For example, there cannot be two parallel flows with mutable access to a value. Nor can there be a flow that borrows a value while there is no flow that owns the value.
I might not have heard the word ‘feminism’ yet, but I knew that the way women and girls were treated in Saudi Arabia was wrong and that this was not the Islam I was taught, nor did it represent the home I was raised in.
We witnessed something very interesting: the United States had a quota for imported tuna. Once Peru’s quota had been filled, a biological miracle occurred right there on the canning line. What had been tuna was now pilchard, a member of the herring family, on which there was no quota.
Not verified but an interesting data point in how German civil servants don’t have that attractive a position and can get better deals working indirectly for the people ‘at the engines of the global economy’.
Wat is geweld? vroeg hij haar. Is het besmeuren van gebouwen gewelddadiger dan het blijven verbranden van kolen, terwijl we weten dat de broeikasgassen die daardoor in de atmosfeer terechtkomen een hoop leed veroorzaken, niet alleen voor toekomstige generaties, maar ook voor de minder gefortuneerde mensen die vandaag leven?
This is why recent developments in fields such as Afrofuturism and Black horror are so crucial. They provide a critical alternative to the alt-right’s exterminationist fantasy of an all-white future. Just as importantly, they offer readers other ways of thinking about time that do not fall in line with the fascist dream of a history that unfolds step-by-step along the lines of the Aryan dictator’s master plan.
So I had some code very similar to the following that wouldn’t compile and me with my old Python head was a bit surprised why this was the case. It was a bit more complicated to figure it out in my example but this simplified version makes it pretty clear.
Working in the Spotify organizational structure can be a bit tiresome but I’m glad we’re getting the important stuff from their product development culture, listed here by Jason Yip, right as well: aligned autonomy, trust and decoupling. Without those the structure indeed does not matter.
People leaving your team have a cost that is far far larger than what you can directly see (and we know what a challenge directing stuff that you can’t see is). These visualizations
by Benji Weber put forth a strong argument especially against people working as isolated individuals on things.
I agree with this take by Jacob Kaplan-Moss that you should be able to estimate very accurately and then just not do it most of the time. Learning how to estimate is a non-negotiable part of building an intuition for software engineering. It’s not the estimation that we need, it’s the intuition.
Improving the way we do posts is something I’ll be spending a bunch of attention on in the next months and here is an excellent guide of how to improve that part of the incident process.
That’s a very astute observation of the state and culture of the Go programming language. I got out of Go way before I hit anything like this (though the Channel Axioms are something everybody is going to deal with). For me Go is a not very interesting intermediary language between Python and Rust.
An in-depth study of the links between Nazism and Anthroposophy by Peter Staudenmaier at the Institute for Social Ecology with a lot of interesting bits in there.
We’ve worked remotely like this ten years ago with Hubbub and had to come up with a lot of these tactics and tricks just to be able to get work done. In the meantime, it seems the tools have come a long way (imagine the things we could have done if we had a tool like this back then!) but people’s thinking is still stuck in the past.
An entire article about speed vs. velocity vs. tempo that can be summarized as: “Orientation is the Schwerpunkt.” How much does your team invest into orienting themselves before they take on new work?
One of the things I have to fight the most for and that I think is what allows me to work well: “Regularly get in your team’s shoes”. Call it Genba, or Fingerspitzengefühl but the most important thing is to stay in touch with your team’s day to day reality.
“I see operationally-minded engineers working cross-functionally with software development teams to help them grow in a few key areas: making outsourcing successful, speeding up time to value, and up-leveling their production chops.”
A lot of the stuff here is our common sense when running projects and also our unique problem as a platform team trying to get stuff done with/for other teams. One thing that engineers tend to forget is how much agency they have: “Although you can’t control what other teams can do, you can influence them.”
A couple of years ago I learned Haskell and to do that I read a book that is universally recommended for beginners and used to be available free online called “Learn you a Haskell for Great Good”.
The construction site next to our house is still spewing forth noise and fumes at all hours. The city is unable to do anything here it seems and calling the people at the construction site we are met with nothing but deflection and lies.
I’ve discovered a hilarious new Turkish comedy show called “Gibi” (translated to As If). The episodes revolve around a group of friends who get embroiled in absurdist situations and have very nasty but eloquent arguments with each other.
An amazing article about COBOL and how deep our investment is in legacy technologies that work really well but are also a dead-end. It also seems that if you know any one of those technologies you can find work up until the moment that you die.
The long rumored link between Turkish and Japanese is getting some validation. I’m now also looking into learning Japanese (Chinese wasn’t really doing it for me).
A list of learnings from writing a production database by Mahesh Balakrishnan that can easily be applied to any other part of software engineering as well but of course not one-to-one, like: “Socialize estimates of task difficulty repeatedly”
A field report from doing incident management by John Allspaw that I can very much relate to with lots of learnings that need to be disseminated: “Focus less on incident metrics and more on signals that people are learning”
One of the biggest limiting factors for people working in technology is that they like to forget that everything around them is a socio-technical system. The world just isn’t that simple.
The construction site that surrounds our house has started a bunch of space heaters this week. The devices had been there for a while but only started being annoying now that they’re turned on. These things run day and night, they make a ridiculous amount of noise (some 60 dB at our window) and because they burns diesel oil they also pollute and stink up the entire courtyard.
I was amazed at how closely this article about product development at Facebook tracks with how I approach it: “PMs are 100% accountable for the results of your team.”
Any chance I get I also dispense with Pull Requests because I like my projects and teams to be happy and productive and blazingly fast. From my experience both approaches are about equally safe and with proper guidance you don’t even need a team of only seniors to make it work.
The Pulp game editor is hugely impressive and at the same time making something like this is well within the potential of any small talented group of people who have a bit of time and vision.
Most of the time, elites do what they want, influenced by their own ideological commitments and powerful lobby groups. In times of crisis, when people do pay attention, they can be manipulated pretty easily by the media or other partisan sources.