An excellent short piece by Emily Nakashima about the various ways that power bends reality. It is well worth keeping in mind even especially if you are the person who has power.
After this piece, I’m totally sold on the benefits of mentoring (and registered myself on Coding Coach). I would be open to mentor a couple of people on engineering/product management/leadership.
Fisher says there is brain evidence that when women are under stress (say, a new baby has colic), they are inclined to “tend and befriend”(become more empathetic and social), while men under stress are apt to withdraw.
Some of the Medialab faculty seem to be outraged because its current head Joi Ito took money from Jeffrey Epstein. Those that can are leaving. Power to them.
One of the most well-known examples of code reuse between Android and iOS, Dropbox, is giving up on it because it’s too difficult to find people who can/want to write C++ code.
Mid to large size teams can accrue dependencies like a katamari and then they’ll be wondering why their node_modules has become unworkably big. That is only one reason to adopt a quick RFC process for engineering decisions that have the potential to affect a bunch of people.
An impressive application of the strangle vine pattern to rewrite the Slack desktop client which everybody loved to hate. The write-up reads rather matter-of-fact but the process to get there most likely was not.
Pollution from internal combustion engines is killing everybody slowly and here we are in a country that can’t be bothered to regulate diesel engines into oblivion.
Reading Shopify’s approach to keeping their merchant’s secure at their humongous scale seems to come down to the radical standardization of everything. People think this is boring (it isn’t) but it has tons of benefits beyond just security.
One good example with an open sourced tool over at Slack of how they’ve implemented their Security Development Lifecycle to enable their developers to move forward confidently.
First I hear about Mauerkrankheit—and I’m not the only one—but a politically triggered rise in mental health problems would explain many things both past and present.
Farmers are forced to be taught in a “reeducation camp”to use their mobile phones to monitor the status in the greenhouse including CO2, light strength, soil temperature, etc.
The dropping arises from the combination of the laissez-faire attitude of Dutch parents along with the incredible safety of the Netherlands. I have been dropped as a child and I never considered that this was a uniquely local experience.
Berlin right now is the frontline for transportation applications with 4 scooter services alone. I’m glad that Jon has made a comprehensive overview of multi-modal transportation apps because I sure as hell wasn’t going to have the time for it.
The manifesto to choose boring technology in order to be able to solve interesting problems is something to (re-)read regularly until you’ve internalized it.
Cloudflare is setting a high bar for post-mortem writing but if you want to get started with this, the only parts you really need are: What went wrong & What are we doing about it.
OV-Fiets is the bike share avant-la-lettre, but it’s so locally Dutch that it always has been a bit hard to explain. The popularity of OV-Fiets has increased, now coinciding nicely with the international boom in mobility.
For the more abstract work, it makes it a lot easier for other people to ‘read your mind’ and for you to delegate if you share as much context as possible as Anna Shipman describes here.
Something that bears pointing out regularly: “Plus, contrary to popular belief, agile practices were not invented by the Agile movement. They predate it by many decades.”
Cath writes some very salient points about growing into leadership that on the one hand should be more widespread, but on the other hand, everybody will likely have to find out for themselves.
I’ve never exactly followed any framework but instead, I played it by ear and mixed and matched what worked best from wherever I could find it. That’s always a bit bothersome (but easily solved) when people want to work with the exact definition of something.
Whenever our kids are dismayed by somebody else, they come to us and say that there was either a human (ein Mensch!) or a kid (ein Kind!). No genders, no nothing.
Any programming language once it gets big enough will face pressure to turn into Java. PHP succumbed to it, let’s see where Go goes. Try isn’t that big of an issue but it is a path that eventually may lead to… generics and other stuff.
Too aggravating to even read this entire thing. I’ll have to get it together soon to delete my facebook account. Though I’ll still be locked into Instagram and Whatsapp then, so I think it would be best indeed if those services would be broken up.