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Posts

2019

·29 words
I’d say a lot of this criticism of React is fair but because all frameworks have jumped onto components, I don’t really see a realistic workable alternative either.

·12 words
Design thinking is finally officially over, even Ideo admits it now.

·45 words
This lament on SF does not sound that far off from where Berlin is. The city is a lot bigger and less boring, but without measures, it could go the same way when it comes to property prices and hollowing out of public services.

·33 words
An excellent short piece by Emily Nakashima about the various ways that power bends reality. It is well worth keeping in mind even especially if you are the person who has power.

·28 words
We were represented at PM Camp last week and here’s a blog post (in German) by Alicia, one of my team members about the way we work.

·31 words
After this piece, I’m totally sold on the benefits of mentoring (and registered myself on Coding Coach). I would be open to mentor a couple of people on engineering/product management/leadership.

·22 words
I can’t get enough of these literary exposés, this one about how Benjamin Moser treats female collaborators and appropriates their work.

·28 words
I also love this proposed government based on sortition and ostracism. It seems like it could be a lot better than what we have right now.

·12 words
Finally a proper English language profile of Turkish star rapper Ezhel.

Medialab fallout

·163 words
Some of the Medialab faculty seem to be outraged because its current head Joi Ito took money from Jeffrey Epstein. Those that can are leaving. Power to them.

·33 words
One of the most well-known examples of code reuse between Android and iOS, Dropbox, is giving up on it because it’s too difficult to find people who can/want to write C++ code.

·23 words
It’s 2019 and uploading an application to Apple is still a nightmare-ish pursuit. I am so glad to be done with Apple’s bullshit.

·48 words
Mid to large size teams can accrue dependencies like a katamari and then they’ll be wondering why their node_modules has become unworkably big. That is only one reason to adopt a quick RFC process for engineering decisions that have the potential to affect a bunch of people.

·20 words
“I offer this: literature can save a life. Just one life at a time.”

·50 words
With some minor adjustments, this entire piece about the systematic advantaging of the automobile is applicable to Germany as well.

·35 words
An impressive application of the strangle vine pattern to rewrite the Slack desktop client which everybody loved to hate. The write-up reads rather matter-of-fact but the process to get there most likely was not.

·27 words
Pollution from internal combustion engines is killing everybody slowly and here we are in a country that can’t be bothered to regulate diesel engines into oblivion.

·39 words
Reading Shopify’s approach to keeping their merchant’s secure at their humongous scale seems to come down to the radical standardization of everything. People think this is boring (it isn’t) but it has tons of benefits beyond just security.

·28 words
One good example with an open sourced tool over at Slack of how they’ve implemented their Security Development Lifecycle to enable their developers to move forward confidently.

·23 words
For most managers these responses should come naturally, but still good to reflect on how to deal positively with employees giving notice.

·27 words
First I hear about Mauerkrankheit—and I’m not the only one—but a politically triggered rise in mental health problems would explain many things both past and present.

·20 words
We do our own flavor of attachment parenting and this is still one of my favorite pieces about motherhood.

·44 words
Farmers are forced to be taught in a “reeducation camp”to use their mobile phones to monitor the status in the greenhouse including CO2, light strength, soil temperature, etc.

·40 words
The dropping arises from the combination of the laissez-faire attitude of Dutch parents along with the incredible safety of the Netherlands. I have been dropped as a child and I never considered that this was a uniquely local experience.

·27 words
A more than useful read of how the CEO of Ogilvy tries to worm out of the fact that they are doing work selling concentration camps.

·21 words
An incredible treatment of moving to New York that manages to make SF more than a bit lame in comparison.

·41 words
Berlin right now is the frontline for transportation applications with 4 scooter services alone. I’m glad that Jon has made a comprehensive overview of multi-modal transportation apps because I sure as hell wasn’t going to have the time for it.

·16 words
Instead of giving up, let’s hope that climate despair pushes people towards increasingly radical action.

·25 words
The manifesto to choose boring technology in order to be able to solve interesting problems is something to (re-)read regularly until you’ve internalized it.

·16 words
A nice rundown of Good Strategy/Bad Strategy as recounted by Russell Davies to Anna Schipman.

Cloudflare is setting a high bar for post-mortem writing but if you want to get started with this, the only parts you really need are: What went wrong & What are we doing about it.

·37 words
OV-Fiets is the bike share avant-la-lettre, but it’s so locally Dutch that it always has been a bit hard to explain. The popularity of OV-Fiets has increased, now coinciding nicely with the international boom in mobility.

·37 words
For the more abstract work, it makes it a lot easier for other people to ‘read your mind’ and for you to delegate if you share as much context as possible as Anna Shipman describes here.

·27 words
Something that bears pointing out regularly: “Plus, contrary to popular belief, agile practices were not invented by the Agile movement. They predate it by many decades.”

·58 words
Cath writes some very salient points about growing into leadership that on the one hand should be more widespread, but on the other hand, everybody will likely have to find out for themselves.

·56 words
A very recognizable story of an engineering organization finding itself and one person’s journey into leadership and back.

·27 words
My foray into local politics showed me that more than anything the Grüne are a party of yuppies without much or any social face behind it.

·26 words
I haven’t read this profile of the Sacklers. I’ll only read one when it is profiling them because they will be executed for their crimes.

·61 words
I’ve never exactly followed any framework but instead, I played it by ear and mixed and matched what worked best from wherever I could find it. That’s always a bit bothersome (but easily solved) when people want to work with the exact definition of something.

·31 words
Whenever our kids are dismayed by somebody else, they come to us and say that there was either a human (ein Mensch!) or a kid (ein Kind!). No genders, no nothing.

·29 words
Leaving this here because I’m going to need it more often:

·46 words
Any programming language once it gets big enough will face pressure to turn into Java. PHP succumbed to it, let’s see where Go goes. Try isn’t that big of an issue but it is a path that eventually may lead to… generics and other stuff.