A fun profile on Annalena Bärbock (initials ACAB) the leader of the Greens who could become Germany’s next chancellor.
Month: April 2021
A good list of skills that you will need when you want to level up, but if you have to choose one, pick “Clear Written Communication” and knock that one out of the park.
https://developer.squareup.com/blog/how-to-be-a-more-influential-engineer/
Slack has an interesting S-Curve based approach to adopting new technologies where they mention that getting through the trough of adoption is more like product-work than anything else.
Moving away from Omnifocus
I started a new job and thought I’d try out OmniFocus for a change after using Things very intensively at the last job. Things felt a bit constricting and I thought I’d try out the alternative app for a change.
Turns out this was a huge mistake.
- Don’t learn a new productivity application while starting a new job. This was a lot more annoying than I expected it to be. In part also because…
- OmniFocus is extremely unpolished. I don’t know what they are doing with the monthly subscription pricing that they cash but developing the applications is not it. The tool is extremely bare and missing huge swaths of basic functionality out of some kind of misguided principle. Their quick add window looks and works terribly and is a bad parody of the one that Things has. The interface design looks like something I could also have whipped up (and I consider myself largely design blind).
- OmniFocus is also very old and has gone through a bunch of version updates which makes all of the user guides and documentation hard to sift through. I’ve more than once been reading about stuff that didn’t exist anymore in the current app.
I will be switching back to Things as soon as I can find out how to purchase it in the correct way. And because both of these tools are fairly popular there’s an exporter/importer so I don’t have to type everything over manually.
Advanced Turkish Anki Deck
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.