I read this thorough survey of monospace fonts by Tim Bray and found out in the end that I’ve already been using the fonts that he recommends (Jetbrains Mono and Inconsolata) for a while now.
It is beyond funny that the right wing conspiracy theorists have latched onto the idea of creating liveable, walkable cities as the next threat to humanity.
A thorough explanation why building UI frameworks in Rust is uniquely difficult (and why we haven’t seen clear victories for Rust in that domain… yet).
“When Jake Knapp was running those design thinking workshops at Google, he saw that for all the excitement and Post-its they generated, the brainstorming sessions didn’t usually lead to built products or, really, solutions of any kind.”
The next bit of insanity has to do with the German Datenschutz nutters. This is a small but virulent group of people who have blown up privacy issues to the point where most of Germany is still afraid to use the internet.
Discord has been executing near perfectly and it looks like they’ve built-in most of the functionality of Discourse now. That’s an absolutely amazing complementary feature to the ephemerality of the chat stream.
It’s understandable that organizations try to make their word legible and simplify things. In fact, it’s one of the reasons for the organizational boundary.
A nice article about Box’s transformation and especially that chart contrasting burn v. growth is one of the most important things for any startup to keep in mind.
I use a graph based note taking tool (foam) and I am to yet derive any kind of value from the graph (other than some minor visual oohs and aahs). It’s vastly oversold and I don’t want to think about all the time people have wasted tidying and linking up their notes.
As a company scales, there are phase shifts which feel like they suck all the productivity out of an organization. The way to get through as described here is familiar: categorize and capture everything, reduce WIP and loop through your process.
A lot to like in this article (“They avoid scrum and SAFe like the plague.”) but I’ll settle for adopting the core thrust of it and just retiring the entire concept of a PO and never have to debate “What is the difference between a PM and a PO?” ever again.
Since the one digital thing that Germany is really good at is copying, here is the UK’s 2025 roadmap for digital and data. Just copy-paste it and do everything that’s in there.
Ilya Grigorik notes down a perspective on what people at the higher senior+ levels should be doing. At that level things can get fuzzy and people tend to struggle.
The past couple of weeks I had a bit of a weird feeling because there weren’t any new episodes from Piratensender Powerplay. Then I found out Friedemann is out sick but also that they have a Patreon with extra episodes.
The Engineering Enablement podcast has been good to listen to—if a bit anodyne. The recent episode I listened to with Jeremiah Lee about Spotify’s massively popular but failed org structure was really fun and useful.
“This may surprise you, but continuous deployment is far and away the easiest way to write, ship, and run code in production. This is the counterintuitive truth about software: making lots of little changes swiftly is infinitely easier than making a few bulky changes slowly.”
A really enjoyable three part essay series by Hillel Wayne comparing software engineering with traditional engineering disciplines to see whether we are really engineers, whether we are special and what we can learn from each other.
Machine learning looks like a very challenging field to keep up with let alone to study it. This guide by Vicki Boykis gives a bunch of pointers around reading, mapping and learning that can be applied to any large field you want to get into.
The Yard Sale model is a very basic thought experiment that explains why the rich get richer and why a free market like the one we have is not fair (or free).
Looking at conversations from an improv perspective opens a lot of doors for interesting outcomes. It requires active thinking and leaning into the awkwardness both of which are good skills to practice.
A manifesto for 2023 by Robin Sloan to take nothing for granted and try out all kinds of new things. Everything old is new again and everything new is exciting.