Posts

Een absurd maar nog schrijnender verslag uit de rechtbank van de processen die gevoerd werden tegen de avondklok-relschoppers.

“Helicopter Story” was one of the best pieces of sci-fi I’ve read in a while. All the more galling that it was ripped apart in a culture war free-for-all.

“dass deutsche Behörden und bürokratische Prozesse mitverantwortlich sind am Scheitern des Start-ups.”

Foursquare is responsible for an inordinate amount of good times I’ve had, it still powers @cuppings and I’m still pleased that we got it to launch in Amsterdam as its first international city.

The character relations turned into a bit of a tangle so I fired up Miro and quickly charted them out. In the end it wasn’t that complicated but the worlds of Meryem and Peri are very clearly separate.

A summary of the agile development holy grail of continuous integration and deployment that is so hard to attain but very much worth it.

I feel this list by Dan Na of what it means to switch to the management track and this point in particular is more or less what my days consist of (intensity, attention, feeling): “Management forces you to care more about everything.”

I think this is a leveling definition that I can live with: “Managers are paid to drive results with some support. Directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision (‘set and forget’). VPs are paid to make the plan.”

I’ve been thinking along these lines and a DNA type meeting as an informal place of leadership and sparring sound great. In our case, I think I’ll call it “Debt and Architecture”.

Given all of the mistakes we could have made picking out Turkish names when you read this article, I think we did pretty well.

A fun profile on Annalena Bärbock (initials ACAB) the leader of the Greens who could become Germany’s next chancellor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The correct sequence is to start with a business goal, translate that into a technical strategy and have architectural initiatives follow from that.

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.

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.

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.

Taken from the title of Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin’s 2008 book, “the dark forest”region of the web is becoming increasingly important as a space of online communication for users of all ages and political persuasions. In part, this is because it is less sociologically stressful than the clearnet zone, where one is subject to peer, employer, and state exposure. It also now includes Discord servers, paid newsletters (e.g., Substack), encrypted group messaging (via Telegram, etc.), gaming communities, podcasts, and other off-clearnet message board forums and social media. One forages for content or shares in what others in the community have retrieved rather than accepting whatever the platform algorithms happen to match to your data profile. Additionally, dark forest spaces are both minimally and straightforwardly commercial. There is typically a small charge for entry, but once you are in, you are free to act and speak without the platform nudging your behavior or extracting further value. It is also interesting to keep in mind that the dark forest shares the same cables and satellite arrays as clearnet channels, is accessed via the same devices, and essentially all of its denizens continue to simultaneously participate in clearnet spaces (as contemporary professional protocol demands). It is therefore not analogous to legacy countercultural notions of going off-grid or “dropping out.”

A strong hint about the real future of virtual reality and a callback to the MUD era which I had a lot of trouble understanding. Seeing it on Tiktok makes it a lot more tangible in a bunch of ways.

Another big volley towards more tenants’ rights in Berlin that if won will provoke a vast shift in thinking around housing politics both locally and globally.

A strong overview of the various considerations around going back to the office that will help a lot of companies who stand to make this decision right now. Particularly interesting how the German lagging context will deal with it and what consequences it will have on the commercial property markets.

An economic analysis of witch hunts in Germany that show it to be a pre-modern corrective for people who climbed out of their social position.

The organizational debt listed here is more the norm than the exception and a lot of management is dealing with unnecessarily suboptimal circumstances.

But on the other hand, it becomes a society where all the assets are in the hands of one group of people. And that group of people transmits these assets to the next generation. So I think it becomes a very interesting question, to ask whether current trends might not lead to an even more segmented and stratified society than the one we have now.

De organisatiestructuur is sowieso een kwetsbaarheid van Nederland crisisland, verzucht Arjen Boin. Allereerst is het probleem dat onze ministeries niet meer de capaciteiten in huis hebben om zelf het heft in handen te nemen. Den Haag heeft steeds meer een monitorende en coördinerende functie gekregen. Ambtenaren zijn in veel gevallen geen specialisten meer op de dossiers die ze beheren — hun specialiteit is vergaderen en managen en ze rouleren door de organisatie.Grofweg kun je als bestuur in tijden van crisis twee dingen doen: optie één is overschakelen op een crisisstructuur, zegt Boin. Daarbij centraliseer je de macht en breng je het aantal mensen dat mag meepraten terug. Dan kiezen we de mensen die namens ons de belangrijkste beslissingen nemen. Na afloop rekenen we af. Een crisisorganisatie is georganiseerd in een trechter. Aan het eind van die trechter zit de persoon die zich goed laat adviseren en op een gegeven moment zegt: ‘We gaan naar links of naar rechts.’ Uiteindelijk komt het bij de aanpak van zo’n crisis voor een groot deel aan op het politiek leiderschap

Elon Musk proving that he’s a peddler of garbage and global destruction once again.

The trimodal salary distribution for Amsterdam (and likely other cities as well) as displayed here is very useful information and will hopefully help push compensation (and innovation) in Europe closer to American levels.

The more experience you have, the more implicit authority you will have. It can be tough to understand that when you propose a silly idea over lunch when you have 5 years of experience has a very different impact than when you have 15 years of experience — someone might actually listen to you and go make it!Really, this is a great thing, a sort of influential power you gain. It needs love, care and maintenance though — always work on getting better, learning from your mistakes and improving on your experience. There’s nothing more dangerous for an organization than a person with terrible ideas whom everyone admires professionally.

[Cryptoart is] a crime against humanity.

https://hynek.me/articles/semver-will-not-save-you/

This is an interesting Instagram scam.

He believed that the ‘blood sacrifice’ of a few would regenerate the national consciousness and lead, by force of Irish arms, to the eventual withdrawal of Britain from Ireland.

And from that point on she micromanaged me, and I realized that she was fear-based, both in how she thought of her bosses and in terms of how she ran her team.

“The interesting thing about interactive media is that it allows the players to engage with a problem, conjure a solution, try out that solution, and then experience the results. Then they can go back to the thinking stage and start to plan out their next move. This process of trial and error builds the interactive world in their minds. This is the true canvas on which we design—not the screen. That’s something I always keep in mind when designing games.”

This article on the Huawei corporate culture is one of the worst possible ways to treat employees I’ve ever seen.

https://buriti.ca/6-lessons-i-learned-while-implementing-technical-rfcs-as-a-management-tool-34687dbf46cb

There’s going to be a need for operations in companies however much of their infrastructure they outsource and it’s going to be increasingly interesting and valuable work.

I immediately understand it but I’ve never seen it articulated as explicitly as here by the Singapore Civil Service College: “The main value in software is not the code produced, but the knowledge accumulated by the people who produced it.”

When it comes to software development most of these are good opinions and you can take them as yours without spending the six years Chris Kiehl needed (or the many more I did).

A very concrete framework with an example of how to give feedback at work.

Talking about tech debt is so unspecific and confusing that maybe it’s better not to use the term at all and instead talk about it in these terms (specific goals, business outcomes, incremental delivery).

A useful perspective on the leadership career path and what skills you need to keep leveling up.

but I like working with PMs who went into it through channels other than the official ones, and are motivated out of their passion for building things and solving problems. Not because they feel it’s something they’re supposed to do, or because they think it’s prestigious, or because it is the default path from whatever elite school they went to.