, it only stores up problems for later. In my own case, by delaying my work I just end up feeling even more stressed, not to mention the gathering clouds of guilt and frustration.

Teamwork

Erik Torenberg This is key, and I've seen this happen more than once. Work that doesn't feel mission critical gets dropped, but if you can't walk a mile, your manager will not bet on you running a full marathon:

A trap some employees fall into is they slack off on lower level work because they want to be given higher level work but because they don’t earn the trust of their employer they stay doing the low level work until they excel at it.

Jennifer Kim I had to deal with this scenario before. Make sure you have these checks in your hiring process:

1% of the population is estimated to be sociopathic (and overrepresented in business, positions of power). So it’s worth building in a “check” in your hiring process to take a closer look at seemingly “perfect” candidates that has won everyone over a little too easily.

Here's one story and a way to check yourself:

I was stunned. Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the phone.

Jennifer Kim I talked about adopting this perspective, in What Does Success Look Like?

These kind of interviews are still too rare.

Companies can build an unfair recruiting advantage, by designing interviews that surface candidates’ growth. Let them show you their trajectory, their potential.

Or keep on keeping on with the same, broken approaches 🤷🏻‍♀️

Locked Doors

Jeff Bezos hack: Amazon boss’s phone ‘hacked by Saudi crown prince’ What a story!

The two men had been having a seemingly friendly WhatsApp exchange when, on 1 May of that year, the unsolicited file was sent, according to sources who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity.

Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos’s phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Guardian has no knowledge of what was taken from the phone or how it was used.

Tim Medin I suppose we're all leaking data, we just don't all know it yet:

The more I use AWS the more I’m suprised everyone isn’t leaking data.

Google says Apple Safari’s anti-tracking feature can be used to track users Quite ironic I would say:

As noted above, most browsers keep lists of the most commonly used third-party trackers and limit the amount of data that those trackers can get -- for all users. It's a one-size-fits-all, top-down approach.

Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention works from the bottom up instead. It counts how often a given third-party tracker is loaded by the websites a user visits.

The problem is that this block list is going to be different for each user. By deliberately forcing ITP strikes from specific websites and seeing what kind of information is blocked, an external party such as an ad network can get a pretty good idea of what each user's ITP block list looks like.

Techtopia

The Future of Politics Is Bots Drowning Out Humans TL;DR “Democracy requires two things to function properly: information and agency. Artificial personas can starve people of both.”

Judd Legum 👇 Democracy is bad for Facebook (consumer protection, anti-monopoly), and so Facebook is bad for democracy. No surprises here.

1. I don't think people fully understand how dysfunctional and dangerous Facebook's political ad policy is

Yes, people know Facebook allows politicians and parties to lie

But it's so much worse

This is important, so I'm going to explain in detail.

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

jgoulah Looking for a remote eng leadership position. I love helping to develop and grow people, teams, and companies. Recently built a startup from seed stages through series C and prior to that Sr Engineering Manager at Etsy.

Daniel Lindsley Senior engineer, specializing in Python, JS, testing, search, APIs, mentoring, & building resilient apps. Remote is a must. http://toastdriven.com/daniellindsley/

g_Smith Infosec. Have IT experience and working on my Security+ cert. Willing to relocate.

None of the Above

Charlie O'Donnell “What really killed @WeWork: NYC subway co-working.”

mujer valiente 💖

In Chicago we don’t say “I love you”. We say “yes, I can pick you up at O’hare” and I think that’s beautiful.

Phillip Henry This is the most NYC thing:

Someone: Im in town!

New Yorkers: OMFG!! That’s so great! Have fun!!!!

Maxim Leyzerovich “GANfield” Mesmerizing …

alex 🔥

ppl shit on outlook but gmail is still out here looking like 2003

Derek Thompson Me. This entire week has been inbox 3. Send help.

i reject the notion that there are only two kinds of email ppl—inbox zero and inbox 20,000. i am an "inbox 3" guy.

i answer/delete all email except for 3 stressful ones that just sit there for days or weeks, as the inbox grows and shrinks around them, like little inbox barnacles

let me know how i can be helpful Is that the BlockChin everyone is talking about?

What does this (completely real) product do? Wrong answers only

Manisha Agarwal 🤔

The good thing about insomnia: it sharpens your Math skills, because you spend all night, calculating, how much sleep you'll get, if you're able to "fall asleep right now."

Kerri Elizabeth Miller Overheard at The Airport:

Hey, pro tip for managers - don’t do a performance review on speaker phone in the airport.

Maggie: your boss is horrible and you should quit. Don’t listen to his promise of having a “transparent conversation”.

Erik Peterson “I think it’s awesome you can now rack mount your employees”

Selective Emigration and Personality Trait Change This is interesting. One time opportunity to witness social change at scale, based on personality traits. Unfortunately, not a research we can easily replicate:

… the emigration of 25% of the Scandinavian population to the USA 1850–1920 was driven in part by more ‘individualistic’ personality factors among emigrants, leading to permanent decreases in mean ‘individualism’ in the home countries.”

Dolly Parton “Get you a woman who can do it all 😉” (what are the odds? Jolene playing now in the background …)

City Beer in SF knows its audience.

Design Objective

Why 36% is the magic number: Finding the right amount of text in mobile apps This article looks at how much text is used in different apps. First screen text usage ranges from 3.5% (Snapchat) to 50.5% (Uber), so there's no one size that fits all. But if you're unsure, looks like 36% is a good place to start, and iterate to the right balance.

How to conduct UX research if you’re an introvert - UX Collective A lot of developers and designers I worked with are introverts. Guess what, you don't have to be an extrovert to engage in UX research. In fact, some of your users are going to be introverts, so it helps if you can speak their language!

Some participants, especially young people, will prefer to talk to you via an instant messaging app. Interviewing via, for example, Messenger will help them (and, honestly, you) feel more comfortable. It might also get you more insights, and a transcript that you can always go back to.

Maia Bittner 😭

all these roboadvisor things are like ”wowza you just spent a ton of money at WELLS FARGO CREDIT CARD PAYMENT slow down the spending there pal!!!”

Gangster's Paradigm "the ideal candidate thrives in ambiguity"

Brett Goldstein: A designer I know told me his PM writes jira tickets that just say "make onboarding easier" or even "increase retention" 😂

Tools of the Trade

Samperson “I made a goose that destroys your computer Download it free here: http://samperson.itch.io/desktop-goose”

How to survive a remote working position How to separate home and work, when you're working from home:

By planning tomorrow's work at the end of today, you can help avoid that nagging feeling of something being unfinished and the temptation to 'just have 15 more minutes' working on a problem. Occasionally it can be a simple as just updating the task board with progress, but it can also be writing some notes for your future self on tricky points that you need to tackle tomorrow.

andi zeisler Conference call with shooting! 😭

My kid is always playing Fortnite with his friends on my phone, and I cannot see the appeal, it's literally just a conference call with occasional shooting

Matty Mariansky “why our office is switching to Fortnite”

(wannabe) breaker of (the bad) loops Me too!

Every time I accidentally open a big pdf on my phone (hotspot) I momentarily think, “gah such a bandwidth waste!” before realizing it’s like, three webpage visits with ads.

moonstrucktimberwolf “Dying”

Web-end

Chris Heilmann “https://mybrowser.fyi/ is a really good looking way to create a report on what browser you're currently running.”

Meowlivia_ “Toggle Ideas 💡 https://codepen.io/oliviale/full/xxboXzo”

Also, Steve Gardner: “I've made another https://codepen.io/ste-vg/details/oNgrYOb, Day & Night toggle ☀️🌙”

Devoops

(A few) Ops Lessons We All Learn The Hard Way Epic list. Everything rings true, and some hurts in the feels:

1. Email is the worst monitoring and alerting mechanism except for all the others.
2. Absence of a signal is itself a signal.
3. The severity of an incident is measured by the number of rules broken in resolving it.
4. The mobile hotspot you're paying for so you can leave your house while you're oncall only works at home and in the office.
5. The only other person who knows how this works is also on vacation.
   …

Corey Quinn 👇 This thread tearing into IBM Cloud is hilarious! Unless you have to use IBM Cloud as part of your work, in which case, my heartfelt condolences – send me your resume and I'll link to it in next week's email.

Whoever designed this needs to be put on a PIP. Services are sorted alphabetically. There's no guided onboarding. "Want to spin up a VM / storage bucket / toilet in which to drown yourself? Start here!" is always useful. "Lite" and "free" are apparently two different things.

Peopleware

Carrie Melissa Jones I love remote work for a whole lot of reasons, but loneliness is something we need to start talking about, and let's figure out how to solve it before it gets worse:

The famous Cigna study that is used to back up almost every proclamation of the loneliness epidemic has been updated. And it's gotten worse: [https://www.cigna.com/newsroom/news-releases/2020/cigna-takes-action-to-combat-the-rise-of-loneliness-and-improve-mental-wellness-in-america]

If you build community, you can help to turn things around.

Una Kravets This one simple trick that is guaranteed to make a career difference:

I've started blocking off the first 30 mins back at work every Monday to migrate my TODO list and review what I did last week.

➡️ HIGHLY recommend doing this to help you stay focused and on-task throughout the week (esp. if you do a lot of varied tasks/projects at work)

Scott Barry Kaufman (SBK) When you look at life from a different perspective!

Teamwork

delia paunescu 👇 “Per my last email” and other favorite corporate passive aggressive phrases:

i've recently become obsessed with all the insane corporate ways we say normal things to each other.

"I’m a little confused" is by far my favorite - it's absolute rage masked as a professional pleasantry.

what are some of your best/most insufferable work gibberish phrases?

EricaJoy “an em and a pm plan a wedding”

Startup Life

The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2019 | First Round Review Summary of the best First Round articles from 2019.

How To Know If You've Got Product/Market Fit This is a really good breakdown. And remember, markets shift, so may end up iterating in and out of product/market fit several times.

If your product is broken and people are still using it, if you have high retention with a broken product, that’s a clear sign you have PMF. When Twitter was constantly going down in the fail whale days, and no one moved off of Twitter. That was a sign of raw market adoption.

True product-market fit is a minimum viable company More on finding that elusive product/market fit:

Many entrepreneurs conceptualize product-market fit as the point where some subset of customers love their product’s features. This conceptualization is dangerous. Many failing companies have features that customers loved. Some even have multiple beloved features! Great features constitute only one-half of one-third of the whole puzzle. To have created a minimum viable company, a company needs all three of these elements — value propositions, business model and ecosystem — working in concert.

Brie Wolfson “Startup Curve reimagined as Big Net-New Project Curve”

Locked Doors

Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data “An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells ‘Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.’” I've said it before and will say it again, using some anti-virus software can be worse that not using any at all. Not all anti-virus is bad, but must research before installing a piece of software that has access to all your files and browser history.

Brian Anderson That's the simplest most concise and correct explanation:

Pro tip: Security means you’re concerned about bad things happening to your data. Compliance means you’re concerned about auditors happening to your data.

bruise almighty 👇 This is distopian, rediculous, and 100% ineffective:

I had to get a background check for my job, and it turns out the report is a 300+ page pdf of every single tweet I’ve ever liked with the work “fuck” in it.

Enjoy your dystopian bs! waves

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

kirsty Experience in React Native/Rails/Angular/HTML5/CSS. https://github.com/dereknahman

Paige Williams Looking for a role where I can continue to grow as an engineer with a collaborative team. I have experience with React, Redux, GraphQL, TypeScript, Node, and mapping/ data visualization libraries. https://www.paigewilliams.dev

None of the Above

Alysia Judge “WAS SHOOTING HIS MOTHER NOT ENOUGH”

Simon Holland Oh. Snap.

A rival dad is mad because on his Facebook post about his Super Bowl party I asked if he was going to have store brand ketchup again this year.

Jeff Kasanoff 🤡

LA is beyond parody - just watched a woman get thrown out of a Target for harassing employees while screaming “DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY FOLLOWERS I HAVE?”

Greg Афиногенов Yes:

sourdough starter is the closest thing to divine grace an atheist can experience: it's inexhaustible, self-replenishing, and infinitely divisible

But also, Louise O'Connor:

A sourdough starter is a tamagotchi for people in their 30s

San Miguel Sheriff The thing is, we know what he's talking about and it makes sense.

Large boulder the size of a small boulder is completely blocking east-bound lane Highway 145 mm78 at Silverpick Rd. Please use caution and watch for emergency vehicles in the area.

Saron Seriously. Just reach out. What's the worst that could happen?

Cold emailed a bunch of startup CEOs. One of those emails turned into a coffee. The coffee turned into an internship. Internship turned into a job. Been in the game for the past 8 years 🙌🏾

Sahil Lavingia And also, the people receiving these emails will thank you for being thoughtful and not wasting their time!

Sending 100 copy-pasted cold emails in one hour: 1% conversion rate.

Sending 10 unique cold emails in one hour: 80% conversion rate.

Plus you’ll have practiced your writing skills, and done more research on the people you’re trying to help.

Ron Amadeo Excellent suggestion!

I propose we rename Google messaging services with the year of release, just like a copy of Madden or FIFA.

The provides for easier tracking and better communicates the ~yearly lifecycle of these apps.

Celeste Labedz 💯

If you're going to call every new person of color or white woman a "diversity hire" then you also have to call every new white man a "privilege hire". Don't blame me, those are just the rules.

Aram Zucker-Scharff “Anytime a rich person donates money, this is how you should report it.”

Gizmodo: Billionaire Jack Ma has donated $14 million to develop a coronavirus vaccine, roughly the equivalent of an average U.S. family donating $33 http://gizmo.do/CpiJgJ6

mckenzie 🔥

the united states is $22 trillion dollars in debt and they have the audacity to try and give ME a credit score? worry about yourself first babygirl

Amanda China is mobilizing to tackle Coronavirus. I'm more worried about countries that don't have a high functioning government (*cough*US*cough*):

In response to the coronavirus epidemic, China has:

-begun construction on two 1,000 bed hospitals, to be completed w/in two weeks
-isolated & sequenced the virus genome & made that info public
-begun developing a vaccine

Could the US have mobilized its resources in such a way?

Bathurst 12 Hour “G'day Skip 🦘”

poolside.fm Super-summer interweb radio station with cheesy 90's videos is exactly what I need right now.

Weekend Reading is a blog about technology, and also people and culture. Culture includes politics and media. So, of course, I have strong opinions on what happened at the Iowa caucus earlier this week.

Short version, the DNC paid < $120K to build an app for tabulation votes. The contract went to a small vendor, inexperienced developers, who did little if any testing. When they tried to use it the first time, it went as well (or as horribly) as you’d expect.

The first mistake, maybe they didn’t need to write all that code. The second mistake, out-sourcing domain expertise to app developers, Justin Joque talks about that:

the replacement of people who know how organizations, bureaucracies and systems function with poorly designed and specified "apps" that continually fail

Bad product launches are the industry standard now. Doesn’t mean it’s right, we should be doing better. But it’s not news, either.

Here’s the thing. The Iowa caucus has a manual process that works just fine:

So across the state, counties just like ours called their results into Des Moines headquarters the old-fashioned way, flooding the phone lines and overwhelming the few volunteers assigned to this job.

The only reason they’ll want to use an app is to get those results the same night instead of waiting a day. Iowa represents ~1% of the US population, waiting a day for the results is not a big deal.

Except, if you’re the 24/7 news industry. They need to feel the airtime with stories, and if they don’t have a story, they’ll make one up. Since they didn’t have the results until 3 days later, they had to make up a story.

Much ado about absolutely nothing at all. So there you have it, the non-story of the week, now you know and you’re not smarter for it.

Design Objective

Alex 🌚 “Love writing design specs that don’t leave any open questions.”

Making Sense of Dyslexia on Behance - usinf origami posters to raise awareness That's a creative campaign that easily gets the point across. Love this.

laura bananas 😭 This is the one thing uniting designers and developers:

designer: looks nice but can we move the headers 1px up
developer: its not that we cant its that then i have to put 19px (ugly number) instead of 20px (beautiful number) in the css and that makes me sad
designer: ah absolutely understandable carry on

Tools of the Trade

Rob Napier Good point. So many times I got stumped by a bug, but once I figure out which of my assumptions was wrong, I instantly found the bug:

Periodic Reminder: When debugging, you must first accept that something you believe is true is not true. If everything you believed about this system were true, it would work. It doesn't, so you're wrong about something.

This is a surprisingly common stumbling block for devs.

Good Experiment, Bad Experiment — Reforge Running an experiment is not just about start, stop, and write down the results. There is science (and art) to running a good experimence and avoid wasting time on the bad ones. This post captures the essence:

Good experiments advance product strategy. Bad experiments only advance metrics.
…
Good experiments have a plan for success. They invest in making a successful experiment a real part of the product and think about full go-to-market integration. Bad experiments leave MVPs in the product forever.

Fermat's Library Also, this is where log comes from (as in, “did you check the logs?”).

15th century sailors kept track of their speed at sea with a knotted rope, a piece of wood and an hourglass.

This is the reason why “knots" became a unit of speed for maritime navigation.

Learn more about it in this week’s paper: https://fermatslibrary.com/s/five-centuries-of-dead-reckoning

Someone Used Neural Networks To Upscale An 1895 Film To 4K 60 FPS Oh, wow, this is really interesting and the results are quite impressive. Also, not at all concerning, when you consider the rapid pace of video manipulation. Also, Digg still around?

Lines of Code

WrrrdNrrrdGrrrl 😭

An older woman came into the bookstore today. I made a joke about a credit card reader issue and she said "these things are all programmed by twenty-five-year-old boys who don't comment their code" and somehow we ended up having a great conversation about programming and biases.

Architectural

Justin Joque 👇 This is 100% correct. And also, not a new thing. Consulting companies have been doing this for decades (eg McKinsey is 94 year old business), replacing people who know the system with different people, out-source, off-shore, and now apps. In the end, apps are just a new way to out-source labor for cheaper:

A few thoughts about the Iowa Caucuses: what we are seeing there is part of a larger shift, the same thing that happened with the Boeing 737 max, the MiDAS software that wrongly kicked 20k people off of unemployment in Michigan. We are seeing over and over the replacement of people who know how organizations, bureaucracies and systems function with poorly designed and specified "apps" that continually fail. The problem is not really the technology, but the idea that local institutional knowledge and labor can be easily replaced with consultants

Cari Hernandez This quickly turned into a meme, substitute with “the CTO wants to use microservices”, or ”store todo lists on the blockchain“:

Every time your democratic party official mentions using an app the best thing to do is spray them directly in the face with a spray bottle filled with room temp water. This may startle them but it does not hurt them and will curb the behavior.

Peopleware

Gurwinder 👇This is the kind of content that works very well at 280 characters:

MEGATHREAD TIME: In 40 tweets I will describe 40 powerful concepts for understanding the world. Some are complex so forgive me for oversimplifying, but the main purpose is to incite curiosity. Okay, here we go:

Starting with:

Causal Reductionism: Things rarely happen for just 1 reason. Usually, outcomes result from many causes conspiring together. But our minds cannot process such a complex arrangement, so we tend to ascribe outcomes to single causes, reducing the web of causality to a mere thread.

Why the Most Important Idea in Behavioral Decision-Making Is a Fallacy - Scientific American Blog Network TL;DR The popular idea that loss aversion is the bigger motivator (fear > greed) doesn't replicate well. Add another one to the replication crisis. When we're talking about losing vs gaining $10, loss aversion doesn't play a significant factor.

In the case of loss aversion, contradictory evidence has tended to be dismissed, ignored or explained away, while ambiguous evidence has tended to be interpreted in line with loss aversion. For example, a paper purporting to illustrate that price increases are more impactful than price decreases received 65 citations in Google Scholar in 2016, whereas a follow-up paper challenging this view received only 17 citations.

Teamwork

Daniel Gross “Sometimes a comment on the Internet is better than all the management books in the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22255301”

Adrienne Porter Felt So true it hurts:

A solid 10% of being an engineering manager is asking two people if they've talked to each other yet

Locked Doors

Simon Weckert Love this hack!

99 smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps. Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route! #googlemapshacks http://www.simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html

Oliver Hough “I made this handy map so you know how to attribute”

Byron C Clark “This has got to be some kind of secret spy communication, right?”

Startup Life

Manu Kumar 👇 Why it's nearly impossible to “accelerate a startup”. You don't always see the straight line to product/market fit, learning takes time:

7/ Every startup is it's own unique puzzle. The founders job is to decipher and figure out their puzzle. And like when you're assembling a puzzle, you sometimes get it wrong, and have to go back and try again, or try a different approach.

Debt is Coming TL;DR The recurring revenue stream of SaaS companies is basically a fixed income asset. Your customers are your assets, and you can borrow against those assets. At the growth stage, debt is cheaper than equity. Mind you, current debt instruments are dangerous for startups, which have pushed them towards VC, but I can see how new type of startup friendly debt instruments come online and make a big dent in the VC world.

Space-race

Mat Velloso “And you think you're a big deal because you can ssh into your container...“

NASA brings Voyager 2 fully back online, 11.5 billion miles from Earth “Thanks to some (very) remote engineering work by NASA, the intrepid explorer’s science mission is back on.”

Apollo 11 vs USB-C Chargers Explores the important question: can you use the CPU in a USB-C charger to fly people to the moon?

A Small-Rocket Maker Is Running a Different Kind of Space Race They're based in Alameda, so I have straight line of sight from my house, but they're not launching any rockets from here (populated area) so 😢 It's a different kind of rocket for sure, tiny (40') and as far as launch vehicles go, dirt cheap ($2.5m). Goal is to launch a lot of them, with small payloads, like the Swarm satellites. Think of this as microservices deployed to low earth orbit.

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

mudge Rubyist with 14 years experience, senior developer/technical lead. London. https://mudge.name

FRANCESC Engineering leadership role at late-stage startup/public co. golang & kubernetes a plus. https://www.campoy.cat

legally james! Senior full stack JavaScript (front, back and DevOps). London.

None of the Above

http://amazondating.co “Hot Singles Near You starting at $4.99 with Prime delivery“ 😭

wikipedia brown aka silk bonnet spectre Current mood:

so you're trying to tell me that it's the same week as it was earlier this week? give me a break

Best of Nextdoor “Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley...”

Pigeon Fancier 👇 Any of these happened to you?

What’s the most ridiculous demand a customer has made of you? I’ll go first: when I was working retail, a woman once demanded I pick her up from her Botox appointment with my car & bring her to the mall to shop

Russ McSpadden “A coyote and a badger use a culvert as a wildlife crossing to pass under a busy California highway together. Coyotes and badgers are known to hunt together.”

brony sanders 🍞📈 “it’s so interesting that the first generation of kids who were used as props by their instagram influencer moms have grown up and are now asserting their own agency. and their reaction isn’t exactly a surprise. who would want their childhood to be online like this?”

Gabrielle Blair 🔥🔥🔥

When I hear men worshipping guns and talking about how there’s nothing that will stop them from defending their family, my mind goes to Naaman in the Bible. Do you remember Naaman? He was a great military leader, and he also had leprosy.

1/

Akki “This is the best thing you'll see today 😍”

Open Source Rotary Cellphone h/t Mike Elgan

Design Objective

Kadi Kraman More e-commerce apps like this, please and thank you!

So fortunate that I was involved in adding this feature that lets you view clothes on models of different sizes!

Always amazed at the difference between the cover model and the alt model wearing the same size

All clothing sites should do this ☺️

Maia Bittner “EVERY APP SHOULD HAVE A DEMO MODE BEFORE SIGNUP 👏”

Tools of the Trade

Variety He's saying out loud how we all feel!

Taika Waititi jokes about what writers should be asking for in the next round of talks with producers: “Apple needs to fix those keyboards. They are impossible to write on. They’ve gotten worse. It makes me want to go back to PCs” #Oscars

Jean Yang Maybe a different outfit would help? 👇 “An opportunity too good to be missed! Oscars red carpet stars as keyboards, a thread.”

Corey Quinn 💯

Myth: Your AWS bill is a function of how many customers you have.

Fact: Your AWS bill is a function of how many engineers you have.

vaguely reassuring state machines A new (to me) Twitter account to pass the time.

Lines of Code

Geoff Wozniak “A little bit of sass in the IBM 704 manual.”

Peopleware

Harvard Business Review That sounds exaclty like what you'd expect it to be: “Although 95% of people think they’re self-aware, only 10%–15% actually are.”

ADHDsurprise “I mean, that's apt. #ADHD”

Teamwork

State of Remote Work 2020 Highlights:

• 97% would recommend remote work to others.
• 80% primarily work from home.
• 32% say having a flexible schedule as the biggest benefit.
• 20% say loneliness and collaboration/communication as the biggest struggle.

Today in Business Models

Marketing Examples 👇 Thread about the marketing genius of Lil Nas X. When one channel doesn't work, try another channel, and find ways to use the system to your benefit

3/ So Nas got creative.
He stopped tweeting SoundCloud links and started writing a song he could promote through memes.
“It had to be short. It had to be catchy. It had to be funny.“ — @LilNasX

…

8/ Nas wasn't stopping. He lined up remixes with some of music's biggest stars.
Billboard has a loophole where remix plays count towards the original song's chart placement.
With every remix millions more streams poured in, and Old Town Road became impossible to budge.

Merci Victoria Grace This is the most SV home listing ever:

I love this framing of home pricing as “seeking”, as if the house itself is raising a seed round to live out its dream of moving to SF and starting a company.

(Obvi DM me, House.)

Renovated Hayes Valley Victorian, with black-and-white facade, seeks $4.75M

Locked Doors

Security breach leaks the personal data of all 6.5 million Israeli voters | Snyk 😱 Simply unbelievable. View Source reveals a URL to endpoint that returns the user database with clear text passwords.

How Big Companies Spy on Your Emails “this shouldn't come as a surprise, free product = … didn't realize CCPA requires these apps to offer an opt-out feature.” If you're using GMail of course this is a moot point, only a question of how many companies you reading your email (add one more if you use work email).

The CIA secretly bought a company that sold encryption devices across the world This is such a fascinating story. For decades, the CIA and BND managed a Swiss company that made encryption systems, and solid compromised units to countries around the world. And how they almost got caught several times by their own emplooyees.

On Political Grounds

Confusion over ‘independent’ voters in California prompts redesign of voter registration card This is typosquatting but for political candiates:

Still, a survey conducted for The Times in 2016 found 73% of American Independent Party voters believed they were unaffiliated with any party. Voters from all walks of life — including celebrities, business leaders and the spouses of candidates — said they incorrectly filled out the forms.

Pinboard 🔥

There is a fascinating optical phenomenon with moral red lines, they will recede just as you approach them

Amber Jamieson “DC seems like an extremely normal and cool town full of extremely normal and cool people: https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/02/09/25-incredibly-dc-dating-stories-from-meet-cutes-to-nightmares/”

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

Tampa Bae Experienced with React, Node.js, Java, Docker, and Kubernetes. Looking for a remote/flexible team.

Valerie Woolard Senior Rubyist and/or tech lead. DC or remote.

Darian ‌‌ Rosebrook 👋🏼 Product designer, history w/ UX, UI, and Brand Identity. https://cmps.co/2UCS9wp

annabelle bertucio Kubernetes and containers security, focuses on content, advocacy, and communication, with OSS background.

Ruby Quail Looking for dev or service design work. http://rubyquail.design

None of the Above

Craig Calcaterra 👇 The homework map thread. Have you seen the homework map thread? You must check out the homework map thread.

Daniel Vaughn “Received a PDF resume with a proper file name, but I'm unsure whether to be amused or annoyed by the difference in the actual PDF title. I'll give it an 80/20. It is clever though.”

Zoe Hong Cool trick, 100% recommend:

I also have a subscriber who just comments "engagement" on every video they watch, so they can give me youtube algorithm points even if they have nothing to say. I have the best subs.

Hart “Here’s the greatest tiktok I’ll ever make.”

Tiago Forte Sweet and hilarious:

My parents just told me they thought every weekly email I send is only for them, because I address it “hey folks.” They got on my email list a few years ago and from that point forward thought I wrote them an update every week about what I’m up to 😂😂😂

#StormCiara at London Heathrow - 20+ Go-Arounds and Crosswind Landings!! This guy is having the most fun narrating big jet landings at LHR during storm Ciara. So fun to watch. Turns out, one of these jets broke the subsonic record of, making it from JFK to LHR in under 5 hours.

Joshua Browder Love this idea! I hope if works and we can sue them out of existence.

Exciting news! We are launching a new service that gets you compensation from robocallers:

1. If a robocaller calls you, give them one of our virtual credit cards.

2. The card gets all their details and allows you to sue for up to $3k per call.

Zack Bornstein “Barkour!”

Science girl “This is a wireless antenna in California. Network coverage was disrupted by an Acorn woodpecker, a 3 ounce bird stashing an estimated 35-50 gallons/300lbs of acorns.”

James Felton “Imagine how fucking powerful this cat must feel”

Dan Hedl “Bitcoin doesn’t have after hours. It trades 24/7”

Design Objective

Marc Edwards “This image from Microsoft’s Windows 10 icons article captures the last twenty years of icon design so well.”

Zoe Hong 👇 Color geeks, you'll love this thread:

Why I don’t think Parasite should be rereleased as a black and white movie
Or
How color is such a beautiful storytelling tool in Parasite
(no plot spoilers)”

Web-end

The Impact of Web Performance This article has several interesting data points on the sales impact of slow web sites. I like how deep it goes. For example, you'd expect people who own expensive devices (eg iPhone 11 vs iPhone 7) would also spend more money. So the article breaks it up to show that within the same device category, faster sites still perform better.

Here are the results for iPhone 8 Plus(§) (results are similar for all iPhone categories):

What does this tell us? Well, for one, the smoothness of your animations matters. Second, the same thing I’ve been repeating over and over: Fast = $

Alex Russell summarizes it in the best possible way:

One weird trick to improve sales!

Stop punching potential customers as they enter your store.

Luke Jackson 🔥

Reasons to ship your whole website as an img+map tag:

• Images parse way faster than JS (duh)
• Responsive for free (width: 100%)
• Trivial SSR (image to base64 and inline)

Then you just sit back and profit from all the dev salaries you would have wasted building it in react 💸

Kyle Turman 😭

So you're tellin' me a user centered this design?

Lines of Code

foone 👇 How weird bugs are copy and pasted into eternity:

So I learned of an amusing bug today:

Docker for Windows won't run if you have the Razer Synapse driver management tool running.

But the reason is the funny part...

Teamwork

Refinement Revenue This is a solid post about finding product/market fit before jumping for growth, but this point in particular:

Advice is often a double-sided marketplace for braindead people. The Advice Giver is usually an established, busy person. They have a lot of meetings. They have their own problems (which might be the same as yours, by the way). The Giver isn’t really thinking about your business. They’re pattern matching. The Giver will often give you the advice that comes with the most cognitive ease. The simplest advice, instead of the most correct advice.

Cameron Moll “Complex problems take time no matter the resources, dependencies, or team size.”

Startup Life

Kickstarter workers vote to form first union in tech industry I'm all for unions that force tech companies to reconsider unethical behavior:

Employees at crowdfunding platform Kickstarter voted Tuesday to form a union, the first of its kind in the technology industry, after an 18-month battle with the company’s management.

…

The historic vote comes amid growing discontent among employees at technology companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, who have started to organize in an effort to get their employers to cease activity that some workers view as unethical.

Zack Kanter For real:

Startup comp is simple. Either: 1) become among the best in the world at identifying mispriced assets, 2) convince incredible people to work for less, 3) pay top of market, or 4) build a mediocre team.

~everyone thinks they are doing 1/2; nearly everyone is actually doing 3/4.

let me know how i can be helpful “This is a little know fact: In Silicon Valley when two companies backed by the same VC clash, it is customary for the legal teams to respond in iambic pentameter and the matter is arbitrated through a poetry slam.”

Today In Business Models

David Frankel Compiled 200+ tech exits from the last decade, in 17 cities in the US, Canada, Europe, and Israel. I added population size (for cities, using their CSA), and looking at exit value per resident is eye opening.

DigitalOcean raises $100M in debt as it scales toward revenue of $300M, profitability DigitalOcean claims low CAC, self on-boarding, and high retention, allowing them to raise large debt round instead of equity. A shift like this requires three things: a large round (✔️), a large exit (…), and — let's all be honest about tech group think — positive framing by the tech media (✔️):

DigitalOcean, a cloud infrastructure provider targeting smaller business and younger companies, announced today that it has secured $100 million in new debt from a group of investors, bringing its 2016-era debt raise to a total of around $300 million. The company’s nearly $200 million debt raise in …

Techtopia

Kari Paul 👇 Fuel economy: 54 MPG. Range: anywhere with cellular access …

today in sharing economy struggles: our app powered car rental lost cell service on the side of a mountain in rural California and now I live here I guess

Man deliberately darted his car in front of Waymo minivans to cause crash, Arizona police say The Black Mirror episodes are writing themselves:

“Tang admitted to ‘brake-checking’ the Waymo vehicle, which ultimately rear-ended his vehicle,” police said in a statement. The minivan was being driven manually.

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

Fiona Redmond Experience on a large internal corporate red team, as well as both offensive and defensive cyber through the military. Seattle area
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fionakredmond/

Éléonore Mayola Full-stack web development, data science, data engineering #python #clojure #js #aws. Remote contract. http://www.elle-est-au-nord.com

SamanthaDSpivey Junior data scientist. Denver CO/Remote. https://github.com/SamanthaDSpivey

Nisar Hassan Naqvi Front-end Developer looking for a remote Job or some contract based work. https://nisar.dev

Aspen James “I quit a good job yesterday, they unfortunately need to do some work on #DiversityAndInclusion, and it just wasn't a healthy place to be". Web developer, fullStack, JavaScript. http://aspenjames.dev

Emma Backend or fullstack. Python - Django - DRF - EmberJs - Vue. Remote. https://levit.be

None of the Above

ブルーハムハム “小さなキーボディスト #小さな音楽隊” With the sound on!

Casey Newton 😭

Friendship in 2020 is liking their tweets and ignoring their texts

Rex Chapman “Some people are born with it...”

Axis II of Evil My cupboard:

Scientists recently placed a 10-piece set of matching Tupperware in a sealed chamber.

When they opened it a month later, the chamber had 24 lids that did not match any of the 6 remaining containers.

Lisa Forte “This. It is a sign.”

Ali Spittel 😂

I just told my dog that barking at the people in the hallway is "not best practice" and programming has officially taken over my life

Klara Sjöberg “Task failed successfully”

Why Susan Fowler blew the whistle on sexism at Uber The Verge interviews Susan Fowler about Uber, sexism in the tech, and retaliation. and her upcoming book Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber:

“There are times I wish I had not done it because of how terrible it was,” Fowler says. “But the thing I keep telling myself is that you do the right thing no matter what. Like, yes, it sucks. Yes, it’s terrible. But would I go back and do it again? Absolutely.”

Nature & Animals 🌴 “Because every timeline needs more baby goats.”

Sibber Influencer “I don't care if I loose followers over this. The truth hurts... Get over it.”

😷 So we have to talk about COVID-19. I picked up two links for perspective and practical advise.

Preparing for Coronavirus to Strike the U.S.

A mix of scientific and humanitarian, because remember this is not just personal risk to you, but your family and your community.

All of this means that the only path to flattening the curve for COVID-19 is community-wide isolation: the more people stay home, the fewer people will catch the disease. The fewer people who catch the disease, the better hospitals can help those who do. Crowding at hospitals doesn’t just threaten those with COVID-19; if emergency rooms are overwhelmed, more flu patients, too, will die because of lack of treatment, for example.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) PSA for Startups

This article starts with important health information — eg infection and mortality rates — and follows with practical advice for employers and office workers:

• Encourage hand-washing
• Wipe down work areas regularly
• Encourage flu vaccination
• Zero tolerance sick policy
• Curtail travel and conferences and move to video calls
• Curtail visitors from other countries
• Plan for the remote work contingency

Don't panic. Together we'll get through this.

Design Objective

Alex Griendling Thanks, this is super helpful:

I've often had clients who have a difficult time envisioning how a sketch might translate to a finished piece (which is fine and completely understandable), so I began including a slide like this in front of sketch presentations. It helped me, maybe it'll help you.

Allison Grayce Choose your career track wisely:

to design at a startup you have to love the problem

to design in-house you need to love the product

to design at a consultancy you should love the process

pancake princess 👇 This thread made me hungry:

hi i’m going to rate all the pancake emojis starting with

1. delicious, perfectly brown, five in total, how luxurious i approve, good sized butter, could have more syrup though 8/10”

Tools of the Trade

Hopin What if you could move your event online? We're looking at a future that has less travel, smaller gatherings, and video is the norm. This service replicates the entire event experience — sessions, networking, booths, even reception — online.

Andrés Cuervo “A few weeks ago I played around with drawing on my iPad & just mirroring to a projector. Fascinated how even just this simple technique produced really fun results!!”

Lines of Code

Jules Glegg 😭

Hi, I’m a senior engineer. You might know me from my greatest hits “but why is it null?” “There is greater honor in deleting code than in writing more” And the chart-topping “let’s just walk over to them and ask”

Peopleware

Andrew Wilkinson 👇 If you're hiring, then you better be looking out for these red flags. More in the thread. Trust, but verify, a quick reference check can make all the difference. If you're not sure, check their LinkedIn profile and ping 1st/2nd connections.

Great red flags for sketchy people:

• A series of important titles at companies that don’t seem to exist anymore

• Says former business partners are bad people/mistreated them

• Lifestyle that doesn’t match level of purported success

• Moves cities/groups often

Spike Brehm One of the best ways to level up as an individual contributor, is to spend some time as a manager. You gain perspective, and avoid a career development plateau (aka Peter principle). Kodus to companies that make it possible.

I learned a ton as a manager: the importance of generating clarity, of clear goals, of creating a good team environment; navigating budgeting & headcount, navigating bureaucracy. Many lessons I can still use as a senior IC to get shit done in the company.

Teamwork

Rúnar 👇 I hired several developers that way. 5 stars. If you can, this is the best way to go about it:

Here's a crazy idea for technical interviews. Instead of whiteboard coding, 45-minute algorithms challenges, and brain-teasers, ask the candidate to bring some code they wrote. It can be anything. The interview is then just a code review.

How to manage a highly sensitive person Chances are there's one on your team:

As an executive coach and HSP myself, people often ask me how to manage highly sensitive people in the workplace. It first and foremost requires correcting the belief that sensitivity is a defect. Perceiving the world more deeply is a gift—one that can be leveraged to spark creativity, innovation, and professional growth. In fact, sensitive people are consistently rated as top performers in their organizations. HSPs tend to be well-liked by managers and appreciated for their thoughtfulness, even if they get overwhelmed from time to time. Nevertheless, being highly sensitive can present challenges for managing stress, pressure, and relationships in the workplace.

Mekka Okereke 👇 Yep. Think twice what you incentivize with metrics and performance review:

A quick thread on the dangers of OKRs, performance reviews, and pedantry that can happen if we lose sight of what a performance review is supposed to be doing.

Story time!

Corey Leigh Latislaw “Ever wonder about the differences between management, mentorship, coaching, and sponsoring? Loving this slide I made for the management training I'm running at @kinandcarta_cr that hopefully makes it a bit clearer.”

Startup Life

BlitzFail: How Not to Go Off the Rails High growth often relies on tech, business, and culture debt, so figure out what will eventually snap, and fix it before it's too late:

In this post, I identify the top reasons why fast-growing startups go off the rails (or “BlitzFail”). The issues have three things in common: first, they are existential; they are capable of derailing a startup. Second, they are surprising; they tend to go undetected for awhile, then manifest suddenly. Third, they are common enough to occur across many startups.

How a Hot $100 Million Design Startup Collapsed Overnight Case in point, the story of Homepolish — an Instagrammable startup — run like a house of cards:

By the beginning of 2017, there were already signs Homepolish was not performing as expected. On Valentine’s Day, around 15 people (about 15% of the company) were summoned to meetings at restaurants and coffee shops near the office and fired. Some were specifically told it was because they “weren’t contributing to the profits of the company.” Among those culled were four of the most senior, longest-term employees — ones who sometimes disagreed with Santos. Soon, not a single staffer from the early days remained.

Austin Petersmith 🤔 I believe so.

Possibly unpopular opinion?

In the early days of a startup, your ability to make good data-ignorant decisions is more important than your ability to make good data-driven decisions.

Leo Polovets 👇 Thread with some great links:

1/ The amount of great content coming out these days for founders, managers, and employees is incredible. Tons of 10+ and even 100+ page detailed tactical manuals, interactive guides, curated content databases, you name it. A few notable examples:

Locked Doors

Interview: Nick Woods – Increment: Software Architecture While some companies are anti-privacy by design, the reality is that privacy is not the easy default. It takes effort, and few companies have the will to invest in privacy. Nick Woods, the former lead architect of Apple’s iCloud Photo Library talks infrastructure, privacy, and system design.

Clearview AI’s entire client list stolen in data breach Well, of course the company that's spying on you just had a massive data leak, what else is new? Their client list includes Macy's, Walmart, Eventbrite, Coinbase and the NBA … Coinbase and the NBA? What?

Techtopia

The juiciest bits from Steven Levy’s “Facebook: The Inside Story” Yikes!

Much of the reckoning of the past three-plus years can be traced to delegating policy operations to Sandberg, while the company’s all-powerful growth team — which reported to Zuckerberg – ran roughshod over everything else. Policy has always lagged behind the messes created by the growth team, and this was by organizational design.

Stephen Kendrick “I forwarded a #COVID2019 story from the @washingtonpost app to my mom, and an auto generated text went through first saying “I have the coronavirus. So far, it isn’t that bad.” It did not go over well.”

Gillian Smith “Baby tracking app design is really... something.” 😱 nikki stevens reversed engineered the code, and as you'd expect, the code base makes some curious design decisions.

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

James McCabe 20+ years of software craftsmanship. I help companies write highly scalable applications using Scala and JavaScript. Contract/remote. https://oranda.github.io

Thorne CTO, decade of professional experience. React, Node, and more. Remote. https://thornemelcher.com/

rachel Senior software engineer, 10 years experience, international public speaker. Looking for devrel role, but open to all opportunities.

Kim Arnett 7 years iOS/Swift experience. Customer experience, a11y, diversity, dev leadership. Ann Arbor to Detroit, or Remote. https://kimarnett.com/

Romain Piel Interested in joining a midsize product-focused company. Android and/or backend dev (Rails, Go). Remote.

Emmanuel Adesile Over 2 years of software engineering experience. JavaScript, React, React Native, Node/Express and GraphQL. Remote.

Christina Gorton Looking for remote roles as UI/UX developer, devrel, or community management. Experience with teaching, mentoring, React, CSS, Animations and other frameworks. https://www.christinagorton.com/

Jeremy Wagner Looking for devrel or webperf engineering. 15 years as a front end developer. International speaker. http://jeremy.codes

Ivan Malovanyi Looking for job as a Golang Developer. AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Mongo.

David Goodwin JavaScript dev, full stack (MERN), dev ops, techno-enthusiast, and all-around swell guy.

None of the Above

Joshua Raclaw “I need a theory of semantics that accounts for this”

ashi 😭

It finally happened! The flight attendant asked "is there a doctor on this flight?" and I leapt up and said yes!

Did a tracheotomy at 30,000ft with a razor blade and ballpoint pen.

He didn't make it, but the thrill was undeniable. Thinking of going to doctor school now.

Will Taylor Drama Dots! That's just so …

Coworker of mine couldn't remember the name for ellipsis and called them DRAMA DOTS and now I will too forever thanks

Rex Chapman ““Ok, who did it?”😂🤣😭💀💀”

The Library Owl 🍷

things to ask yourself at a party:

• where are the bookshelves
• where are the exits
• who poisoned the wine
• who wanted the hostess dead and why
• does the killer think they can outwit you, the greatest detective in the world

Viveka When we talk about racist laws, this is what we mean. Laws are not neutral by default, they can be designed to produce a very specific outcome:

Gosh, a surprising number of black defendants in the US chose to carry precisely the amount of crack cocaine that would get them a mandatory sentence.

Thanks to @cody_tuttle who is doing some killer research on race, poverty and crime.

http://econweb.umd.edu/~tuttle/files/tuttle_mandatory_minimums.pdf”

kim. “this dog literally failed every single test thrown at him to become a service dog and i am scream laughing. but imho he’s still a very very good boy.”

Nicole Sanchez “Lest we forget, the Patron Saint of Remote Work is Marion the Great 🙏🏾🕯️”

Has your company asked you to work from home due to coronavirus? Like it? Hate it? What’s the most challenging for you?

For years, I alternated between working from home and working in an office, here’s some advise on what to do/expect on your first week:

Hate the commute, but it’s giving your workday a structure. Find your substitute. Dress up for work, even if you’re just changing from pajamas to trainers. Have a designated work space that’s not the place you sleep at, watch TV, etc. Make a clear distinction between work and non-work time.

The time you save by not having to commute? Use it to exercise and overall wellness. Go for a walk, a run, yoga, whatever.

Miss the casual socializing of the office? You have to make a conscious effort here. Use video and chat liberally. Keep it running in the background. Schedule coffee or lunch with your co-workers. Find some excuse to leave the house every day.

Could be your manager is struggling with both the personal transition to work from home, and running a distributed team for the very first time. Be patient while they figure things out.

Did you know, it’s healthy to take short breaks throughout the day? Also, did you know you can use these short breaks to do laundry, dishes, etc.

And don’t forget, even if you are home along, wash your hands regularly. 🧼🤲

Design Objective

humphrey obuobi “this is why ux writers matter”

Scott Berkun Which designer are you?

Every designer that uses grey for text is:

a) under 35 with good vision, and/or
b) doesn't care if people their parents age can actually read what's in their designs, or
c) doesn't believe anyone reads anything anywhere anyway.

Maia Bittner “who knew we needed so much security to opt-out of the email marketing list you didn't want to be on of a restaurant you went to once”

Neal Agarwal “😈”

Tools of the Trade

Terkel “MacOS Catalina tip: You don't need a window manager anymore, just hold down option 👍”

R. Alex Anderson Thanks, this is exactly what I wanted to feel right now …

Want to feel old? ReactJS was released May 29, 2013, or 2468 days ago.

JQuery was released August 26, 2006, or 2468 days before React was released.

That’s right. React has been around as long as JQuery was when React came out. 🤯

Yusuf 👇 Thread for anyone launching a product:

I am a nobody on the internet; not an influencer, not a VC, and not a serial entrepreneur. But my product, @OneProfile_HQ, was recently awarded #1 Product of the Day on @ProductHunt and that has changed my life.

Sharing here how I did it. Maybe it'll help change yours too.

🧵

How a 2 person startup already uses 28 other tools Software is built on software which is built on … If you look at human history, you'll notice a correlation between population size and the speed at which new technology gets invented. And that new technology — from early argiculture through medicine to information sharing — increases the speed at which population can grow. It's a flywheel affect. The software world is a microcosm of that, played in high speed.

Isaac Blankensmith “I recently learned that as a chronic face toucher, I might be more likely to get Coronavirus.😬So I made the ANTI-FACE-TOUCHING MACHINE™ to train myself to touch my face less. (sound on) Made with http://g.co/teachablemachine #CoronaOutbreak”

Andrew Lunny 😱

If you die in Jira you die in real life.

Aaron Levie 😭

Remote work starts out fun, then instantly turns into the hunger games once you and your spouse have conflicting video calls and only one "professional" space.

Lines of Code

Jules Glegg “Boiled this out of some observations of code reviews across multiple orgs and teams. Lower right is my home quadrant but I can flex into enabler/mathematician depending on my stress level”

Peopleware

Katerina Borodina 💯

at work, i made a writeup on how to install a certain app. it involves the terminal, so i was worried the non-technical folks would struggle.

so far... the non-techies have installed it perfectly, but the techies skipped instructions and had to ask for help. check your biases!

Are Entrepreneurs “Touched with Fire”? Interesting study, though it's self-reported and the sample size is ~300, and we all know about the replication crisis. But it gets me thinking. In this study, founders report that they are 2x more likely to have depressesion, 6x ADHD, and 10x bipolar relative to non-founders. And founders that haven't experienced any of these, are still more likely to have it run in the family. However, founders report the same rate of anxiety disorder as non-founders, which is not what I was expecting.

Startup Life

Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020 Sequoia's letter to founders and CEOs about what to expect and how to prepare. This is about keeping the business healthy, and surviving through a financial crunch, shortage of customers, and slower funding:

Having weathered every business downturn for nearly fifty years, we’ve learned an important lesson — nobody ever regrets making fast and decisive adjustments to changing circumstances. In downturns, revenue and cash levels always fall faster than expenses. In some ways, business mirrors biology. As Darwin surmised, those who survive “are not the strongest or the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change.”

Funding in the Time of Coronavirus In the same vein. We've seen financial dips before, except this time there is more capital on the line (and zero interest rate, see below) waiting once the storm passes.

Today in Business Models

ZIRP explains the world How zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) explains why venture capital is chasing matresses and office spaces:

So all these dollar-organisms all start swimming towards riskier waters. Treasury investors shift to corporate debt. Public equity hedge funds shift to late-stage private equity. Late-stage private equity shifts to mid-stage, mid-stage to early stage. Seed rounds become bigger. Angel investors become a thing. Unicorns, unicorns, and more unicorns. Ashton Kutcher.

The Business Equation - Venture Desktop What's the equation that underlines your business?

The most effective business equations feed directly into a company’s advantage flywheel by serving as the push that gets the wheel spinning in the first place. Often, as we might expect, these flywheel accelerants come from engagement.

Locked Doors

How a Hacker’s Mom Broke Into a South Dakota Prison This story is so good … “Security analyst John Strand had a contract to test a correctional facility’s defenses. He sent the best person for the job: his mother.”

Troy Hunt: Project Svalbard, Have I Been Pwned and its Ongoing Independence Troy Hunt tried to sell Have I Been Pwned, and it didn't go as expected, and I enjoyed reading and learned a thing or two.

🧼🤲 Wash Your Hands

WHO: How to handwash? With soap and water “Hand hygiene is an easy, inexpensive, and effective mean to prevent the spread of germs and keep everyone healthy.”

Robert Quigley “Checkmate, digital journalism.”

CNN: An Australian newspaper has printed an extra eight pages to be used as toilet paper after coronavirus fears prompted customers to bulk buy supplies, leaving some supermarket shelves bare.

Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by Johns Hopkins CSSE Johns Hopkins updates their global pandemic dashboard twice a day.

Jenny Jaffe “WERE MEN NOT WASHING THEIR FUCKING HANDS?!”

None of the Above

Dominic Holden “seems like two separate stories but okay”

Ben Machell 🤔

What's the wellest an email has ever found you?

Alex Fitzpatrick “Ask your doctor if Lyriq and Celestiq are right for you. Do not take Lyriq or Celestiq if you have a history of high blood pressure or depression”

Car and Driver :New @Cadillac EVs include Lyriq SUV coming in April, Celestiq flagship later

David Spinks 👍

We’ve seen physical fitness and mental fitness become mainstream concepts in western society.

The next wave will be social fitness: how we build and maintain relationships.

There will be books, exercises, apps, classes, coaches, and events all to help you stay socially fit.

Dexter “This may happen if you try to scare a bear away with a waterhose...”

Cats of Instagram “Stop laughing, I'm a big scary kitty, see?”

Clare.O “I promised I wouldn't #panicbuying but I couldn't stop myself. 🤗”

😷 How's your week going?

My week was reading about pandemics and social isolation. Not the smartest thing to do. Impossible to focus and I barely got any work done.

I'm optimistic, but even the optimistic scenarios talk about people dying, losing their job, etc. Nobody knows for sure what would happen.

We do know that our lives are about to change. In a big way. And in short order.

Change and uncertainty make for an emotional rollercoaster.

Weekend Reading, always information, and this week I'm adding a new section for all you work-from-home readers.

And I hope there's enough humor and cute animal pictures because it's important to take care of our emotions. And the people close to us. 💪

WFH

For those new to remote work, here are some of the best places to get started:

GitLab’s Guide To Remote Work — One of the largest remote-first companies. Aside from that guide, they also maintain a comprehensive list of remote work resources. You can spend all week there, reading and learning.

Zapier’s The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work — Another remote-first company that have found a magic formula for culture/product/market fit. You can download this guide and read on your device.

Remote: Office Not Required — Basecamp literally wrote the book on remote work. Their books are fun to read.

Jules Forrest 👇 Thread of people sharing their WFH workspace, the unglamorous edition.

Several grumpy opinions about remote work at Tailscale TL;DR “iPad + Airpods + Whereby is a really great combination in 2020. And it also works well with Zoom, which is good because you're stuck with it.”

Ian Brown 😭

WFH was great but now my partner’s employer is making them WFH too and our house is a goddamn open office plan all of a sudden.

Martin Kleppmann🇺 Yes …

In 1665, the University of Cambridge temporarily closed due to the bubonic plague. Isaac Newton had to work from home, and he used this time to develop calculus and the theory of gravity. http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04004

… but he also turned off Slack notifications, declined all Zoom meetings, and uninstalled the Twitter app from his phone!

Thoughts of Dog® Woof.

the human has been working from home the last couple days. and every so often. they let me participate in the video calls. all the other humans cheer when they see me. i am the only thing holding their company together

memento mori 😭

Just got an email from a prof: “As a reminder, you are required to wear clothes during Zoom meetings.”

Rules are made when they become necessary, not before.

Eugene Wei “May be time to revisit our views of this brave man in his N95 mask who ordered a quarantine of Manhattan over the objections of the public and whose primary foe was a man infected by a bat”

Tools of the Trade

David Bailey “There are no perfect VS Code extensio-”

Architectural

The many reasons replatforming FreshBooks should have failed (and why it succeeded) This is one way to replatform (read: the Big Rewrite) a SaaS application. Minimize risk and pressure from the executive team, so you can do what's necessary to succeed:

What happens if we create a company that has nothing to do with us? No one could track the two companies together. And we could use that new company as a petri dish to build the new FreshBooks.

What we would get out of that is we could build something out of our competitors’ eyes, or even our customers’ eyes, frankly, which is helpful in a lot of ways. We could scale it up to know if it was actually business-performant and better.

Masterclass: How to sell to 20M software developers with an amazing onboarding experience If you're building software solution for developers, this is a great article on how to do onboarding right. From VP of Engineering at Algolia.

Teamwork

David Hoang 🔥

Leadership role expectations:

• 24/7 thought leadership
• Conference speaking
• Podcasts interviews

Leadership role reality:

• Saying the same things over again consistently at scale
• Asking two teams if they’ve talked to each other
• Finding where that Google doc is

Do CEOs act like jerks because they are jerks, or because the language of management will create a jerk of anyone eventually? Let me noodle on this and we can deep dive in the next heads meeting.

Sara Wallace Goodman 👍

I guess we’re about to find out which meetings could’ve been emails after all...

None of the Above

devastations “oh to be a squirrel smelling a flower”

Jeremiah Lowin 😭

I made a graph of old relationships.

It has an ex axis and a why axis.

Shaun “This is a picture of an asteroid crater in Arizona...
Look how close it came to hitting the visitors centre...”

ryan teague beckwith 💸

Your 401k right now is like your face: Don't touch it

Madi Kay “National Park posters created based off their worst Yelp Review, I’m dead”

Jeff Siegel Everything you need to know about cauliflower pizza:

The coronavirus was a hoax created by #TraderJoes so the company could conduct market research on what products are worth keeping in stock. Stuff people won't buy, even during the end of times, is probably a good indication of what to get rid of.

Kory Stamper 👇TIL

"Quarantine" has a pretty complicated etymology. WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR ALL ABOUT IT, YES YOU WOULD, SETTLE IN, MY NERDS

1/13

Dylan “Two types of people in this world”

James Hamblin Yes, it's called prevention paradox:

The thing is if shutdowns and social distancing work perfectly and are extremely effective it will seem in retrospect like they were totally unnecessary overreactions.

Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real? - talking about major effort to avert a crisis Related. Y2K was a major effort to avert a disaster, and all that effort paid off, and so people doubted that it ever was a real problem to begin with.

Toilet Paper Hoarding Boosts Bidet Sales At least in the US, personal hygiene is trending. Just checked Amazon, and they're out of stock on the more affordable models,

Taylor Lorenz “This guy’s fake reality show TikToks with his friend are so good”

This is a tough one.

😷 How's your week going?

The weather was nice for part of this week, so I left the house and went for a walk around the neighborhood. Get the blood flowing, soak in some sun, do some creative thinking, that later on turned into a couple of emails and a Zoom call. Few people outside so it was easy to keep distance. And I felt so much better after each walk. Highlighy recommended.

☀️🕶

WFH

How to do effective video calls TL;DR “Get good audio, use gallery view, mute if not talking, and welcome the cat.”

Sleeping tips when staying indoors during isolation period For many people, the sudden change/loss of schedule can disrupt their regular sleep habits. This is a quick read on how to get back on track.

David Zhou “Zoom pro tip 3: make it a video background to have a convincing loop of you looking engaged”

Esther Choo I don't have kids, but I understand:

Tonight I was like, whew, that was rough but we made it through day one of kids being home from school.

Then realized it’s actually just the weekend, extended school closing has technically not even started and we are doomed.

Tools of the Trade

Layoffs are Coming 🚨 Unfortunately, the great move to work from home is not something that will spare the tech industry. Some people hold on to the idea that tech — especially startups — are immune because “software is eating the world”, but software is still a business, and business needs to make money. A global recession has a cascading effect, as everyone buys less, revenues shrink.

Most likely you get to keep your job, but I do like the idea of being prepared, just in case:

When layoffs happen, they hit quick. You probably won’t see it coming. You don’t want to be trying to get your resume in order while negotiating severance and figuring out COBRA! So in the next couple of weeks, get your resume all updated and ready to send at a moment’s notice. Put a recurring reminder in your calendar/todo app so you remember to do this regularly (quarterly, perhaps.)

Apropos, and we did see this happen in prior recessions. This is the software industry's reversion to the mean:

To put a fine point on it: if we hit a downturn, Java’s going to get you a job far faster than Rust. If you’ve got some of those more old-school technologies — Java, C/C++, .NET, etc. — in your background, but haven’t touched them in a while, it could be worth your while to brush back up.

Dr. Caroline Bartman ⏲ I've been practicing this technique for over a week, didn't know it had a name!

now that we are all working from home, may i recommend:
the MODIFIED POMODORO method.

1. work on work stuff for 25 minutes.
2. Read coronavirus updates on twitter and http://nytimes.com for two hours

repeat until you've finished approximately 25 minutes of work in 1 day

Freedom: Internet, App and Website Blocker On a more serious note, you can use an app like Freedom to block distracting (news, social media) sites. These are not normal times, do not expect you or your team to be productive. But also, take care of your mental health, and this may just be the app you need to lower your blood pressure and sleep better at night.

iPad Pro — How to correctly use a computer — Apple The iPad is getting a proper keyboard with touch pad! I want … I need this. This ad is so great, it starts looking a bit like Brazil, and pokes fun at computers — including Apple's own line of delicate and expensive to repair notebooks:

Treat your computer with respect.
It is not a toy.
Do not touch the screen.

Chetan Puttagunta “Enterprise software as disinfecting wipes.
A thread to add levity to your feed 😃:”

Lingua Scripta

Adam Klein 😭

New JS restrictions due to COVID-19:

• Arrays must have less than 10 items
• No importing node_modules. If you must, run in an iframe
• All CSS borders must be solid
• Avoid TCP handshakes
• Leave 2 empty lines between statements
• Use spaces, not tabs (unrelated to COVID-19)

Today in Business Models

David Dayen In general, it should come as no surprise, that this crisis will lead to even more wealth concentrating at the top:

For today's Unsanitized: I got my hands on a slide deck from Bain & Co that all but admits that private equity is poised to scoop up bushels of companies once the economy comes up for air https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-private-equity-licks-its-chops/

Aneel I wonder how much of that growth is speculators:

If you'd invested in wrong zoom a month ago at the open on the premise that there's going to be more people who don't know they're on the wrong ticker over time than people who do AND that no amount of stories would reach the former and MORESO during covid-19... you'd be up +900%

FYI: ZM is the ticker symbol for Zoom, the video conferencing software we're all using, and their stock is up 2x since January. ZOOM is a different company, they're no longer in business, and so their stock is up 15x since January. Yes, that is the infinite logic of the stock market.

Locked Doors

Ransomware Gangs to Stop Attacking Health Orgs During Pandemic 🤯

Today, the Maze operators responded to my questions by posting a "Press Release" that also states that they will stop all "activity" against all kinds of medical organizations until the end of the pandemic.

None of the Above

Best of Nextdoor “Meanwhile, in Oakland...”

Anbara Salam 👇

As a public service in these stressful times I'd like to offer, as a palate cleanser, the most embarrassing moment of my life.

10ish years ago, my ex bf and I visited a spa in Germany. It's swimsuits in the pool but you have to be naked in the sauna.

Btw I speak no German.  1/

Ada Powers “I get it: you're on lockdown. You're trying to do a lot with a little. It's hard to find joy in the midst of fear, depression, and austerity.

That's why it's time to learn about totwaffles. (thread)”

mommysama 👇 This story is just bonkers:

I laughed at this but lemme tell y’all a story about how my family and I got scammed and almost stuck in Montego Bay last month (thread)

Humor And Animals “couldn't ask for a better training partner
(magnusthetherapydog IG)”

Nicola Coughlan Stay vigilant!

I know this time of self isolation is hard and scary for people but however bad you are feeling- please, please don’t consider starting your own podcast

Straight men under the age of 35 are particularly vulnerable to this and we all need to be vigilant of the dangers x

Marty O “Update: Not all sports are cancelled”

How to get your money back on a non-refundable hotel 🔥

The hotel refused to refund the payment. I called and asked to extend from 3 nights to 10 nights. When they asked the reason, I replied that I just got back from Italy and am looking for a place to stay until the 14-day quarantine period is over. “I want to stay in one place and not move around,” I told them.

Nat Torkington “The subgenre of "WTF shopping substitutions" is my new favourite thing.”

jayne stigger: @ClareBarry I ordered a walnut loaf. Guess what I got?

A Cat In The Lonesome October This is the start to every movie about a post apocalyptic world!

A completely empty ferry terminal at night…

And the only object in the room is an artfully placed full page newspaper explaining what happened.

Because life is a video game.

Tara Hunt “I swoon. Much fashion. So safety. 👗😷🔥”

lenka: ladies and gents, the president of slovakia

Aisha Malik 👇 Civilization is all about social caring:

Anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture.
Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the

The Beekman Live Goat Cam A live nest cam looking at a pen with baaaby goats. Got this playing on a side window.

IKEA Israel “It's really not complex - just staying at home.”

😷 How's your week going?

Every week I spend about 2~3 hours to curate the best content for Weekend Reading. This week it's taking twice as long as usual, because there's so much information out there, and it's all about the editing.

I don't plan on turning Weekend Reading into a COVID newsletter, but right now this is the most important information to share. In the US and much of Europe, the virus is doubling every three days and many lives are on the line.

I'm picking the best information from people in the know: scientists, healthcare professionals, epidemiologist, etc. If this is new information to you, read it carefully and pay attention. If you know it all, here's a reminder to share with your family, friends, and community.

Look at China, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong. They showed us that acting fast and smart, we can flatten the curve. There's light at the end of the tunnel. Together we can make a difference!

If you know a healthcare professional, give them a hug! From a distance — we don't want to get them sick. Let them know how much we appreciate their effort and sacrifice.

Stay safe. Wash your hands. Keep distance. Listen to experts.

☀️🕶

😷 Stay Safe

Mythbusters ‘Contamination’ Experiment Proves Why Social Distancing Is So Damn Important “A Mythbusters experiment conducted back in 2015 has seen a renewed appreciation now the nation is coming into a state of semi-lockdown.”

More Americans Should Probably Wear Masks for Protection You don't say!

Healthcare workers need N95, but the rest of us can do with surgical masks, bandanas, balaclavas, etc. They offer just enough protection for the wearer, but more important — slow the spread from people who are asymptomatic. The idea that only people with symptoms should wear masks ignores the incubation period. And it ignores human nature: unless more people wear masks, not enough people would.

Abraar Karan:

8/ Masks were a whole different ball game as well.
Everyone wore masks. Part of this was to prevent transmission.
But part of it was also to reduce stigma against the sick.
If only the sick wear masks, they may be hesitant.
But if everyone does, then no one is missed.

If you have a personal mask, you can decontaminate it for reuse by sticking in the oven for 30 minutes. Healthcare workers would want to look into vaporized hydrogen peroxide.

Dr. Punch “Gloves are meaningless if you don’t take them off properly. Anyone can take them off safely with these smooth operator moves. 🤣🤣. Stay safe and #ScrubLikeASurgeon #COVID19”

Notification of Enforcement Discretion for Telehealth The US has relaxed HIPPA regulations. You can now use FaceTime, Zoom, Houseparty, or whichever video app to chat with your doctor!

There's an app for that I wish. The three I know of are Private Kit from MIT, TraceTogether from Singapore government, and Hamagen from Israel's ministry of health. They all prioritize privacy in much the same way, but ineffective when hardly anyone uses them (< 5K installs according to Sensor Tower), and the app store reviews are brutal (2.8 to 4.4 stars).

If you are working on an app for physical distancing that is privacy aware, please let me know.

US Health Weather Map by Kinsa This US Health Weather map is a visualization of illness linked to fever — typically the flue. The data is aggregated from Kinsa smart thermometers (I take it back, not everything that's Wifi connected is stupid). We can predict how many of these fevers are typical based on historical data, and so the difference (orange and red) is likely COVID-19.

Note: this map will not show asymptomatic carriers or hospital admissions, mostly home care.

Don Schaffner 👇 TL;DR you don't have to worry about your lattice, fridges don't kill viruses (heat and humidity is better), and don't soap what you're about to ingest:

Unless you are living under a rock or have already perished from COVID-19, you've likely seen a YouTube video making the rounds where a medical doctor (wearing scrubs!) purports to give COVID-19 advice. (1/33)

Gerston Blenman “Joker : “Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I'm an agent of chaos...”

Also Joker :”

🏚 WFH

Joshua Rayntine “Behind every successful woman is an unsuccessful man not wearing any pants:”

Netflix Party Watch Netflix together with other people at a distance. A Chrome extension that keeps all browsers in sync, and also includes chat, because what are films without the audience commentary?

Peter Steinberger “Wow, App Store downloads changed massively since the pandemic event! (data is from @appfigures)”

🦠 😷 Coronavirus / COVID19 Emoji List The informative guide to using Emoji in the time of Corona:

🧼 Washing / cleanliness
🧼🖐 Hand washing
🧼👏 Hand washing (at small sizes, 👏 Clapping Hands resembles hand washing)
🧴🤲 If soap is unavailable; use alcohol-based handrub / sanitizer

Tammy Duckworth 😭

So today I didn’t realize I was off mute and told the Democratic Caucus (including a couple recent presidential candidates) that “...mommy is working honey, please go potty and wash your hands then mommy will come downstairs.” How’s your working from home going? 🤦🏻‍♀️

NotOccupying “When your anatomy class is now on zoom. #QuaratineLife #AcademicTwitter”

Design Objective

Marketing Examples “Levi's COVID-19 email is a lesson in copywriting:”

Tools of the Trade

Screen — Screen sharing for remote teams “Work together like you’re in the same room. Supports Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, Safari, Firefox & Chrome.” Yes! Remember ScreenHero? Slack bought them and killed then, but the founder is back with a new independent app.

The Complete AEA DC 2019 Now Online “As of this morning, we’ve published the 12 remaining sessions from AEA DC 2019 in one fell swoop. They join the five videos we’ve already released this year.” Thank you!

Addy Osmani “Tip: http://excalidraw.com is fantastic for quickly mocking up UIs. Free, feature-filled and the live collaboration mode is excellent.”

Peopleware

Why Time No Longer Has Meaning, According to Science This article explains why last week feels like it was the longest year ever (also, why time passes slower for kids, for which everything is a new experience):

As Eagleman explains in this video, “People don’t actually see time in slow motion during an event.” Instead, when you are in a life-threatening moment, your brain records this memory in much greater detail. Then, when you recall this memory, your brain gets confused by all of these extra details, and is tricked into thinking this event lasted longer than it actually did.

dergigi “People are 178% worried, which seems accurate to me.”

Today In Business Models

Suhail If you're running a startup, now is the time to over react:

Things I am hearing from founders' board mtgs:

(1) Re-plan operating plan in 30-45 days (the future is hard to predict)
(2) Assume 18 months of recovery
(3) Tighten the belt: cut pay, cut costs, or layoff.
(4) Plan for the severe to extreme downside scenario
(5) Raise now

April Dunford 👇 Thread. When the economy picks up, the new normal will be different from the old normal, so make sure you skate to where the puck will be:

A few thoughts on positioning in a downturn. Pay attention to what's changed for your buyers - a shift in their priorities could have a big impact on your unique value 1/

Bill Gurley 💯

If someone older than you with business experience is giving you advice on navigating tough times please listen & don’t argue. Good judgement comes from experience that comes from bad judgment. They used to have the same perspective you do. That’s why they are trying to help.

Rafat Ali 👇 Business travel is going to change profoundly:

There is a mass delusion in travel industry about recovery, if my LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos from travel CEOs, or analysis from consultant types: if you just hold on for few more months, the world will come gushing right back out, come Q3 or Q4. Add inspirational song here...

Helen Dale A business model invented out of lock down:

Economics of Coronavirus: illegal dog walking markets have sprung up in Spain. People are renting their dogs so they can be taken for walks, allowing multiple "customers" to go outside; it's one of the few reasons people can leave their homes.

Going rate per dog is €35-45/hour.

Locked Doors

Carina C. Zona 👇 Unfortunately, while Zoom is a wonderful and useful product, they play fast & loose with privacy and security:

Here's a sampling of some of Zoom's cavalier long-rerm history regarding security and privacy (thread):

Full Third-Party Cookie Blocking and More Good bye 3rd party cookies. Safari is doing the right thing here, Google needs to track you, so don't expect Chrome to follow up for a while.

Available For Hire

Darren Full stack developer with experience in React/Redux, Node.js and Python. Regular coach/instructor in underrepresented tech communities like @CodeFirstGirls & @codebar. London or remote. https://github.com/DarrenVong

goldirises Site Reliability Engineer, cloud infra, Kubernetes, Helm, golang, python, nice person, etc. Seattle area or remote.

Bonnie Kate Wolf Illustrator and visual/brand designer based in SF. Contract, or full time. http://www.bonniekatewolf.com

kjmrussett Open source, design systems, architecture, React, front end engineering, public speaking. https://www.linkedin.com/in/resource11

lynn Infra / tooling / SRE roles. Go, python, or rust. Startups, Seattle or remote. https://github.com/lynncyrin/

Jack Lo Russo Front-end engineer with design background. Passionate about building great products and growing excellent teams. https://www.jacklorusso.com

None of the Above

Deeda Payton “The salsa aisle inventory pretty much sums up Texas 🤠”

camgrilll 🤔

the government is making us quarantine so they can change the batteries in the pigeons

Sage Boggs “OK, buckle up. I wanna talk to you about Triscuit.” 👇 The ending is electrifying!

Flatten the Curve of Armchair Epidemiology Great take on all the social media armchair experts:

Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE) is a phenomenon where people lack the ability to understand their lack of ability. While strains of DKE typically circulate seasonally, a new and more virulent strain called DKE-19 is now reaching pandemic proportions.

When you’re done reading this article, this is what you’ll take away:

• DKE-19 is coming to you.
• It’s coming at an exponential speed: gradually, then suddenly, then suddenlier.
• When it does, your feeds will be overwhelmed.
• Exhausted fact checkers will break down. Some will die of sadness.
• The only way to prevent this is social media distancing. Not tomorrow. Today.
• That means vetting sources BEFORE you share, starting now.

Jon Acuff Time to reshuffle the bookcase.

I’m judging the bookshelf behind you when we do a Zoom call.

Rex Chapman🏇🏼 “Quarantine day 11:”

NE Oh Regional Sewer 👇 TL;DR flush toilet paper, but not disinfecting wipes! Also, this thread is unexpected fun read:

i’m here to help. you name an item and i’ll tell you if it’s flushable or not.

Posted from B3ta 🔥

The Four Possible Timelines for Life Returning to Normal “The coronavirus outbreak may last for a year or two, but some elements of pre-pandemic life will likely be won back in the meantime.”

Ozzy Man Reviews I don't even want my money back, just cancel the whole of 2020 and keep the change:

Coronavirus Causes Dip in Podcast Listening Fascinating, but in retrospect not that surprising. Podcast listening is down across the board, probably because fewer people are commuting. News is down 10%, culture is down 17% — replaced with Netflix and TikTok? Sports down 17%, but also much of sports has been cancelled.

The biggest hit? Crime podcasts are down 30%. It has been said that crime podcasts are porn for people who live a safe life, and now that nobody is safe, that category is redundant.

Judd Winick “Where is your god now”

Coronavirus has no race by visuals

😷🧵 Maskathon

This week, we summon the hacker spirit and do a Maskathon.

It was only last week, when we talked about why everyone should be wearing masks (if you're still not convinced).

Since then, a few more countries have changed their policies, either suggesting or mandating the use of masks in public places.

Except (especially here in the US), they don't have enough masks to give everyone. And besides, N95/surgical masks are disposable. They're not designed to be reused (but you can disinfect).

So this week, we're going to look at do-it-yourself masks.

julie_eigenmann Make a no-sew mask from bandana/handkerchief and hair ties. Easy to follow and takes a few minutes. For added protection, you can insert a HEPA filter between the layers.

Masks for Curbing the Spread of SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Detailed and illustrated guide, courtesy of the government of India. Includes detailed instructions for sewing a mask that will fit like a surgical mask.

Etsy Feel like accessorizing? Etsy creators are selling masks in all shapes and patterns.

Lex Fridman “Air flow from a person breathing, talking, and coughing, with & without face mask. Visualization by @LaVisionInc”

The untold origin story of the N95 mask “The most important design object of our time was more than a century in the making.”

🏚 WFH

COVID–19 Resource Center Important! Guidance and tools to navigate changing regulation on benefits for the self employed.

Christian Moriarty FYI

Just a by the by: "private" messages sent to individual people during a Zoom meeting show up in the end-of-meeting transcript along with all other public messages.

Tell your friends, save a life.

mdowd 👿

Today’s quarantine lesson: if you “ok google” in a zoom meeting, you can mess with about three or four peoples houses at once

John M. Cunningham “The original Zoom meeting”

The light therapeutic I'm reposting this. For many of us, we're suddenly spending more time indoors and in front of computer screens. This article talks to researches about the affect daylight and screens have on our sleep patterns, and our physical and mental well beings. You might want to make some changes after you read this. I opened up all the curtains in my house, try to spend an hour outdoors every day, and dialed the computer's color temperature to warmer.

Assaf “Distancing”

Tools of the Trade

Steve Forde “Threw together a "Dad's on a call" indicator for downstairs. Made with an Adafruit Huzzah Esp8266 and controlled via Telegram bot.”

colors.lol “Overly descriptive color palettes.” Delightful color schemes, and I love the memorable random color names: give me some unsealed mahogany, undiagnosed light indigo, foggiest jungle green 😀

Dave DeLong “One of my absolute most favorite Safari features is right-clicking on the 🔈 icon in the address bar to pull videos (especially @YouTube vids) into a system PIP window.

This lets me continue watching a video while doing other things on my Mac.”

Designing web applications for the Apple Watch using Toucaan CSS Framework. There's no dedicated browser, but some Apple Watch applications can show web pages. With the help of CSS media queries, you can adapt content to fit the screen, and the eye to watch distance.

Lines of Code

Khalil Stemmler Write boring code:

Boring code:

• is consistent
• is not clever
• is easily understandable
• makes locating features easy
• adheres to Principle of Least Surprise (things do what I assume they would)
• takes a minimal amount of effort to change
• uses the right tool (paradigm, language) for the job

Jim Manico Remember Y2K? Well …

The governor of New Jersey just put out the call on live TV that he is desperate for Cobol programmers right now.

Peopleware

That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief This:

Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.

TechnicallyRon 👏

If you don’t come out of this quarantine with either:

1.) a new skill
2.) starting what you’ve been putting off like a new business
3.) more knowledge

That's perfectly fucking fine you're currently going through a historical event out of your control it's not a bank holiday

Startup Life

28 Moves to Survive (& Thrive) in a Downturn “In the face of a global pandemic and a financial meltdown, a new reality confronts Founders. Here are 28 moves to survive and thrive during a downturn.” 👍 If you're running a startup, read this!

Start-Ups Are Pummeled in the ‘Great Unwinding’ - The New York Times So we're calling it “The Great Unwinding“? 🤷

The VC & Founder Sentiment Survey Founders were always more optimistic than VCs, this survey shows that. More interesting to me is the sentiment difference between pre and post series A. 46% of pre-series A founders are considering/making layoffs, that jumps to 70% post series A. I guess experience brings caution (wisdom?) Also, younger is more nimble: 51% of pre-series A are going/considering remote work for the long term, but only 32% of post-series A!

Covid-19 Finance Assistance Network - Splash If you need help navigating through the economic challenges — including applying for PPP loans and other federal assistance — Lew’s List, High Plains Advisors, and Foundry Group have assembled a group of CFOs, controllers, and other finance professionals to help you. For free.

Today in Business Models

Why Walmart is seeing a rise in sales for tops, but not bottoms during the coronavirus crisis Second order effect from all the Zoom meetings.

Stackline’s News and Insights — Top 100 Fastest Growing & Declining Categories in E-commerce When all this is over, we'll have too many bread makes (+652%), cute hair colors (+115%), and next level ping pong skills (+89%). For now, we've given up on men's swimwear (-64%), drones (-50%), and sunglasses (-43%).

(For reference, toilet paper only up 190%?)

Serge van Ginderachter “Who led the digital transformation in your company?”

Locked Doors

Temporarily rolling back SameSite Cookie Changes and TLS 1.0/1.1 support has been removed Chrome and Firefox are rolling back planned security upgrades, for fear they would break essential health, government, and community services:

This is because many people are currently forced to work at home and relying on online tools amid the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, but some of critical government sites still don’t support TLS 1.2 yet.

Court: Violating a site’s terms of service isn’t criminal hacking Courts are struggling to interpret the vague Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. For now, they decided that website terms of service are nothing more than an advisory. I hope that sticks.

A Message to Our Users - Zoom Blog Good move on behalf of Zoom. They played fast and loose with security, and now are promising to take corrective action.

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent ‘misleading data’ being shown to pilots Have you tried turning the plane on and off? Apparently, this is normal procedure for the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350.

Available For Hire

kyra Over two years of web development experience. C#, Java, python , C, React, Angular, HTML/CSS. Canada.

Monica.dev Full Stack engineer and community organizer of. NYC, DC or remote. https://www.aboutmonica.com

Ahmed Gurbuz Data Scientist/Engineer. Open to relocation. http://ahmedgurbuz.com

Stephen Lang Embedded software developer. Open-source preferred. Remote. https://skl.me

Alex Diwa Front-end/full-stack developer. https://alexdiwa.com/

Craig Pearlman Swift, Objective-C, PostgreSQL, Oracle, PHP, Laravel. http://craig.blackfog.net

Kari Halsted Tech writer, info architect, editor. Remote.

None of the Above

chris “everyone in April:”

Eric Lach True

sourdough starters are just Tamagotchi for early middle-age

Rex Chapman “The only demons under your bed...”

Gwynn Ballard 😆

A work from home email:

Dear mom,

Per my last email, I would love a grilled cheese for lunch, at your earliest convenience. Please advise.

Best,

Gwynn Ballard
Manager of House Operations

relationships.txt “My (f26) boyfriend (m28) is visiting another girl's island a lot in animal crossing. Is this cheating?”

Cassie LaBelle 🔥

The entire US domestic box office receipts last weekend totaled less than $4,000.

$3,842 of that came from the indie film "Phoenix, Oregon."

Please no more indie filmmakers make "I wish my tiny movie would top the box office charts" wishes on monkey's paws okay??

Joseph Kim “My favorite physical distancing practice in South Korea is in Gwangju, where you don't sit next to people at local govt offices but next to cute dolls (on the seats it says we need physical distancing so we [children] can go to school by April 6th, source: Yonhap)”

Coronavirus: Why are there teddy bears in Bay Area windows? “Teddy bear hunts are popping up in neighborhoods around the Bay Area. Here’s why.”

Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man are stubbing out their smokes... to find a corona-cure Big Tobacco is working on a vaccine for Coronavirus. Nothing makes sense about 2020.

iucounu “this orangutan telling a thrilling story to an entranced audience of otters”

Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model Recommended reading.

out of context brooklyn nine nine Did … did the script writers know?

Andrew Stuart 👇 The goats are taking over the town! 🐐

I think I just got a group of goats in Llandudno arrested.

Let me explain... first, I saw this from inside a dark pub (the one I live in currently). I thought I was seeing things. So I took some video:

Jennifer Baer “Hi. I designed some coronavirus travel posters for you. Stay the F* home. Love you all.”

Stuart Antony “This is Toby he is now working from home...”

WFH

Everything we’ve implemented at Front to keep a great culture while being remote If you have a “suddenly remote team”, this article is full of ideas on keeping open lines of communication and morale high. Send a Daily Weather Report, host a 24/7 Zoom room, recommended books for parents, Skincare Fridays, etc. Have you tried any of these? What do you think?

Design Objective

iPad Main Menu Concept Love this! This design concept adds a main menu to the iPad: no more hidden features that are only available by some magical incantation. This menu is part of the dock, so you can access it everywhere (slide from the bottom), and even makes sense of multitasking.

Dawid Woldu “Are we all just supposed to ignore that? 🤓 @SlackHQ” 😱

Tools of the Trade

Microsoft Edge is becoming the browser you didn’t know you needed Edge has some interesting features: collections with notes, vertical tabs, smart copy (visual block), password manager. And now that it's based on Chromium, it also supports most web sites. But, will it counter-balance the dominance of Chrome, or worse — take out Firefox?

An introduction to the Web Contact Picker API The Contact Picker API allows a website user to pick specific contact from their address book, without allowing the website to access all their contacts. So you get the convenience (eg to share a link, add user to team) without privacy risk.

How To Say No ”Saying no is hard, but it’s also essential for your sanity. Here are some templates for how to say no - so you can take back your life.” Love this website. It's a collection of templates for saying no in different scenarios, and also available as GMail templates.

mitchparkerciso 🔥

COBOL will outlive the people making fun of it.

Jakub Kozłowski λ “okay Github, I know my builds are shit but no need to be passive aggressive about it”

Architectural

About CRDTs • Conflict-free Replicated Data Types Community and resources for anyone interesting in CRDT. CRDT is a core technology for building collaboration apps that allow multiple users to edit the same document (eg Figma, Google Docs, Notion).

Microservices “it’s because of the way our backend works …” It's funny but also I cried a little bit because it hits so close to home.

Today in Business Models

Newsletter-only startups are filling a niche in news consumption These growth numbers are staggering! In my opinion — I tweeted about it here — RSS/Atom feeds are not coming back. Get use to that. Instead, email — and specifically newsletters — is the new distributed social network:

Other newsletter digests have been taking off, too. In 2019 alone, Morning Brew's revenue grew from $3M to $13M, while their subscribers ballooned from the tens of thousands to nearly two million. The growth story behind the millennial-focused newsletter theSkimm is similar: since gaining 100,000 subscribers in their first 12 months, they've added about a million new readers per year.

Thumbtack Customer Projects March 1-31 2020 - Google Drive This is what it takes to fight the virus and the effect it has on various service industries. Carpet cleaning, DJ, painting, personal training, all down significantly. The one exception (green line): lawn mowing and trimming. What changes are you seeing in the service industry?

Locked Doors

Apple and Google are building a coronavirus tracking system into iOS and Android Yes! The only way contact tracing works is if it's baked into the OS. If you need to install an app, not enough people would do that (I talked about it here.) It has to work across iOS and Android, and it has to be privacy friendly and not used for mass surveillance. If you get a chance to read the full spec for Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing let me know what you think about it.

Zoom Rushes to Improve Privacy for Consumers Flooding Its Service “The risks, the misuse, we never thought about that.” That's the Zoom privacy policy in a nutshell. I have to admit, it's catchy and memorable, almost poetry. And it's classical Silicon Valley playbook: growth at any cost, wait until there's media backlash, apologize, maybe do something about it.

Meanwhile, NY schools, US Senate, and Singapore have mandated "no Zoom" policies, stock is a bit down on that news, but I doubt this will have a lasting effect. Like Facebook before, it's a PR blip, forgotten in a week.

“We were focusing on business enterprise customers,” Mr. Yuan said. “However, we should have thought about ‘What if some end user started using Zoom’” for nonbusiness events, “maybe for family gatherings, for online weddings.” He added: “The risks, the misuse, we never thought about that.”

Mr. Yuan said Zoom never felt the need until now to rigorously examine the platform’s privacy and security implications for consumers. “If not for this crisis,” he said, “I think we would have never thought about this.”

Related, Every Zoom Security and Privacy Flaw So Far, and What You Can Do to Protect Yourself

Webcam Hacking - Technical Walkthrough Deep dive and very interesting look into the security architecture of iOS and Webkit.

Available For Hire

Zoe Gagnon Looking for an IC or management role. https://www.zgagnon.com/

Erin Fox React, React Native, GraphQL. Most of my experiences have been product focused. I sometimes give conference talks. Bay Area or Remote. https://medium.com/@erinfoox

None of the Above

SANWlO “Oh to be rilakkuma, floating in coffee without a care in the world”

more stew than man 😭

to sanitize your fabric masks, boil them for ten minutes. do NOT forget to put aside a little of the mask water to add to the sauce

jennineak “I’m close to being this insane”

Eva 🍞

There are no bread baking mistakes, there is only tomorrow's French toast.

ABC News “LOTS TO SEE: Kittens from the Atlanta Humane Society got a chance to do some exploring while the Georgia Aquarium is closed to the general public.”

Eric Spiegelman 🍿

My wife and I play this fun game during quarantine, it's called "Why Are You Doing It That Way?" and there are no winners

Hillary Monahan “This is RAD.”

Radiolab for Kids Radiolab is one of my favorite podcasts, educational and entertaining. They just launched a new podcasts, with only kid-friendly episodes. The first one is about space!

Alec Luhn “The "Isolation" Facebook group where Russians stuck at home impersonate famous paintings is by far the best thing to come out of the #coronavirus lockdown. I'm going to post my top 3 https://www.facebook.com/groups/izoizolyacia/”

If You and Your Friends Are Bored, PowerPoint Parties May Be the Answer People are going to find ways to socialize remotely, but this is not what I expected would happen:

Andrew: You make a random PowerPoint on something that you enjoy, and you present it to your friends. We all picked a random topic—some topics were really goofy.

Audrey: It was interesting to listen to, because everyone got to share something that they were passionate about. I think a Zoom meeting can last up to 40 minutes and we had to restart it three times.

askreddit.txt “I wish the OP good luck on their noble quest”

Dreadnought Holiday 👇 This is pure slapstick comedy, but with a navy vessel and cruise ship:

It often seems that the golden age of naval idiocy has disappeared forever.

I'm therefore pleased to note that the Venezuelan patrol vessel Naiguatá has managed to recapture some of this spirit by fighting the dumbest action of the 21st century.”

Jake Enyeart on TikTok People are “working from home” 🍷

Here's What People Across the Country Are Ordering on Uber Eats During Quarantine That explains … I went grocery shopping and I couldn't find any garlic. None. The store didn't run out of garlic, they had none to begin with. There was no display case where the garlic used to be. And then, back home I'm reading this piece on what people order most from restaurants, so now we know where all the garlic went:

According to the delivery company, French fries were the most popular dish ordered in March, followed by pad Thai and garlic naan.

linadirector “Creating your quarantine character😷😂”

no name “for keeping track”

How to Make a Mask with Filter Pocket & Nose Pinch This mask covers as much face as recommended by medical professionals, includes a nose pinch, pocket sized for PM2.5 filters, and ties (because there’s an elastic shortage!) Simple design that's easy to cut and sew. Get the instructions and diagram from https://shop.zoehong.com/face-mask

(I'm the guy on the treadmill, stress testing the mask for durability and breathability)

🏠 WFH

Felix Salmon #nopants

was just informed that the dress code for public Zoom calls from home is “business quarantine"

Do you miss the office? Try the office noise generator I don't miss the office, but I sure miss coffee shops, something about the background noise makes it easier to focus. Anyway, this site lets you simulate background office noise without leaving the house.

Bread Scheduler: Bread recipes, planner and timer for better sourdough Everybody in my timeline is baking bread, so I thought you'd appreciate an app for helping you schedule bread making.

Danielle Baskin “Once lockdown is lifted and we’re no longer on Zoom, I’m walking around with a tiny mirror above my face so you can continue to stare at your own face while we’re talking.”

:🧰 Tools of the Trade

idris-maps/middle-manager 😄 A tool for making better presentations: uses Markdown, CSV for tables, and the best part — a bullshit meter.

Nader Dabit 🔥

If you could end Covid-19 by sacrificing a JavaScript framework, which one would you choose and why Angular?

Andy Lindeman It's always DNS …

OH: "DNS is just naming things and cache invalidation, how could it end up being complicated?"

IBM will offer free COBOL training to address overloaded unemployment systems It's not too late to learn COBOL! The picture is not representative of what COBOL looks today, modern mainframes are not as chic, and you can probably dress business quarantine.

Architectural

Stefan Tilkov 👇 Thread:

Many enterprise IT departments have become big fans of an “API-first“ strategy. I think that in general, this is a bad idea. (Thread)
…
I blame most of the disasters in modern enterprise IT strategy on the fact that it’s people like me – backend architects with way too little focus on UI/UX aspects – who have been put at the controls for far too long.

Corey Quinn 🤣

The longer this pandemic drags on, the better the technology decisions companies make. This is entirely due to the lack of executive exposure to enterprise software ads in airports.

Peopleware

clairewillett 👍

my boss just called and said “how are you” and I reflexively said “fine” and she was like “NOPE, START OVER, I am not fine and you are not fine and no one is fine, let’s have a real conversation, how are you” and I was like “super terrible” and she was like “MUCH BETTER”

Teamwork

Carta’s covid-19 layoff Carta had to layoff a significant portion of their workforce. This is the message from their CEO. It's a great example of leadership, clear communication, and humanity. Even though it's a dire situation, this one gave me inspiration to be a better leader!

If you are one of those affected it is because I decided it. Your manager did not. For the majority of you it was quite the contrary. Your manager fought to keep you and I overrode them. They are blameless. If today is your last day, there is only one person to blame and it is me.

Lynne Tye 👇 If you are interviewing in these difficult times, these questions will tell you a lot about the company culture and what it would be like working there:

A lot of you are interviewing for jobs right now, or will be soon. Regardless of the role, all interviewers will ask, “Do you have any questions for me?” BE READY, especially now (mid-COVID-19) when all interviews are remote.

Startup Life

The Founder's Field Guide for Navigating This Crisis First Round, as always choke full of useful information, from recession-era leaders, investors, and CEOs.

Finally, don’t change your stripes, says Simon Khalaf (currently Twilio, former CEO of Flurry Analytics). “Maintain the culture of the company. Don’t change who you are because the world is changing. Startups succeed because they want and will change the world, and not because the world changes them.”

The Psychology of Founders Who Win in Downturns This is must read for founders, and anyone who's working in a precarious business (startup, small business, etc). Read, grok, apply.

Bill Rodgers won the Boston Marathon and New York Marathon four times each. Rodgers attributed his success to a simple trick: he ran harder on the downhills than on the uphills. His magical insight? Runners tend to push hard to get up a hill but then let up once they go over the peak. They often expend energy trying to slow their descent. Rodgers took the opposite approach. “I always remind myself to lean forward and take advantage of gravity,” said Rodgers.

📈 Today in Business Models

Karat | Cards for Creators I like this idea: banking for creators/influencers. Instead of credit score, it looks at your assets/revenues, based on social engagements and brand deals. Welcome to the 20's!

CFOs looking to make remote work, telecommuting more permanent following COVID-19, says Gartner survey “74% of CFOs say they expect to move previously on-site employees remote post-COVID-19, according to a Gartner survey.” CFOs often resist WFH, yet also in charge of paying rent/lease for office space. RIP office real estate.

Exclusive: Mary Meeker’s coronavirus trends report The 28-page report her firm sent out to their investors.

This may become the "call to arms" to better marry technology with healthcare, in terms of everything from telehealth to rapid point-of-care diagnostics, to applying automation and AI to health care services.

"We are optimists and believe there is hope on the other side of despair.... We need government, business and entrepreneurial intervention at scale (deployed logically and effectively) to get to the other side."

How the Virus Transformed the Way Americans Spend Their Money The NYT looks at the radical change in consumer spending habits since COVID hit the US.

Locked Doors

xssfox “THIS IS NOT HOW YOU ANONYMIZE LOCATION DATA” (context)

Available for Hire

Rebecca Turner Principal/staff type eng role at a tech company with an eye toward dev-tools and/or tool-smithing. 25 years of experience.

Vinay Khade Front-end engineer, React and up for learning new technologies. https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinay-khade-b892b88a/

Silvia Senior Product/UX Designer. Singapore/relocate. http://ariantisilvia.com

Victor Kernes User Experience (UX) & Product Designer. San Francisco/remote. https://victorkernes.com

Benno From bare metal up to front-end. Australia. https://lwn.net

Alexis Ewing-Moody Full stack developer with experience in Ruby/Rails, JS/React, Golang, and team leadership. http://afrodevgirl.github.io

Camilla Second-year CS and Art student. Bay area/remote. http://www.camillaxguo.com/about

🤷 None of the Above

Margaret E. Atwood “This...”

Hanna Dickinson 😱

If you weren't sure of how bad things have gotten, Amazon is out of podcast mics.

buns iverson “i’m baby”

semi-good (dad)jokes 😷

“BC” now stands for “Before Coronavirus” and “AD” is now “After Distancing”

Raphael Rashid “Broadcaster exit polls in South Korea are on a whole other level. #415총선”

Carolina A. Miranda 🤣

2020: A masked guy puts lasagna in your trunk and then you drive away.

Cats of Instagram “Kitten cuddling- the therapy we all need right now 🐾”

Alan Chen I will never!

The one-spacers have won. Microsoft Word now showing 2 spaces after a period as an error.

Kelly Vaughn “I sure love buying my banana’s by the each”

Olivia Cole is social distancing & u should be too I feel called out:

Hey writers, here's a great place to buy notebooks during quarantine!

...... your shelf where you have 50 million of them that you haven't used yet, stop playing

rt.live This is a great visualization of the Rt value — how fast COVID is spreading/slowing down — state by state.

Hurry, Don’t Rush - James Heathers This is a fantastic take on the research for COVID cures, and scientific pursuit in general:

The dire need for information should not mean rush to produce unreliable information quickly, and attempt to shoehorn your research in particular to the center of the problem. Hurry, don’t rush.

27 Of The Most Powerful Photos Of This Week Breathtaking.

Why Copper Is Good at Killing Viruses | Science | Smithsonian Magazine Sell gold, buy copper. On a more serious note, I ordered some copper tape and going to try sticking it to things, and report how it works.

Bill Gross To brighten up your day, aerial view of downtown Los Angeles with no smog.

PAPA_5K “Bodega cat working from home”

🏠 WFH

Jackie Singh 😷 “most of the zoom personality types” — I only got to do 1/4th of these so far …

Jon Lovett 🤔 Why do video meetings feel more “exhausting”? You can't tell when people are looking away, so you have to be “on” all the time. You're acting for the camera and also directing yourself:

Usually you don't have to screw your face into an “I’m on” position always. In person, you still have moments to yourself. Maybe that's why it's uncomfortable to glance over at someone and find that person already looking at you and why they glance away quickly.

6 Feet Office If open office plans are going to survive through 2020, they may end up looking like this. There's a chance — slower economy, more people working from home, retailers moving online — that office space prices will go the way of oil, and tech companies will “innovate” by adding walls and doors. I'm not holding my breath, are you?

Tristan Harward 🤣

So, lemme just share my screen... one second.

OK can everyone see my screen?

Sailor Moon Livetweet @ home “Ending zoom calls with your friends like”

🪑 Design Objective

Streem Need help but don't want a service person in your house? Video Chat and Augmented Reality can solve that. I expect we'll be seeing a lot more Shared AR Experience apps in the future.

🧰 Tools of the Trade

BlurHash Simple service that turns any image into a blurred placeholder. The placeholder is only 20~30 characters, so you can inline into HTML/CSS, or serve it inside the JSON response data.

How to find cause of high kernel_task cpu usage? TIL If your MacBook Pro runs hot or shows a high % CPU for the kernel task, try charging on the right and not on the left!

Node.js version 14 available now We're getting optional chaining, nullish coalescing, I18N, ES Modules (no longer experimental feature), and Async Local Storage API (basically, ThreadLocal).

Stream Super cool. Let's you create a live online event, streaming over Zoom, and you can charge a fee or accept donations. Great for music events, fitness instructors, online classes, etc.

Forecasting s-curves is hard S-curves (or sigmoid functions) are very powerful, using only three parameters, they're able to model a variety of social and biological systems over time. Yet, it's impossible to forecast the curve from a few (early) data points. This article explains why forecasting is so tricky.

Manish “DYING”

🕸️ Web-end

Profiling React.js Performance Is your React app slower than expected? Check out this guide to mesauring React component render performance, using the React Profiler API, React's new experimental Interaction Tracing API, and the User Timing API.

Flexible layouts without media queries Using CSS grid, with minmax, and a little bit of math to create responsive UIs without media queries. I just ran into this problem last week, with a component that has to use inline CSS (so no media queries).

Mathias Bynens TIL Stop using the old comma-separated CSS color syntax. Not only is the new syntax easier to read, it will support new color features.

Spacing in CSS Everything you wanted to know about spacing in CSS. Also, this is a 30 minute read about the single topic of spacing … to anyone who thinks CSS is “easy“, I rest my case.

98.css A design system that brings back Windows 98.

🗒️ Lines of Code

steveklabnik “i love, love, love this exchange”

Saron 👍

If you're holding back on writing that blog post because it's "too basic" or "too simple", stop holding back. I've been googling "basic" python questions for hours and it's your blog posts that have been saving me. Your knowledge is valuable. Write.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Teamwork

What does a Director of Engineering do? Sha shares his career experience, the responsibilities and the challenges of being a director of engineering.

My accountabilities when scaling a team go in both direction. Downwards, there's a responsibility to my team to find them the right people and ensure i'm putting them all in the right seats. Upwards, it's about costs and optimizations. I have to fall within budget so that I contribute to the companies profitability. It's easy to throw money at a problem, it's much harder to solve it in a financially responsible way that helps the company grow leaner.

Spotify’s Failed #SquadGoals This is a fantastic read on what Spotify got wrong, and I recommend every engineering/product manager read through this document. It's also beautifully illustrated, given that it talks about one of the worst practices in Silicon Valley: over-hyping engineering practices in Medium posts, in order to attract candidates, but never following through.

Spotify introduced the vocabulary of missions, tribes, squads, guilds, and chapter leads for describing its way of working. It gave the illusion it had created something worthy of needing to learn unusual word choices. However, if we remove the unnecessary synonyms from the ideas, the Spotify model is revealed as a collection of cross-functional teams with too much autonomy and a poor management structure.

🛴 Startup Life

Impact of COVID-19 Crisis: Insights from Global Startup Survey with the Voice of the Entrepreneurs The outlook: not good. Not good at all.

• 41% of startups globally are in the “red zone”: they have three months or less of cash runway left
• Of startups that had a term sheet before the crisis, nearly 20% have had the term sheet pulled investors
• 74% of startups saw their revenues decline, and 16% of startups saw their revenue drop by more than 80%
• 12% of startups have seen their revenue increase by 10 percent or more

David Frankel Makes an excellent point. If you're selling software to other software companies, you need to understand second-order effect. It's not enough to know your customers, you need to know your customer's customers.

Toyota famously uses the "Five Whys" to eliminate the root causes of defects in manufacturing.

In this scenario, startups need to ask “who?” instead of “why?” in an effort to understand the underlying stability of their revenue.

Parsa Saljoughian “Get ready...”

🔒 Locked Doors

CaptureTheFlag If you're wondering why your iOS apps are crashing today, it's this bug: Italian flag emoji and Sindhi text combo that translate into “Unsupported characters”, causing some apps to crash. You’re most likely to see it on apps like Twitter, where people are prank posting this character combo.

Mat Velloso 🔥🛢️

"Data is the new oil"

You mean it costs money to store it and nobody wants it?

🤷 None of the Above

Banksy “My wife hates it when I work from home.”

You Have a TikTok Hit! Now, Quick -- Change the Title SEO for the stay-at-home generation: snippets of songs are becoming popular, so labels start changing song titles to match up with what users are searching for.

“We found that because of the way it was titled, ‘ily,’ the search terms ‘Surf Mesa I Love You’ weren’t finding the song,” explains Toby Andrews, general manager of the label Astralwerks. “So we went in and changed the title to add ‘I Love You Baby’ to make it easier for people to find. Now that’s a practice we’re looking into for other records of ours — things that have good traction behind them, but maybe the title doesn’t necessarily match the theme of the song that people are looking for.”

Flightradar24 “A Boeing 767 from Icelandair has drawn a big heart over Reykjavik in Iceland, on arrival from China with medical supplies”

Coronavirus News: Power Market Shows We Sleep Later in Lockdown - Bloomberg It only took a pandemic to figure out that most people would rather wake up an hour later. What are the chances we'll start adopting a healthier sleep/work schedule?

graham starr “[kneels down. places hand against ground] something terrible happened here”

WTI Crude for May goes negative My car is only half full, and I wouldn't mind getting paid to fill it up. Sadly, that's not how it works.

And if you're thinking of buying a barrel of oil for negative $30, where would you store it? Tracy Alloway tried that, and he has quite the story, in That Time I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

Jon Sneyers “The Year 2020 bug: software isn't ready to deal with negative oil prices.“

Seanan McGuire 👇 Thread. You want to know when this is all over? Check the re-opening date for Disneyland:

If COVID-19 were a liberal hoax or if the lockdowns were overreach, Disney would be baying for an end to social distancing. The fact that they're not proves that this is real. Follow the money, and the money says the optics of Animal Kingdom killing Grandma are really bad.

lucy “what is their soundcloud”

Why COVID-19 Makes Some People Sicker Than Others Bad news for the US. Turns out our lifestyle — over-worked and over-stressed — is a contributing factor to mortality.

Sleepyface “😂😂😂😂😂”

Thousands of Americans backed by rightwing donors gear up for protests The majority in the US support the lockdown, a necessary measure to keep us alive. The “movement” to end stay-at-home “springing” up across the US, is really an astroturfing campaign funded by deep conservative pockets. The Guardian follows the money trail behind this campaign.

KARAinFLA “Dogs all across America are revolting against the Corona virus by refusing to go out for YET ANOTHER walk.”

Daniel MacEachern “The cat definitely wrote the headline and subhead”

🏠 WFH

Amanda Goetz 💯

The future of work is figuring out childcare not slack integrations.

Send tweet.

Johann “Quick tip for those doing online meetings.” — this is a fantastic hack, and if you learn nothing else this week, let it be this:

🪑 Design Objective

molly clare wilson "Designing a product or service? Here are 10 Personas Non Grata for you to consider.”

Mitch Goldstein 😆

WANTED: Junior Designer.

Must know .aep .ai .app .css .docx .dwg .eps .fig .gif .html .indd .jpg .js .keynote .md .mov .mp3 .mp4 .numbers .obj .otf .pcs .pdf .png .ppt .prproj .ps .psd .qxd .sketch .svg .tif .ttf .txt .xlsx .xml .zip.

2-year trial period. $15/hr. Brooklyn.

Designer Emoji “Frustrated by the limitations of the current emoji set, we created a suite of emojis inspired by the unique experiences we go through as designers, and people living through 2020.”

🧰 Tools of the Trade

Causal This is now my go-to app for modelling. It's easily 10x better than Excel. The UI is easy to learn and simple to use, and more organized. You can use ranges (guesstimates) for input variables, it will calculate time series for you (interest, churn, etc), sensitivity analysis (!), work with multiple scenarios side by side, and when you're done building the model — presentation mode. One hour with Causal got me a model that would typically take 2~3 days in Excel.

Low-Code Will Completely Change Startups The tools are getting much better, and many more launching every week. At the same time, we're going to see a big budget crunch, R&D and IT departments will have less money to spare. Dev time is the biggest spend, which is why I believe we'll see an acceleration in no/low-code tools:

The market for low-code platforms was $4.3 billion in 2017. It is predicted to grow to more than $27 billion by 2022

Large companies are moving to low-code to reduce cost and increase speed.

“By 2024, three-quarters of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development initiatives.” — Gartner

Addy Osmani “Tip: @FirefoxDevTools highlights what elements have scroll overflows! Useful to find what DOM nodes have an unexpected scrollbar.”

Scapegoating COBOL? | Mar Hicks Stop and watch this video. Mar Hicks, historian, dispells many of the myths we hold around COBOL. Not a dead language (still actively used), COBOL developers have not retired (many are young, got laid off), and who really made COBOL happen?

maxchehab/phelia Up your game: use React to build apps that live inside Slack.

a-Shell Lets you run Bash, Python, Vim and some other Unix tools on the iPad. It's rough around the edges, no Node, no man pages, but it works well enough for some lightweight tasks. I spend more time next to iPhone/iPad, so love having this around.

Evan Hunt 👇 So UNIX started life as industrial waste? (h/t Damien Joyce)

This is my favorite bit of early-UNIX history trivia:

When AT&T donated the V6 source code to Berkeley, it was classified as industrial waste for tax purposes.

Martín Obiols “Can't stop laughing at this” — this is my workflow!

🏛️ Architectural

To Microservices and Back Again There are two things I find appealing about microservices. Individually, they are small and simple, less complexity. And you get a lot of opportunities to start green field projects, no monolithic legacy code. But those only matter when you're starting new projects, in the long term you end up with more code legacy and inevitable complexity:

Having a code repository for each service was manageable for a handful of destination workers, but became a problem as the scale increased. Shared libraries were created to provide behavior that was similar for all workers. However, this created a new bottleneck, where changes to the shared code could require a week of developer effort, mostly due to testing constraints.

Jaana Dogan 🔥

The goal was to abstract away the infrastructure. We instead converted every application developer into an infrastructure developer.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Teamwork

📖 Heuristics for effective management A curated list for engineering managers: 1:1's, coaching, decision making, coding, meetings, hiring, and more.

Kris Jenkins I can't even … so true …

Q. What are Story Points?
A. Story Points are a way of making developers deliver faster by asking them for a random number, and then saying, “That seems a little high,” until they say a smaller number.

🛴 Startup Life

Founder Psychology Is at the Heart of Most Blitzfails Second to markets, the thing that determines a startup's success is founder psychology:

When you read the accounts of spectacular blitzfails, the founders who’ve come off the rails are always described in similar ways. They’re described as “running through walls,” “crazy,” “aggressive” and “visionary.”

When things are up and to the right, people use those adjectives in a positive way. It’s not until the startup goes off the rails that “crazy” goes from meaning something good to meaning something bad.

📈 Today in Business Models

When Tailwinds Vanish Predicting the course of high tech through 2020. We've seen consolidation before, only to be undone by new emerging model. IBM got to dominate the mainframe stack (hardware and integrated software). Microsoft owned huge pie of the PC software business. Now we're at the same stage of maturity with regards to Internet companies: “Software companies founded today are competing less with pen and paper than with other Internet-first incumbents.”

Startup Offense and Defense in the Recession Another take on the current market situation, and how to position your B2B startup to survive the next year/two.

Nikhil Krishnan “Every time”

🤷 None of the Above

Robert Huckman “Math joke in banner at bottom of screen. Answer: they never quite do...”

Deanna Raybourn 🎅

I've had the same Instacart shopper three times in a row and he just messaged to say, "Hey, it's not on your list but the just got toilet paper. Would you like some?" and long story short I think he's invited for Christmas.

Jesslyn 😆

Who called it Quarantine Baking and not Existential Bread?

Samara Ginsberg “It was only a matter of time before I did one of these #sorrynotsorry”

Sasha Perigo Every day is exactly one of these three:

With ADHD I have exactly three types of work days:

✔️ Get absolutely nothing done
✔️ Get 4 hours of work done, at a random time of day
✔️ Get 40 hours of work done in 8 hours

Science girl “Glass bottom swimming pool in Texas What do you think?” — not for me!

How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take? - The New York Times The New York Times has an article explaining what goes into creating a vaccine, why it's so difficult and time consuming. It includes this interactive chart that lets you explore the very optimistic and the more realistic scenarios. So let's be optimistic and hope we see a vaccine by second half of 2021.

Nicole Hemmer Why the biggest political movement of 2020 is missing from the 10 o'clock news:

People have chosen to radically alter their lives both to avoid getting sick and to save other people's lives.

That is a significant political act, and there is enormous support for it. But it doesn't fit conventional political scripts so it's not understood as political.

Pentagon officially releases UFO videos Nothing about 2020 can surprise me anymore, including visitors from outer space.

The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918: A Digital Encyclopedia If you think history has something to teach us, The Influenza Encyclopedia covers the 1918 epidemic in great detail.

Andrew Feinberg “This is the best weather forecast in the history of television news”

Tim Burgess “Not sure who made this...”

🏠 WFH

Adrienne Barnes #MeetingCulture

My husband has been working from home for 6 weeks. I've learned that he basically gets paid to be in meetings. Speak in meetings, meet with other people about their last meeting, and have meetings to plan for the next meeting. 😬🥱😧

Why does writing matter in remote work? When you need to explain to your team why meeting culture is broken, and you need more writing, less Zooming:

Sending a message to update a team member or make a request doesn’t need a meeting. If you frame the problem as a Slack post or a document, your teammates can chime in on their own time. This makes it non-disruptive to everyone, while moves the discussion forward.

Ben Casnocha Truth is, office space has and always will be, day care for adults:

BREAKING: People in their 20's with no kids say that working from home is the future

🪑 Design Objective

Signaling as a Service On the value of signalling, distribution and amplification. Why it works for tangible goods but doesn't translate as easily to software. And what makes Superhuman the closest thing to luxury software:

One of the best books I have read in the last few years is The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler.

The book makes two main arguments:

a) Most of our everyday actions can be traced back to some form of signaling or status seeking

b) Our brains deliberately hide this fact from us and others (self deception)

Mark Dalgleish There are two kinds of people, people who make design systems, and people who find this tweet funny:

The trouble with the term “design system” is that it means completely different things to different people. For example, to developers it means “component library” but to designers it means “I'd like a promotion.”

Poster prompts to avoid Design-isms If there was an office wall, I’d hang it there.

Heydon Yes. UX Rage is real and I feel you:

Does anyone else have this thing where they can't use interfaces, not because they are impossible, but because being angry at how difficult they are to use takes over from actually trying to work them out? "I can't use this, because it should be easy but it isn't"

War Stories: Jordan Mechner on Making Prince of Persia I’m old enough to have played Prince of Persia when it first came out. What an amazing game for that time. This behind the scene video is still relevant today. Game play is something you can’t give up on, and when the challenge is finite RAM and low-res screen, you get creative. Related, Original footage used to animate the first Mortal Kombat video game.

🧰 Tools of the Trade

Codespaces Github’s instant development environment in the cloud. All you need is a browser. This is the best thing to happen to my iPad since Apple released the new magic keyboard.

What accomplishments sound like on software engineering resumes If you’re brushing up your resume, start with this post. In practice, your next manager cares most about your accomplishment, and this is one thing developers struggle to articulate. Jacob has some great examples you can follow to make your resume legit:

This advice is fairly common. Most guidance on writing strong resumes will tell you to focus on specific outcomes and achievements. But, I’ve noticed software engineers, in particular, really struggle here. Our work is often complex and hard to measure; we typically work as teams where individual contributes are hard to tease out; and we tend, as a community, to focus on knowledge of tools and technologies over business results.

cyrildiagne/ar-cutpaste This is such a cool use of augmented reality: cut and paste your surroundings!

Aja Preach!

Man I wish CS programs taught working on software as a team. Source control, code review, writing bugs, testing... all of it.

Julien Dubois “Tabs vs spaces? Let me tell you about Fibonacci indentation ! Great way to reduce the number of nested loops 😄”

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Teamwork

Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by opportunity cost Other people have their own priorities:

I've found that neither malice nor stupidity is the most common reason when you don't understand why something is in a certain way. Instead, the root cause is probably just that they didn't have time yet. This happens all the time at startups (maybe a bit less at big companies, for reasons I'll get back to).

Rob Campbell 🤣

I was once invited to speak at McKinsey. I started by asking, “how many of you have ever started or run your own business?” No one put their hands up. I then announced the name of my presention, “Anything is easy when you don’t have to do it”.

I’ve not been invited back.

📈 Today in Business Models

Deal Performance in April Yields Cautious Optimism for May HubSpot breaks down aggregate data from 70,000 businesses, looking at deals closed, email open rates, and web traffic. Overall, bad with a positive outlook. Striking difference between industries most most and least impacted — travel is down a lot, construction not so much:

Last week was end-of-month for sales teams, and we saw deals closed increase by 4%. With that boost, our customers closed more deals the last week of April than they had since the week of March 16 when the economy really began to deteriorate. This was a hopeful sign of recovery that indicated we might be trending in a positive direction.

On the other hand, rep optimism for May isn't increasing after last week's metrics. Deals created experienced a slight decline, staying essentially flat.

actioncookbook Hot take. Most people buy into the narrative that big corporations can’t innovate, but the reality is often they’re financially engineered to fail:

Every article about a major retailer going bankrupt spends eight paragraphs musing “I guess millennials just don’t buy shirts?” before casually mentioning a private equity acquisition three years ago in one sentence at the end

Related, Why Private Equity Firms Like Bain Really Are the Worst of Capitalism has a good explainer for what typically happens when private equity gets involved:

• Of the twenty-five companies that private equity firms bought in the 1980s that borrowed more than $1 billion in junk bonds, more than half went bankrupt.

The inconvenient challenge of online returns Online retailers don’t have fitting rooms, so customers order two of each, and send one back. What most people don’t realize is, the return doesn’t go back to the retailer, to be put back on the rack. It goes back to some return center that will dispose of it. This is both expensive for retailers, and a source of pollution that’s entirely invisible to consumers. Related, why Casper is the best thing to happen to 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

🛴 Startup Life

The PE Hustle. If you’re a startup and was just contacted by private equity, offering you the deal of a life time, you want to read this thread first. It will spare you an emotion roller coaster of despair.

🔒 Locked Doors

psychicpaper Under the hoods, iOS is a mess of duplicate code and bad take XML. This is a classic example where you want to follow the DRY principle, and Apple does the opposite. Anyway, author discovered this 3 years ago and got to benefit until Apple found out and put a fix in the latest beta release. Thanks for the technical teardown and lesson in code reuse and security.

levelsio How to catch IP thief in the act (h/t Damien Joyce):

Years ago, I added a 🇯🇵 Japanese city called Dorobō to Nomad List

Dorobō never existed in real life, but I used it as a bait to see who would copy my data

Now slowly Dorobō is showing up on sites all around the web

Dorobō means "thief" in Japanese 😄

⭐ None of the Above

Welcome to the pleasure dome “Telling your suitcase there is no holiday this year can be tough...emotional baggage is the worst”

Beagz Too sweet:

My wife just pulled me into the other room and I thought she wanted to have a serious talk but she just wanted to give me m&m’s without the kids seeing.

Austen Allred 5-star would recommend:

One of my favorite apps is pocket because whenever I see something pretty interesting I save the link to pocket and then I never open pocket.

Saves me huge amounts of time.

One in five Wendy’s is out of beef, analyst says So now you know which fast food chain is serving you fresh meat:

Wendy's is "more exposed" to the shortage sparked by the coronavirus pandemic because of its reliance on fresh beef compared with its competitors, the note said.

Allen Akinkunle 🤣

Tech bros are forever hung up on their exes. Ex-Facebook, Ex-Amazon, Ex-Google.

Massimo “Remarkable capture of a a nuclear reactor refueling process performed with a high radiation tolerant camera. The blue glow you notice, is due to the Cherenkov radiation”

Venezuela Said It Captured Two Americans During A Failed Coup And The Backstory Is Incredibly Wild At this point, people are just auditioning to be the next Tiger King. This story has “a daring amphibious raid”, CIA impersonators, and 250 tons of cocaine:

When the AP asked why his team risked the Sunday raid on a heavily armed port city, he reportedly said he was following the example of Alexander the Great and striking “deep into the heart of the enemy.”

The Real Reason to Wear a Mask TL;DR Most people wearing good enough masks is easily achievable:

Models show that if 80 percent of people wear masks that are 60 percent effective, easily achievable with cloth, we can get to an effective R0 of less than one. That’s enough to halt the spread of the disease. Many countries already have more than 80 percent of their population wearing masks in public, including Hong Kong, where most stores deny entry to unmasked customers, and the more than 30 countries that legally require masks in public spaces, such as Israel, Singapore, and the Czech Republic. Mask use in combination with physical distancing is even more powerful.

Zoom Bachelorette, Minimum Viable Shows

❤️ If you enjoy Weekend Reading, share it with your friends. It takes many hours to put this together and a personal recommendation from you will go a long way

🙏 Share on Twitter — Share via Email

If you are looking for something in your house, and you finally find it, when you’re done with it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.

— https://kk.org/thetechnium/68-bits-of-unsolicited-advice/

How do you name variables and functions? How do you make APIs that are easy to use? How do you organize modules and components? How do you structure assets, styles, and markup?

To all of these, there is one simple answer:

• Do it
• At some point you’ll end up looking for stuff
• If it takes more than one step, change it so it only takes one step
• Repeat

When you’re first creating an API you imagine what it would be like to use it. Most likely you’ll get some of it wrong. Do it anyway. Later on, when you’re using that API, you start to realize that things are not where they’re supposed to be, names don’t match what they’re doing, there’s too much overhead between what you’re trying to do, and how easy it is to accomplish.

That’s your cue to go and fix all these mismatches. Move things to where you expect them to be, rename to what you were first looking for, make it easier to use.

When I talk about it, I call it “SEO for code”. Say you start out by writing a method that will retrieve all the latests posts, so getLatestPosts sounds about right.

Later on, when you’re looking it up, you end up looking for “list” and “recent”. Those are your search terms, but your content (code, API docs, etc) doesn’t have good SEO, and you fail to find it.

Search long enough and you will find it, but what if instead, you rename it to match your searched keywords? If this was a web page and you wanted people to find it, you’ll be changing to match what they search for. Rename to listRecentPosts. Done.

If you want to know whether you’re making progress, a good metrics, is WTF/minutes. Whenever something isn’t where you’re looking for it, doesn’t do what it says, or isn’t obvious at first sight, that’s a WTF.

Higher code quality has low WTF/minute. You always intuitive know how to get that metric down, it surprising so many people don’t do that.

The same things applies for organizing files: does it go in the src, models, or lib directory? For CSS styles: should I call this button, signup, or cta?

More important is how this plays in the long run. Sometimes you choose wrong, and sometimes things change over time, and your initial choice is no longer the best. This is where you get to decide.

If you put up with your old choices, you never get better at naming and organizing. If you make a practice out of spotting and correcting mismatches, with time you get better at organizing from the get go.

That is all of it. You only need this one rule and keep practicing:

Put it back where you first looked for it.

Patricia Mou “70s conversation pits need to make a comeback 😍”

🏠 WFH

Every episode of The Office recreated in Slack, weekdays 9-5 So … you were hoping to get work done this week? (if you’re wondering, MSCHF is behind this as well)

Twitter Will Allow Employees To Work At Home Forever Twitter just threw SF landlords under the bus.

Related, TProphet: “If you want to know when it's really safe to reopen, watch how America's wealthiest companies are treating their most profitable employees.”

Christian Reber “Might use this for work next week”

🪑 Design Objective

Chair Design Design Objective is all about … well … design. I use the chair emoji because to me it embodies what separates great design from mediocre:

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

Turns out even iconic designers sometimes forget the basic principles of design, this thread tells the story of one particular chair:

Johnson, his client, complained about the chairs but Wright resisted. Johnson asked Wright to sit in one and he himself fell over! This was was enough for Wright, so he redesigned the chair from this model, with three legs (shown in the film) to...

Rob Heiret Animal Crossing is the game we all need and deserve. To me, it’s more than just a game, it’s an incredibly successful wellness app, and a perfectly timed launch. Someone should do a movie on how AC:NH came to be and its cultural significance:

Not only is Animal Crossing: New Horizons a safe, pleasant, perpetually smiling space, it's a world of its own that the player can shape to their whim. Obviously the real world feels very out-of-control right now, so that, I think, is the secret sauce to this game.

We studied the design of 10,000 websites. Here's what we found If you suspected that websites all look the same, well, someone turned machine learning loose on a corpus of popular website to prove that point with data. Personally, I don’t find that a problem, familiarity is good for usability:

We found that across all three metrics—color, layout, and AI-generated attributes—the average differences between websites peaked between 2008 and 2010 and then decreased between 2010 and 2016. Layout differences decreased the most, declining over 30% in that time frame.

Neil Killick 💯

As a product manager/owner, you might like to think of your development team responsibilities as "continuously curating a roadmap of valuable options", rather than "managing a backlog".

🧰 Tools of the Trade

nikersify/pico This JavaScript library can take a screenshot of the current page in the browser! How? Magic:

The returned DOM is inserted into an <iframe>, serialized into XML, converted into a data URL, put into an Image, which is then rendered onto a <canvas> whose contents are read out with canvas.toBlob and finally returned to the program's caller, together with all the errors when resources failed to load.

Second-guessing the modern web The URL slug for this post sums it up: “spa-fatigue.html”. I agree with the general sentiment. We took something that worked well enough (server-side rendering), replaced with new tech, and now have to figure out how to make the new tech work as well as the old tech:

The less interactive parts don’t benefit much from React. Listing pages, static pages, blogs - these things are increasingly built in React, but the benefits they accrue are extremely narrow. A lot of the optimizations we’re deploying to speed up these things, things like bundle splitting, server-side rendering, and prerendering, are triangulating what we had before the rise of React.

Related, Mat Velloso:

Microservices: "We solved DLL hell by wrapping every binary with HTTP"

Don't at me

And let's not forget: Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY

Shan Huang “Check out Pose Animator - a web animation tool that brings SVG illustrations to life with real time human perception TF.js models.” Incredible what a modern browser can do this (using TensorFlow, PaperJS).

Modern CSS Solutions What it says on the label. Takes on old CSS problems from the BF era (Before Flexbox), and solves them using modern CSS.

leeanndroid “So I know I told y’all to always keep a clean desktop for demos but” 🐄🐄🐄

💪 Peopleware

Kelly Vaughn That is also true of customers and partners:

The lowest budget clients are the ones who tend to cause the greatest number of issues.

It's not just sometimes. It's a fact. It is absolutely a thing.

Lionel Page “An excellent illustration of our ability to interpret new information in a way consistent with our beliefs. via @chazfirestone”

🔒 Locked Doors

The Confessions of the Hacker Who Saved the Internet “At 22, he single-handedly put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Then he was arrested by the FBI. This is his untold story.” The story of Marcus Hutchins aka MalwareTech, the hacker that stopped WannaCry and got arrested by the FBI. Quite the story.

Soon-Tzu Speechley 孫子 “Just received the most Singaporean pandemic content from a mate based in the little red dot” — which episode of Black Mirror are we in?

⭐ None of the Above

not great bob “this girl on tiktok just bodied wes anderson in one minute”

Burger King Hired an Absolute Genius — and It Paid Off This is sneaky smart marketing campaign. Also somewhat creepy, but still hat’s off.

Machine Pix “Basketball hoop that doesn't let you miss by Shane Wighton.”

The Technium: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice Unsolicited, but still a great read! One of these items inspired my earlier blog post, Put it back where you first looked for it:

• Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them “Is there more?”, until there is no more.

• A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.

• Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.

rat king “this is blowing my mind”

The Risks - Know Them - Avoid Them This is a simple explainer of the risks of exposure to 2019-nCoV. Risk is lower in well ventilated spaces (outdoors, large halls), fewer people, shorter time next to people, talking vs sneezing, etc. Think about it in terms of dose x time.

Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models AI is typically trained to predict the future based on the past. This has all sorts of unintended consequences (specifically ML bias), including getting horribly confused when people but too much toilet paper.

The system's sales forecasts that the company relied on to reorder stock no longer matched up with what was actually selling. “It was never trained on a spike like this, so the system was out of whack,” says Sharma.

How people in SF pronounce words 🤣

TL;DR The ease of inline CSS with a nicer syntax and breakpoints. A great choice for a small app, when you just want to get it out fast.

Typically, you use CSS to style elements based on their type and context (eg `button`, `page-header`, `nav-like-active`). If you have a large application, a team, and need to enforce consistent styling, then opt to separate styling from markup.

For smaller projects, though, the separation of concerns is often a tax, not a benefit. When you're not worried about consistent styling across multiple components, or what it means for the development team. You just want to get something up and running quickly.

Some people opt for inline styles. These are CSS styles applied to individual elements, without the cascading part (selectors). What I don’t like about inline styles is that the syntax is very verbose, and there’s no support for breakpoints (no media queries).

TailwindCSS lives somewhere in between. You’re styling each element directly, but using concise class names. Instead of `style=“margin: 0 1rem 0 1rem”` you write `class=“mx-4”`.

The class names are pretty easy to learn, `m-<n>` is all margins, `mx-<n>` is left and right margins, and `mt-<n>` is the top margin. The shortcuts are used for sizing, margins, and paddings. Other styles have longer, easier to remember names, like `text-center`, `list-none`, `flex-col`.

You can pick up TailwindCSS in about an hour. Overall learning curve not so bad, though it’s a downside when contributors have to learn TailwindCSS on top of already knowing CSS.

Editing in the browser is just as easy. Use DevTools to select an HTML element and change its class name to see the effect, or tinker with the style and then work it back into the corresponding TailwindCSS class.

My first experience was restyling the design for my blog. It’s simple enough, under 1,000 lines of Handlebars templates, that it was perfect for the first experiment. Previously, I used standalone CSS stylesheets, and doing a new template with TailwindCSS was time-saving, enjoyable, and frustration-free. 10/10 will recommend.

I still use a standalone CSS stylesheet, though. I can use TailwindCSS for the overall blog layout since the templates are under my control. The content is generated by Ghost, so that has to be styled with proper CSS. There’s also a stylesheet for syntax highlighting (which I carried over from the old template).

The second experience was building the UI for a single page app (literally, one page) that I use to create content for the blog. This is an editor that can pull content from another URL, WYSIWYG edit, and generate Markdown for the blog post.

I’m experimenting with some tools for rapid development (Parcel.js, Next.js) and they all have built-in support for TailwindCSS (via PostCSS). So adding it was quick and easy.

For getting something up and running in a short amount of time — when you don’t have to worry about branded design or team collaboration — I’d pick it again and again.

⭐ Give it a try. The docs are really good, expect to spend many an hour getting familiar with just enough TailwindCSS to get that Aha moment.

♥️ Liked this post? Want to see more posts like this? Drop me a line at assaf@labnotes.org

🤔  You asked where I find the content for Weekend Reading. Some of it comes from newsletters.

🌊 Newsletters are the new blogs. Here's a list of some my favorites. Subscribe and enjoy.

Business

Morning Brew

Aptly name, the morning brew is the first thing I read with my morning coffee. Brief yet insightful summary of the business world, from Amazon to people selling home-made masks on Etsy.

Not only informative, the writing is engaging, there's a daily puzzle, and they got referral marketing nailed down: https://medium.com/better-marketing/this-25-year-old-built-a-13-million-newsletter-in-4-years-ac39c10f7672

If you're only interested in tech, they recently launched a baby newsletter, just for you: https://www.morningbrew.com/emerging-tech/r/?kid=53131059

The Hustle

For “builders, schemers, and dreamers.” Yeah, that's me.

The Hustle talks about the business side of things, with insights into the parking space economy, meat supply chain, bicycle sales, grocery bots, etc.

The world is interconnected, you can learn a lot from disparate fields, and The Hustle is great at delivering these lessons in byte size.

Brianne Kimmel's Newsletter

I subscribed for the coverage of the The Future of Work, its makers, tools, and culture. Ever since The Great WFH event, the future of work is exploding with new makers and creativity.

Speaking of creativity, she also covers the creator market, undergoing explosive growth right now, another subject I follow closely.

Li's Newsletter

Li covers The Passion Economy — aka selling shovels to content creators — and consumer trends. With schools going all Zoom and retail accelerating online, this is the era of the individual creators.

The SaaS Playbook

If your business is SaaS, this is the weekly curated newsletter for you. The content is mostly around marketing, sales, and general strategy. The links are great and each one gets a thoughtful writeup.

---

Designers

Dense Discovery

A curated list of productivity apps, interesting articles, and aesthetically pleasing designs.

It has a strong designer point of view, which is why I like DD so much, but it's not written just for designers. If you're a developer, or anyone who uses software for a living, you'll find something interesting here.

UX Design Weekly

What it says on the bottle. A weekly newsletter with a dozen or so links hand-picked specifically for UX designers.

---

Developers

Web Tools Weekly

If your main interest is developing Web applications, this is the newsletter you subscribe to.

Each issue has three sections, covering a rotating list of categories. One week it would be front-end frameworks, another week React Native, or GraphQL, or testing tools, or CSS.

You never know what you'll get in this week's newsletter, but read it week after week, and you'll get the most rounded education about the present state of Web development. Not to mention, a cache of tools, tips, and technologies.

Hacker Newsletter

Since 2010, we've put out a weekly newsletter of the best articles on startups, technology, programming, and more. All links are curated by hand from Hacker News.

There's a lot of interesting stuff on Hacker News, but also a lot of noise. Hacker Newsletter is a weekly digest of their top picks, once a week. Even that is much, but it's easy to scan through, because it's organized into sections. Take what you like, there's something for everyone.

StatusCode Weekly

Cooper Press runs a bunch of quality single-topic weekly digest newsletters: JavaScript, Go, Node, React, Serverless, Mobile, etc https://cooperpress.com/publications/

They're all equally good. I started with Ruby back in the days, then moved to JavaScript and Node, right now only subscribed to StatusCode. But this is a blanket recommendation for all the Cooper Press weeklies.

StatusCode is geared towards ops people. In my opinion all developers should be able to do a little bit of ops. If you can't ops, there's a limit to what your creativity allows you to do. So this is something I want to talk more about in Weekly Reading.

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General

The Skimm

Remember when we used to hang around the water cooler and talk world events? The Skimm is the morning newsletter that catches you up on world events, there's US and world politics, major business events, that TV show everyone is watching, the latest meme.

Normcore Tech

A mix of technology, business and culture. Each issue is a long read, but always funny, with plot twists, and you'll learn a few things along the way.