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Are people paying the Medium article ransom?

Exceedingly rare to find a talk about programming that draws on both Christopher Alexander and James C. Scott, two authors that I keep coming back to myself.

Leaving this here for when the UBER thing finally comes crashing down.

This Jez Humble talk about Continuous Delivery is one of my all-time favorites. As a bonus at the end he also totally demolishes the Google Guy.

Just like almost every public service in Berlin the pediatrician situation is absolute squalor. It’s impossible to find one who picks up the phone or takes on new patients 1.

Lovely to see the Twisted community take the lead in moving Python forward and I fully support this idea of giving the standard library the Konmari treatment.

There is another dirty secret behind the German switch to alcohol-free beers: German beers just aren’t that good. I prefer any major foreign beer (Heineken, Carlsberg, 1664, etc.) over most beers you can buy here.

Reading about Amsterdam canceling 10'000 parking spaces, does make me feel as if I’m living in an idiot’s city.

I’ve stopped using Instapaper for a long time now, but I’m still reading longreads. Let me explain how.

Amazon RedShift is a hosted version of ParAccel. More recently, a plethora of open source SQL-on-Hadoop projects have emerged; they are young but aiming to compete with commercial data warehouse systems. These include Apache Hive, Spark SQL, Cloudera Impala, Facebook Presto, Apache Tajo, and Apache Drill [52, 53].

A frankly amazing piece by Monica Lent using her experience to debunk seven commonly held truths about programming with verve. Programming consists of folklore and beliefs are often just beliefs. That indeed makes most learning in this field a question of unlearning.

A case for becoming good at writing for software engineers that frankly holds up for anybody in a growing organization.

As the blisters develop and his feet start to bleed, Walton asks the right questions. What are the human and environmental costs of Singapore’s success, and are they sustainable?

A nicely put explanation for why I too pick my environments to be maximally productive with minimal configuration. In many cases, I just make do to the disgust of those who’ve learned all the shortcuts and applied all the customizations, but to them I’d say: marginal returns and opportunity cost.

I’d dare say that with the waning of the iPhone as a platform (both for development and for business), Apple’s closed plays will be increasingly lackluster. I’ve been rooting for Swift but it’s a horse running in the wrong race.

“It’s no coincidence that co-living start-ups have gravitated to cities like Berlin, San Francisco, London and New York. Ostensibly ‘winning’ the battle for capital and talent, they are urban testing-grounds, where rootless and cashed-up tech workers, heated real estate markets, and rising housing pressures add up to a recipe for experimentation.”

About password managers:

Tooling has become so good and so empowering that like in this tweet, many commerce ‘startups’ that are really struggling to hire and retain dev teams (and then utilize them to their potential) would be much better served using Airtable, Zapier and Pipedrive until they break.

I was arguing against Systems Theory today (a necessary evil when you live in Germany) which prompted the thought of searching for the conjunction of Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhmann. That led me to this gem.

From a thread about whether it is possible or not to live in Berlin without a car (gasp!). This is what a normal odd day of mine looks like.

Leave it to the Netherlands to have a Green party that is right-wing just like every other party. Their leader, Jesse Klaver, styled himself after Trudeau during his campaign but after that, the result has been a bit lackluster without a seat in government.

Gitlab’s CEO Shadow Program is a testament to their deep and deliberate thinking about organizational development. I’m curious whether more companies do this.

I had no idea but it seems Berlin has a booming Chinese art scene.

Cities like Barcelona are starting to fight back against AirBnB and tourism.

Set aside all of the obvious outcry, I haven’t seen a single argument yet that explains how encrypted communications are compatible with state power.

Swisher is doing good work here on Facebook/Fakebook but her handling of the worst of technology is still astonishingly softball given what is happening.

A huge deep dive into how Stripe invests in technical infrastructure that contains too many good things to list.

I am hard out at three 2/3 days a week to pick up my children and stayed at home last Friday to take care of a sick kid, so I am doing my best to parent very much out in the open in my workplace. It helps that my grandboss is also very explicit about this but I still find it difficult.

“code is just a high precision design medium”

The play: SPD goes populist-nationalist to catch all of the right-wing worker votes and nibble off from AfD/CDU. They leave the open society social-democratic policies to the Greens.

After their long nap, I took both out for a round of recycling cardboard, pumping some tires and buying some coffee beans 1.

In her estimation, I knew, I was assured a safe life, an easy life, a fine education, every opportunity. I would never have to eat rationed food, or obey curfews, or watch riots from my rooftop, or hide neighbors in water tanks to prevent them from being shot, as she and my father had.

What risks are acceptable is often not documented, and when they are, they are stated in soft, unquantified terms that cannot be used clearly in a calculation to determine if a given expenditure is justified or not.

Berlin will also regularly call on McKinsey to ‘fix’ its problems. As this description of them giving Puerto Rico the Greece-treatment shows, where they come nothing good will follow.

With my background in behavior change, I’m very pleasantly surprised to find this quote in what is a connoisseur’s treatment of the nuances of agile/agility: “There is only one way to create business value, and that’s to change someone’s behavior.”

“Admittedly, this neat combination of worshipping totems while pursuing practical benefits is quintessentially Chinese.”

A lot of very salient thinking on books, metacognition, double-loop learning and the deliberate design of new forms by Andy Matuschak in “Why Books Don’t Work”.

A collective of the largest German YouTubers have just before the European elections launched a campaign against the CDU and it’s a joy to see.

“The key to building this aura is to become increasingly detail oriented, to be more prepared than anyone else, and to have a higher bar than those around you.”

The issue around the Python standard library finally comes to a head thanks to a Twisted contributor. The standard library has felt stale for a very long time now. It’s nice that it’s there but nobody can really program anything in Python without external packages. There really is no debate here and core Python should support actual programmers.

“Changes to one team’s service may be implemented by another team who needs the enhanced capability by what is called an Away Team. This team works on the Home Team’s code to add what it needs according to established engineering standards and then leaves that code in good order to be maintained by the Home Team who owns the service, with help when needed.”

Venkat’s newsletter “Life Spirit Distillation”has a nice argument against personal growth and instead in favor of life intensification reframing the question into:

https://twitter.com/TheOnion/status/1128726771942219781

Many years ago I suggested building in async facilities into Django. I got ridiculed for that both for technical feasibility (rightly) and necessity (short-sightedly). Now finally we have a proposal to build those features into the framework that demonstrates the same need and that can be implemented.

This article about forecasting dovetails nicely with the book about measuring risk that I just read. It makes the case for foxlike thinking, something of which I don’t need to be persuaded.

It’s exciting to see the Emirates government put design front and center. Unfortunately though in a closed context such as that, it is more than likely that design will be instrumentalized and deployed only for material gain.

A book and an overview of how career opportunities are closed off to those without the right background and how to be cognizant of this and correct for it.

Usually it’s not for a good reason but still, it’s nice to see my grand-boss Dror on television regularly explaining cybersecurity to the German public.

Not a word wrong in this piece, landlords are the original rent-seeking leeches.

Innisfil, Ontario’s troubles filling in their public transit with Uber is a great example of how governments should not outsource things to private contractors whose unit economics do not make sense.