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Posts

2020

·56 words
“The piece of advice that I give to new managers—and this sounds simple but it’s really hard—is you have to really listen to your people. They are telling you what they want, and you have to hear it. At the end of the day, it’s not about you. It’s what this human is telling you.”

·38 words
Not surprising that the entire concept of ‘ethical AI’ is another scam perpetuated by the MIT Media Lab. At this point I would assume any project coming out of that institution to be compromised unless proven otherwise.

·43 words
“The best engineers can toggle back and forth between manager and IC roles. Make sure your technical foundation and fundamental skills are solid enough to pull that off.”

·19 words
I know more about TikTok than almost everybody around me and still I hardly know anything about TikTok.

·32 words
It’s not that often that you see a guide how to hire engineering managers, let alone people at the DirEng/VPE level. That makes this guide by Rushab Doshi rare and useful.

·18 words
Translated diary excerpts of a soldier involved in the Dersim Massacre describe a normal kind of horror.

·95 words
A wild ride of an article that draws the essential but often overlooked connections between neoliberalism and fascism.

·38 words
Every place that turns car free like the city center of Ghent here is incredibly well received by the residents. The people who seem to be against it don’t live there, they just want to drive through.

·34 words
You are indeed probably not communicating enough. My advice is to just communicate more. If you are communicating too much (highly unlikely that you would reach that point), people will let you know.

·17 words
Wild that even a mild cycling habit at the population level can strongly reduce obesity rates.

·100 words
Een bijzonder goed stuk van Yael van der Wouden over wat het betekent om Nederlander te zijn en wat het betekent om dat niet te zijn.

·26 words
A fairly definitive article about why SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) should not be used. Mostly because it is the antithesis of every kind of agility.

·21 words
Away is a good example of how Slack can get totally out of hand if your company culture is toxic.

·25 words
I usually get a lot of resistance when I suggest using monorepos but this article explains really well what cultural benefits that choice entails.

·34 words
Ian Bogost remarks on the eery flattening of place and the retreat of people into the domestic cozy, since home can be any place you want it to be thanks to digital technology.

·38 words
Reading back on Fallen London I spent altogether too much time on it in the beginning but don’t have the heart to go back, that is if the city would even take me back at this point.

·21 words
That is a fully comprehensive and excellent list of guidelines to unlearn toxic behaviour in code reviews by Sandya Sankarram.

·85 words
Anybody who’s ever seen a SUV driver knows this, but the car industry themselves have verified that the people who buy those cars are assholes.

·17 words
Germany is deeply entrenched in coal as this utterly backward and destructive position by Siemens underlines.

·25 words
A long piece on The Daily which reveals a lot about its inner workings and the all-consuming scale with which something like that operates.

·14 words
Ik kijk heel erg uit om dingen op het vernieuwde OneWorld te lezen.

·12 words
A broad treatment of what the essential quality of Fingerspitzengefühl means.

·26 words
Venkat keeps churning out these legendary and broadly valid pieces. This one is about why everything online is on fire all the time. Strap in.

·27 words
A long treatment of how to scale work as organizations grow with some helpful guidelines: “Keep the work parallel, the groups small, and the resources local.”

·34 words
Pizza toast and all kinds of toasties are a staple here with small kids which seems to imply that an odyssey through Japan like Craig Mod undertakes here could be a great idea.

·119 words
I’m glad that this takedown of Clean Code by Dan Abramov got so much traction. I have no problem with clean code (lowercase), but inevitably the process of getting there and the things people do as a consequence make the entire endeavor an anti-pattern.

·148 words
“The privilege I have — how? No, genuinely, how?”

·14 words
Een verslag van Marijn Kruk over de bijzonder grimmige politieke situatie in Frankrijk.

·176 words
“If I have learned anything from the experience I’ve just described, it’s that the desire to shape, bait, surf, defy, find meaning in, or otherwise control and draw sharp lines between myself and the haters puts me on risky psychic territory. It’s dangerous. My provisional conclusion? That the best path for me, should hating on my person ever recur at scale, is to deploy, to the best of my ability, relentless sincerity, credulity, wit, and yes, shamelessness, but, crucially, shameability, too—openness to being justly shamed. If I become unshameable, after all, what good is my shamelessness? If I start assuming in advance, deep down, that no one whom I’ve upset with my words has valid points to make, what will I have become? I found it least harmful, actually, to keep my eyes and ears open throughout the dogpiles, experiencing them as reminders that the revolution will not be content-moderated; that I am fighting for things that make people hate me and that that’s sort of okay, I can respect it (plus, hey, it’s mutual).”

·22 words
This is good advice for a Director of UX by Adrian Howard that generalizes well to any other kind of Director.

·20 words
A long article by Robert Arkwright that uses react server-side rendering as a hook to discuss various scalability issues.

·12 words
An incredibly sad and beautiful story of a father’s last days.

·13 words
A bit of near-future fiction about crypto as a subsistence work enterprise.

·55 words
Een lang en grondig interview met Cody Hochstenbach over de wooncrisis in Nederland. Studio Tegengif is een favoriete podcast wat een soort Nederlandse versie van The Weeds lijkt te worden.

·14 words
Pijnlijk dat het enige kritische interview van FvD in de Gelderlander moet plaatsvinden.

·32 words
Lekha is a former collaborator who now has this lovely site of her own. Her sense of systems and many skills have always made it a joy to work with her.

·33 words
I used to know Wytze and the foresight and innovation that he put into the Urban Arrow back in the day (2010) which is still going strong is nothing short of mind-boggling.

·6 words
“Slack eliminates hierarchy time and space.”

·28 words
I read this science-fiction short story which is reminiscent of Ann Leckie’s books in how it plays with gender and militarism, but I think this is better.

·38 words
I listened to the writer of this book explain how the people in the Obama administration thought things would work the same way as they did in The West Wing. Properly hilarious stuff with very serious consequences.

·26 words
This profile on C.C. Myers is a good example of leading from the front but even more than that it shows that speed begets speed.

·22 words
Will I get tired reading these kind of paeans on Finland (in this case their culture of media literacy)? Probably not.

·21 words
A quick rundown by Github of how to develop quickly on production using feature flags and what benefits that brings.

2019

·84 words
The disappearance of Page and Brin is one of the weirder and more foreboding things. You have to wonder whether we will ever hear from them or anybody similarly rich ever again.

·29 words
Not surprisingly I agree with these reasons to do give management a try. It can be a very rewarding thing for the right person at the right place/time.

·18 words
I will never do this but I very much love this phenomenon of writing on vintage computers.