Even given that this is an amazing job description, you don’t often see companies describing themselves as a ‘socio-technical system’. This is a great way to show off both your care and your depth of thinking.
Fascinating to read about the care with which Slack designs their workplaces.
A paean for canteens something of which Berlin has ample for a variety of historic reasons.
I can confirm most of the best practices from this guide of Stack Overflow’s remote first design culture.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/what-will-the-correspondent-publish-in-english-a-look-at-the-dutch-site-offers-some-clues/
A Mac app that turns any website into a handy application, another wild app exploration by Morten Just.
“The economic costs Airbnb imposes likely outweigh the benefits.”
Something that sounds so basic and is so very important but that can be very difficult to achieve when you’re in the thick of it: “Work on the business, not in the business.”
As you’ll see, everything is slightly approximate, slightly exaggerated — so that each step in the argument takes you further from what you’re prepared to agree to.
A worth-while apology for Design Thinking:
The newsworthy thing about the Accenture/Hertz story is not that they failed to deliver but how badly they failed and that they are getting sued for it. Getting something that’s not very good for far too much money is an accepted part of doing business with consultancies of that size.
“Everyone else, money manager big or small, met with him virtually, over Zoom. When Yuan flew to New York for the IPO, it was just his eighth work trip in five years.”
“They’re really good at the PR thing, and it really feels like gaslighting.”
Given their track record, I can’t blame people everywhere NIMBYing Google out of their neighborhoods.
Fuck you a million times.
The men I work with are not the geniuses of Menlo Park, the ones who retreated to garages and emerged with hardware that changed the world. They’re ensemble actors in an industry that favors singular greatness. They have not made fortunes or founded startups but have benefited from their proximity and physical resemblance to those who have.
A handy checklist of what you need to take into account when you do (remote) mob programming. Every time we’ve used mobbing as an approach it has paid off thusfar so I’m very interested in deepening the practice.
A clear write-up of how GOV.UK kept things running smoothly while their petitions website suffered an immense rush of signatures.
Zoom is an excellent video-conferencing app which turns out to be built on some technical excellence of its own (running WASM encoders and decoders in the browser).
I can’t really get enough of Haidt takedowns like this one in the Guardian.
Kim Kardashian West is active in prison reform and studying law. There are no limits to what anybody can do.
That was a very good episode of The Cultures with an especially interesting treatment of community (by Naomi I guess) “as a framework of how and why to get on with people that you don’t like.”contrasting it with the current digital culture where everybody has to cultivate a likable persona.
Looking forward to the Micromobility Summit coming to Berlin this year. I hope we manage to have some serious progress on infrastructure and street legal scooters by then.
Some amazing work by Morten Just turning a phone into a 3D mouse using all the sensors that it has embedded in it. This is mindblowing and hints at all the things that are already possible using the technology we have.
Barcelona is implementing a traffic transition we here in Berlin can only dream of.
“Really, though, it was the same liberal fantasy, where everyone could laugh together because they were all on the right side of history.”
Berlin opens its first mobility hub and makes it look about as shabby as the average parking lot in Kreuzberg (which is what it is).
Nice to see some positive urban development coming from Turkey for a change.
If Berlin votes to expropriate Deutsche Wohnen, it will be a welcome step towards decommodification of housing. Not to mention the long overdue correction that it will give the local housing market.
Here is the sad recounting how the Dutch media fueled the rise of a white nationalist politician to the point where he’s polling as the second largest party now.
I’ve got a Patagonia down jacket and I’m glad that they are taking a stand against the appropriation of the brand by finance bros.
Most of my programming career has been focused on keeping things simple and eschewing premature abstractions summarized aptly by: “duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction”
An elaboration on High Output Management split into “Running yourself”and “Running your team”by Keith Rabois.
The best thing about ContraPoints is that she gives the most charitable possible treatment to in this case Gender Critical people (the other time it was Incels) and then still rips them for all that they are.
I’ll be proud to live in Berlin when the home owner expropriations are passed and the real estate madness is curtailed.
I was supposed to see this play six years ago. Let’s say better late than never. Seen Wednesday, March 20th at the Maxim Gorki Theater.
Nice to see a talk by my colleague Alicia and grand-boss Dror featured in the local IT news.
Some nice parenting tips from the Inuit.
by a huge, active, buoyantly thriving German Department which its Head, Dr. Hagen, smugly called (pronouncing every syllable very distinctly) “a university within a university.”
I loved this summary of Julie Zhuo’s new book “The Making of a Manager”(excellent points in there about one-on-ones, self-awareness, delegation and growth) and I can’t wait to read the entire thing.
Theranos employees are suffering some adverse consequences for participating in that scam (and rightly so).
A basic lesson in design and the importance of non-functional characteristics from Jony Ive: “What we tend to focus on are those attributes that are easy to talk about, and just because we talk about them doesn’t mean that they’re the important attributes. All that means is they’re the ones that are easy to talk about.”
Eggboy speaks: “This egg has united people.”
I love Jacinda Ardern showing true leadership after the Christchurch tragedy.
I’ve been trying to figure out what makes for the best kind of professional working relationships. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t and sometimes they really take off.
I didn’t think I’d live to hear one, but WIDI is a German language podcast (by Igor and a different Johannes) about technology that adds a unique perspective and a more systemic approach to the mix. If they manage to keep it niche, this will be a must listen for a German language audience.
I think it’s lovely that you can do stuff like this these days in Jira (Cloud at least) but given the choice I still would pick more or less anything else.
AOC deserves every bit of support for the amazing work that she is doing and for the huge job that she has taken upon herself.
Confiscatory fines for people who abuse the housing market like here in Barcelona are the way to go.
Bernard-Henri Lévy gets rekt by Isaac Chotiner who has got all of his receipts.