I’m not sure whether this will make any sales at all but Turkish Clubhouse made me brush up on my language and I loaded some old vocabulary I had lying around into an Anki deck and workflow. I thought I’d might as well productize it since high quality Anki decks for advanced learners are hard to find.
Agile is setup as a bit of a straw man in this piece about scaling product delivery, but it is true that following the existing methods too rigidly will not get you where you want to be. I’d rephrase it to say that mature teams need to be able to reflect and create their own systems as they go.
There are a bunch of wrong ways to install Python 3 on your Mac unfortunately. Follow this guide and you’ll save yourself a bunch of pain.
https://opensource.com/article/19/5/python-3-default-mac
Figuring out how to onboard yourself in a remote world is something that’s directly pertinent to me since I’m starting a new job right now. The content is very much the same but it’s still quite a different experience.
https://leaddev.com/professional-development/owning-your-onboarding-remote-world
The correct sequence is to start with a business goal, translate that into a technical strategy and have architectural initiatives follow from that.
https://blog.thepete.net/blog/2019/12/09/delivering-on-an-architecture-strategy/
This point by Charity Majors is well worth repeating: you should not take on additional responsibilities if you’re not delivering at and excelling in your core job. All of the other stuff seems like it matters a lot, but it really doesn’t.
A write-up how Dropbox rearchitected and broke up their monolith into pragmatic components. Nice to read that their base was a large Python code base, a bit similar to Instagram which is still running a branch of Django underneath.
https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/atlas–our-journey-from-a-python-monolith-to-a-managed-platform
German adjective inflections demystified
I see lots of people still struggle with the German adjectives and especially the fact that there are three tables, one for each of definite articles, indefinite articles and when there’s no article, for 48 separate inflections.
The correct order is: nom./gen./dat./acc.
It looks pretty intimidating and back in school my brain refused to do learn this. I crammed it for a test, immediately forgot it after and German classes turned into agony.
There are various mnemonics going around to make the table easier but I’m not in favor of rote memorization if there’s also a logic behind something. As with all language, the entire thing is based on the principle of energy conversation while maintaining essential information and harmony. That’s my non-linguist intuition. Linguists feel free to chime in.
The entire table can be boiled down to five rules.
- Definite nom./acc. singular: all -e (because a definite article has all the information and is leading, so no further decoration or information required on the adjective) except for masc. acc. which is -en (because acc always has -en and it sounds weird without it)
- Indefinite nom./acc. singular: all congruent with the article: ein
erguter Mann, für einen guten Mann, eine gute Frau, für eine gute Frau etc. (because the article still has all the information but it is weaker/indefinite so the adjective helps out) - Definite and indefinite gen./dat. singular: all -en (all the information is in the article so no need to repeat it but good to have some differentiation from the nom./acc. cases)
- Definite and indefinite plural: all -en (because it’s plural)
- No article: the adjectives take the endings that would normally have been carried by the article (because there is no article and otherwise the case information would not be there) except for masc./neut. gen. where the -s is on the noun
That’s it. I hope this adds some logic to something that otherwise feels totally random for German learners.
With practice you can look these inflections up in your head and with even more practice, anytime somebody uses the wrong inflection, it starts to sound wrong (that lack of harmony), just like it would to a native speaker.
Marijn Bolhuis sums up the devastating effects that a decade of Rutte government has in the Netherlands but people keep electing him. It follows from this that Dutch people are a bunch of piggies.
Tiny cars are a huge thing and will be a much bigger deal than anything that Tesla is planning.