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Posts

2019

·21 words
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the media will go to any lengths to ignore Bernie.

·46 words
Too aggravating to even read this entire thing. I’ll have to get it together soon to delete my facebook account. Though I’ll still be locked into Instagram and Whatsapp then, so I think it would be best indeed if those services would be broken up.

·63 words
Ende Gelände is the radical environmentalist movement against climate change and here they are blocking a strip mine.

·29 words
AOC is correct. America is running concentration camps filled with kids.

Patterns failed

·71 words
Exceedingly rare to find a talk about programming that draws on both Christopher Alexander and James C. Scott, two authors that I keep coming back to myself.

·28 words
Lovely to see the Twisted community take the lead in moving Python forward and I fully support this idea of giving the standard library the Konmari treatment.

·36 words
There is another dirty secret behind the German switch to alcohol-free beers: German beers just aren’t that good. I prefer any major foreign beer (Heineken, Carlsberg, 1664, etc.) over most beers you can buy here.

·20 words
Reading about Amsterdam canceling 10'000 parking spaces, does make me feel as if I’m living in an idiot’s city.

·43 words
A frankly amazing piece by Monica Lent using her experience to debunk seven commonly held truths about programming with verve. Programming consists of folklore and beliefs are often just beliefs. That indeed makes most learning in this field a question of unlearning.

·21 words
A case for becoming good at writing for software engineers that frankly holds up for anybody in a growing organization.

·119 words
As the blisters develop and his feet start to bleed, Walton asks the right questions. What are the human and environmental costs of Singapore’s success, and are they sustainable?

·51 words
A nicely put explanation for why I too pick my environments to be maximally productive with minimal configuration. In many cases, I just make do to the disgust of those who’ve learned all the shortcuts and applied all the customizations, but to them I’d say: marginal returns and opportunity cost.

·41 words
I’d dare say that with the waning of the iPhone as a platform (both for development and for business), Apple’s closed plays will be increasingly lackluster. I’ve been rooting for Swift but it’s a horse running in the wrong race.

“It’s no coincidence that co-living start-ups have gravitated to cities like Berlin, San Francisco, London and New York. Ostensibly ‘winning’ the battle for capital and talent, they are urban testing-grounds, where rootless and cashed-up tech workers, heated real estate markets, and rising housing pressures add up to a recipe for experimentation.”

·73 words
Tooling has become so good and so empowering that like in this tweet, many commerce ‘startups’ that are really struggling to hire and retain dev teams (and then utilize them to their potential) would be much better served using Airtable, Zapier and Pipedrive until they break.

·66 words
Leave it to the Netherlands to have a Green party that is right-wing just like every other party. Their leader, Jesse Klaver, styled himself after Trudeau during his campaign but after that, the result has been a bit lackluster without a seat in government.

·32 words
Fijn zo’n land onder de zeespiegel dat wordt beheerst door klimaatontkenners. En gezien het Nederlandse asielbeleid is het niet heel waarschijnlijk dat klimaatvluchtelingen elders op een warm welkom zullen kunnen rekenen.

·24 words
Gitlab’s CEO Shadow Program is a testament to their deep and deliberate thinking about organizational development. I’m curious whether more companies do this.

·15 words
I had no idea but it seems Berlin has a booming Chinese art scene.

·59 words
Cities like Barcelona are starting to fight back against AirBnB and tourism.

·30 words
Ik dacht dat Arjen van Veelen één van de beste schrijvers op de Correspondent was. Dat is hij misschien nog steeds, maar dan shrijft hij wel dit soort onzin.

·46 words
Set aside all of the obvious outcry, I haven’t seen a single argument yet that explains how encrypted communications are compatible with state power.

·25 words
Swisher is doing good work here on Facebook/Fakebook but her handling of the worst of technology is still astonishingly softball given what is happening.

·175 words
A huge deep dive into how Stripe invests in technical infrastructure that contains too many good things to list.

·63 words
I am hard out at three 2/3 days a week to pick up my children and stayed at home last Friday to take care of a sick kid, so I am doing my best to parent very much out in the open in my workplace. It helps that my grandboss is also very explicit about this but I still find it difficult.

The future of social democracy

·80 words
The play: SPD goes populist-nationalist to catch all of the right-wing worker votes and nibble off from AfD/CDU. They leave the open society social-democratic policies to the Greens.

To Christiania!

·149 words
After their long nap, I took both out for a round of recycling cardboard, pumping some tires and buying some coffee beans 1.

Highlights for Interpreter of Maladies

·127 words
In her estimation, I knew, I was assured a safe life, an easy life, a fine education, every opportunity. I would never have to eat rationed food, or obey curfews, or watch riots from my rooftop, or hide neighbors in water tanks to prevent them from being shot, as she and my father had.

·30 words
Berlin will also regularly call on McKinsey to ‘fix’ its problems. As this description of them giving Puerto Rico the Greece-treatment shows, where they come nothing good will follow.

·41 words
With my background in behavior change, I’m very pleasantly surprised to find this quote in what is a connoisseur’s treatment of the nuances of agile/agility: “There is only one way to create business value, and that’s to change someone’s behavior.”

·35 words
“Admittedly, this neat combination of worshipping totems while pursuing practical benefits is quintessentially Chinese.”

·276 words
A lot of very salient thinking on books, metacognition, double-loop learning and the deliberate design of new forms by Andy Matuschak in “Why Books Don’t Work”.

·28 words
Of de Nederlandse omroepen en kranten nou extreem-rechts zijn of niet, het effect is hetzelfde. Ze ondersteunen systematisch politiek en politici die rechts of heel rechts zijn.

·52 words
“The key to building this aura is to become increasingly detail oriented, to be more prepared than anyone else, and to have a higher bar than those around you.”

·59 words
The issue around the Python standard library finally comes to a head thanks to a Twisted contributor. The standard library has felt stale for a very long time now. It’s nice that it’s there but nobody can really program anything in Python without external packages. There really is no debate here and core Python should support actual programmers.

“Changes to one team’s service may be implemented by another team who needs the enhanced capability by what is called an Away Team. This team works on the Home Team’s code to add what it needs according to established engineering standards and then leaves that code in good order to be maintained by the Home Team who owns the service, with help when needed.”

Personal Growth

·36 words
Venkat’s newsletter “Life Spirit Distillation”has a nice argument against personal growth and instead in favor of life intensification reframing the question into:

·44 words
https://twitter.com/TheOnion/status/1128726771942219781