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2019

·42 words
Unexpected but more than welcome that The Verge would bring the story of Ramsey Orta, the person who filmed the killing of Eric Garner by NYPD and is now facing prison time and harassment for it.

·29 words
A thorough and hugely insightful breakdown of six software rewrites with the conclusion that you can always create something new without throwing away the value you already have.

·13 words
An excruciating story about the necessary choices during a genetically fraught pregnancy.

Highlights for The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

·302 words
But other foxes say that in that brief second the man realizes that physical life is a stupid and shameful mistake. And the first thing he tries to do is to thank the fox who has opened his eyes. And after that he corrects the error of his own existence.

·83 words
Facebook did a half-hearted push towards a more messaging focused experience during the conversational boom, but didn’t manage to make any inroads and abandoned the effort. Whatsapp could have been the beachhead but with the original leadership and vision gone, nothing interesting will happen there. Instagram (also without original leadership) is slowly being turned into sludge by whatever PMs Facebook has left.

·19 words
Everybody can thank Facebook for the techlash that is happening now. Elizabeth Warren: “I’m sick of freeloading billionaires.”

·61 words
Ilhan Omar is maybe even better than AOC. She definitely is more fearless.

·49 words
A good argument that agile leadership is about delegating and divesting decision making power as far down as possible into the informal network.

·21 words
In this comprehensive list of matureness in engineers, John Allspaw elaborates on many of the non-technical skills that constitute seniority.

·32 words
Circumstances here on the continent are of course nowhere near as dystopian as in the USA but nevertheless a lot in this bleak and harsh piece about midlife crises rings true.

·44 words
The things that will actually allow you to hire great engineers are things that are very hard to quantify, as listed in this article:

·48 words
The origin story of Notion is pretty wild but all of the recipes in it for deep collaboration and radical iteration make a lot of sense. When I briefly tried out Notion, I was struck very much by how tight both its vision and its execution were.

·70 words
A lot of sense and clear rules about tool usage in this article about remote native organizations by Pablo Carranza. It makes me itch to go back to working remote however much I’m enjoying my current office setup.

A well written defense by Markthalle IX in Berlin that sounds good but still paints a much more rosy picture of reality than is justified. Let’s be totally clear: removing the ALDI will advance the area’s socio-economic cleansing.

·28 words
Reality captured in photos by Istanbul cab driver Sevket Sahintas. There’s an equivalent series here in Berlin that is not being captured as far as I know.

·36 words
As soon as AOC got the nomination I already had a strong hunch that she was the real deal. Turns out I had no idea how much of a deal she was going to be.

·40 words
I’ve seen tons of people whose lives were made significantly easier because of parental credit lines which is good for them, but to be fair:

·28 words
Looked up Game of Thrones bastard names and I have to conclude that the surname for a bastard in Germany would have to be Wurst, like Hans Wurst.

·27 words
It will be increasingly amazing to visit SF (or SanSan as it should be known) and witness how dystopian they can make it with their NIMBY-ism.

An article about micromobility has finally reached German media, now let’s just wait for these devices to become street legal here.

·38 words
Watching this level of conflict photography always gives me the itch (and there are tons and tons of stories not being caught still even in this age of ubiquitous digital) to start shooting again. RIP Yannis Behrakis.

·33 words
After listening to this very enjoyable episode of @ tech_done_right, I’m left wondering which companies here on the continent implement the hiring best practices (standardization, diverse panels, take-home alternatives) mentioned in it.

·37 words
I didn’t think I would be working with MISP, a threat intelligence platform written in PHP but now I am and here you can read a bit more about the various things we’re doing with it.

·25 words
An excellent talk by Tanya Reilly about the career impacts of technical and glue (non-technical) work especially for underrepresented groups: “Being promoted is diversity work.”

·73 words
I’m not a data scientist but I’ve been trained for it (as part of my computer science degree) and I’ve worked in a bunch of related fields. I wholly endorse this take by Vicki Boykis on the state of data science and what you need to be successful at it.

·51 words
I really like this way of looking at team success, but I’d clarify that success means that a team not only holds each other accountable but me as well.

·28 words
A very necessary housing revolution is underway in Berlin that has the potential to halt market forces that are running amok. After Barcelona, now Berlin. Who’s next?

·18 words
This piece about Stephen Wolfram’s productivity system is too much but also too fascinating to stop reading.

·111 words
This description of the Goldsmith MA Design Expanded Practice is more or less also how I prefer to work whether in my own practice or anywhere else. An exposition of how to redesign design education that is well worth reading.

·20 words
A comprehensive list of the challenges for agile development in enterprise environments with the solutions included for immediate implementation.

Highlights for Red Moon

·227 words
Analogies always deceive more than they reveal; I am no fan of analogies, I do not use them. Even metaphor, that mental operation we use with almost every word we speak, is slippery and deceptive. I always speak as plainly as I can.

Highlights for Tribal Leadership

·569 words
First, they spent most of their efforts building strong relationships between Griffin’s tribal members—its employees, volunteers, and patients. Second, instead of telling people what to do, they engineered experiences (such as the retreats) in which staff members would look at the same issues they were dealing with, so that strategy became everyone’s problem. Third, they got out of the way and let people contribute in their own way to the emerging tribal goals.

Reading 2018

·946 words
I grabbed the code I had lying around for last year and without too much trouble ran the same analysis for the books. The graph is not that dramatic this time though for some reason I did not read much during summer.

2018

Highlights for Shambhala

·1872 words
We hope only that we have not obstructed or weakened the power of these teachings. May they help to liberate all beings from the warring evils of the setting sun.

Highlights for No Bad Kids

·673 words
When setting limits, the emotional state of the parent almost always dictates the child’s reaction. If we lack clarity and confidence, lose our temper or are unsure, tense, frazzled, or frustrated — this will unsettle our kids and very likely lead to more undesirable behavior.

Highlights for The Hall of Uselessness

·2505 words
One has the feeling that these critics do not really like literature—they do not enjoy reading. Worse even, if they were actually to enjoy a book, they would suspect it to be frivolous. In their eyes, something that is amusing cannot be important or serious.

Highlights for Ghachar Ghochar

·113 words
The woman had not abused us. She had not come here to pick a fight. We were thrown off balance by her love for one of us, and so we tore into her with such vengeance that she collapsed to the ground, sobbing.