Labnotes

dave trott “The memo that turned Avis into a much bigger company.”

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Design Objective

Maxim Leyzerovich This animation illustrates the point so well:

Never ever present just a wireframe.

Always progressively contextualize:

• Content Hierarchy
• Feature Annotation
• Tasks/Interactions
• Journey Map
• Motion Design

Andrew Chen 👇 Hit the thread for product ideas that sound good but don't perform as well:

product ideas that sound good but rarely A/B test well

• multi-step tutorials that teach you how to use the product
• asking users to pay only after they've fully experienced the product
• (same on referrals - upfront is better!)
• lots of whitespace, low-density of data/information-- that nice designery look we all like

How to design delightful dark themes It's more than black & white: “However, it is difficult to create a delightful dark theme. We cannot simply reuse our colors or invert our shades.”

Dima Spivak 😂

"What's the opposite of 'stop?'"
"Go."
"Damn. I already put 'unstop.'"

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Tools of the Trade

free-for.dev “A list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) and other offerings that have free tiers for developers.”

AnnaR Like that:

Write the README you wish to see in the world

The Passion Economy and the Future of Work Marketplaces vs SaaS:

Marketplaces bring value for creators looking to be discovered and attract customers over time. SaaS tools often make sense for more established creators who already have a customer base. In response to this dynamic, many startups are building SaaS platforms that aim to poach large creators from existing marketplaces.

Nat Pryce Epic!

After reading Beowulf & the epic of Gilgamesh I’ve come to think the term epic is very well used in big-A agile. Real epics start with a compelling story, but then meander on, with random things happening, until they peter out without a satisfactory conclusion.

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Lines of Code

The Lines of Code That Changed Everything Slate explores some of the most influencal pieces of software:

(define-behavior (bounce
        :start-when (or (bump?)
                      bounce-trigger? )
        :abort-when (bump-edge?)
        :onetime? t
      )
)

The Roomba proved that while our attention gravitates toward hardware—such as freaky backward-kneed, door-opening dogs—software might be even more important for a product’s wide adoption. The Asimovian-named iRobot did not create the first robotic vacuum, but the Roomba became a niche must-have not because of how well it sucks, but because of how well it navigated a room.

Test Desiderata Explores the properties of tests:

Isolated — tests should return the same results regardless of the order in which they are run.
Composable — if tests are isolated, then I can run 1 or 10 or 100 or 1,000,000 and get the same results.
Fast — tests should run quickly.
Inspiring — passing the tests should inspire confidence
…

Mihai Popescu Related:

There is a difference between the principles of test code and the principles of prod code. The way I experience it:

• prod code is concise, test code is descriptive
• prod code is general, test code is specific
• prod code is composable, test code is independent

David K. 🤔

There's a lot of confusion between what transpilers, compilers, and interpreters are.

Transpilation is compilation.

TypeScript is compiled to JavaScript

JavaScript is interpreted to Java by recruiters

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Architectural

Hello, production 👍

Deploying something useless into production, as soon as you can, is the right way to start a new project. It pulls unknown risk forward, opens up parallel streams of work, and establishes good habits.

Jonnie Hallman … of those you don't regret immediately:

Every tech stack decision you make will be regretted 3-5 years later.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”

me: “Still trying to remove Angular and Coffeescript from my app’s codebase.”

---

Devoops

erincandescent I guess that's one way to manage infrastructure …

Today it was announced that Yahoo! Groups is shutting down, and taking with it a piece of critical national infrastructure: the Oftel Yahoo Group which is used for managing UK phone number assignments.

Yes, really: See Ofcom's website https://ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/56646/simwood.pdf

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Teamwork

Asynchronous Communication: The Real Reason Remote Workers Are More Productive Not just for remote teams (caveat, written by Doist):

Because employees don’t have to stay on top of each message as it comes in, they can block off large chunks of uninterrupted time to do the work that creates the most value for your organization. They can come back to process their messages in batches 1-3 times a day instead of bouncing back and forth between work and messages or meetings.

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Peopleware

Alex 🏖

Signs you need a break:

• loosing interesting in things you’re usually passionate about and bring you joy
• short temper and easy to provoke
• taking everything personally
• constant overthinking
• emotionally overwhelmed
• always exhausted/tired

Take care friends. Take a break.

YouTube ad sequencing and ad recall How ads are designed to capture your attention (cynical would say “manipulate”).

We’re all wired to remember great stories. Video ad sequencing lets marketers show ads on YouTube in an order based on the most compelling and memorable story structures. There are a lot of structures to explore, so we tested five sequences to understand their influence on three key metrics: brand awareness, ad recall, and purchase intent.

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Locked Doors

Merritt Baer 🚨 Hiding electronics in the trunk:

Colleagues had a car broken into and laptops stolen in downtown Mountain View last night while we were at dinner. We wondered how they knew to break into the hatchback when it is not see- through.

They turn on bluetooth scanners and follow the beacon to find electronics.

Jane Lytvynenko “The details from his Equifax class-action suit are BONKERS”

For example, Equifax relied upon four digit pins derived from Social
Security numbers and birthdays to guard personal information, despite the fact that these weak passwords had already been compromised in previous personal information. Furthermore, Equifax employed the username “admin” and the password “admin” to protect a portal used to manage credit disputes, a password that “is a surefire way to get hacked.”

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None of the Above

Chris Cox “Mom took my fridge.” — smart toilet Twitter integration

Hrothgar 🔥

Airbnb Math:

$40/night x 2 nights = $164

Best of Nextdoor “I avoided this submission for weeks bc of the subject line but then I finally read it and just trust me on this one 😂😂😂”

James Clear Ditto:

My email response time is either 3 minutes or 3 months.

ニューディスカバリー “People who take toy photos seriously 🤩”

iucounu 😂 This thread …

just had cause to send an email containing the phrase 'I am a little surprised to hear this, especially as', which fellow Britons will recognise as essentially a stabbing

Grouch (Joker Parody) - SNL I'd watch this Sesame St Joker mashup.

Manisha Agarwal Joke:

A physicist, a biologist, and a mathematician watch people enter and leave a house.They see 2 ppl enter & 3 leave

Physicist: The initial measurement wasn't accurate
Biologist: They must have reproduced
Mathematician: If one more enters, then the house will be empty again

Dak “I found a video of a duck falling asleep and I’m convinced it’s the cutest video ever”

“Totally here for classic muscle cars with little stuffed animals on the front grill”

---

I was restless this morning, so I decided to leave the house and walk a mile, grab some coffee and catch up on my emails. Not sure why I thought coffee would help with restlessness.

Didn't know it's classic car weekend in Alameda. Which means mostly well preserved muscle cars from the 60's. Like the one above.

Also, while my MacBook is getting repaired (screen issue on the 2016 models), I'm writing this week's edition on the 10" iPad. It's cramped. The multitasking is still limited and buggy. But iPadOS 13 is finally good enough as a computer replacement. Not great, but good enough.

---

Design Objective

10 things I learned from Jason Fried about Building Products Or listen to the episode:

You can only iterate on a shipped product
… All the revisions prior to launch are done to an unfixed, WIP version of your product, and the thinking that motivates those changes is guesswork. The first time you get actual feedback is when your product is live: that’s your threshold for iteration.

cindyalvarez 👏 How to frame a problem:

Every time I make myself write out

We are doing _____
Because we see the problem of _____
We know it's a problem because _____
If we don't fix it, we'll see _____
We'll know we've fixed it when we get _____

the rest of the conversation/project/doc goes SO much easier.

allisongrayce The skill they don't teach you in school:

A judo move you should regularly make as a designer:

Quietly mock up or sketch on a whiteboard while everyone else is relying on words to hash it out.

“So this is what I’m hearing-“ ✨

LissaKEvans When less is more:

I've spent the last two days refining a paragraph of extended metaphor - tweaking, prodding, sanding, trimming, varnishing - and now I've just deleted the whole thing and, honestly, the resultant gap is a thing of genuine beauty.

random_walker Why enterprise software is so often poorly designed:

OK, back to Blackboard! It’s actually designed to look extremely attractive to the administrators (not professors and definitely not students) who make purchase decisions. Since they can't easily test usability, they instead make comparisons based on… checklists of features. 🤦🏽‍♂️

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Tools of the Trade

aschrock I endorse this recommendation:

My students often ask me what skills will help them in a job setting.

Sometimes I tell them "get really good at spreadsheets."

They think I am joking. I am 100% not joking.

Any industry. Any position. Being a spreadsheet god is transferable knowledge.

anniesqueedle These little things are big part of the job:

Had a fun pairing session last week with a dev who's familiar with coding, but just now learning JavaScript. There's little things we learn to do, like messing around in the console to see what methods are defined on an object, that aren't apparent when you first start out.

iPadOS review: The iPad is dead, long live the iPad iPadOS brings the iPad one step closer to an everyday computing device.

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Architectural

mjb2kmn 🤔

How did "sandbox" come to mean something isolated and controlled? Who coined this term? Have they ever seen children playing in a sandbox?

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Devoops

What is the German word for: "It only works when I try to show you how it does not work"? TIL

The word is "Vorführeffekt", which translates to "presentation effect". It's used in both cases. Something works fine all the time until you show it your boss / parents / friends. Or something broken magically works again when you are showing it the technician.

kvlly 😳

'twas the night before launch day
and all through the app
not a thing was working
so much for my nap

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Teamwork

spikebrehm This is why middle management exists:

In my experience (n = 3), reporting to an executive is very much like not having a manager at all. They simply don't have the time or bandwidth for coaching. It puts more of a burden on the employee to self-manage and figure their own shit out. It's easy to feel unsupported.

ReinH 🤔

I've started saying this when helping teams define new processes:

We should expect that these rules will be broken in healthy and adaptive ways, and we can learn a lot by examining this normal and natural rule breaking behavior, rather than attempting to punish or prohibit it.

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Techtopia

bratterz And the gold medal goes to Blizzard for this amazing display of mental gymnastics:

Blizzard frantically spinning the orc statue outside the main entrance, hoping it’ll land on a company value that can explain away this mess: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/23185888/regarding-last-weekend-s-hearthstone-grandmasters-tournament

soledadobrien 🔥

I wish that just one corporate entity would just say, “look we get gobs of money from China, it’s an important market for us, and that is more important than any values we pretend to hold.”

At least you’d have to give points for honesty.

monteiro Facebook isn't interested in democracy. 👇 Thread:

“…if a claim is made directly by a politician on their Page, in an ad or on their website, it is considered direct speech and ineligible for our third-party fact checking program.” https://boingboing.net/2019/10/11/facebook-and-twitter-say-they.html

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Locked Doors

macOS 10.15 Vista 😭 We used to laugh at Windows for building the most annoying UI instead of a better security architecture. Well …

Ken Thompson's Unix password Cracking passwords for fun and historical lessons.

manuelkiessling "unintentionally"

I guess all my fellow developers can relate to this - when you stumble on the way back from lunch, your arm hits a lot of keys on the keyboard, and voilá, you've unintentionally written and deployed a service that matches account mail addresses with advertiser's mailing lists.

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None of the Above

timsneath “You are NOT just a number. In fact, your value cannot be defined. ”

kathyra_ 😂

when we die i hope they show us cool stats. like how much time we spent in meetings that could have been slack messages, or googling things for people that could have googled it themselves

engineering_bae There's no risk in trying:

Job hunt tip: even if you don’t meet all of the criteria, still apply.

If you make an impression on the team, they may open a position just for you or hire you into the original position if they think you’re strong enough.

Rainmaker1973 “This 29.5 by 7 meter wide wall LED display has been recently installed at the Nexen University, Magok R&D Center lobby in Seoul, South Korea”

CNRush 🔥

I’m tired of y’all continuing to lie about who is working in fast food.

“The typical burger-flipper is an independent adult of about 29, with a high school diploma. Nearly a third have some college experience, and many are single parents raising families on $9 an hour.”

HelenYoung16 Part of Extinction Rebellion. Still the replies to this tweet are funny:

It's an eventful day at work. A guy has glued himself on top of a plane at London City Airport just across from me. #londoncityairport

Andy Rubin’s New Phone Thing Isn’t Just a New Phone Thing Glad to see tech journalism evolved from uncritically covering shiny objects to understanding the human toll:

In that earlier era, tech enthusiasts and journalists would have no reason not to take that statement at face value—to give the unabashed benefit of the doubt that this shiny, colorful object and new user interface might usher in a new phase of mobile computing. …

But if you happened to scroll through Rubin’s timeline, you’d see that his most recent prior tweets, from October 25, 2018, were in response to a thoroughly reported New York Times article. The story chronicled the sexual misconduct allegations made against Rubin during his time at Google, which Google reportedly investigated and found credible. …

dsquintana “Rabbits love getting stroked on their nose”

The Rise and Fall of Democracy(.com) Well, there's a metaphor for you:

The domain name Democracy.com is being auctioned off this month, and it can be yours for a hefty price. The bidding, hosted by Heritage Auctions, which specializes in the sale of collectibles, begins at $300,000 and closes at 5 p.m. on Oct. 25.

bedwardstiek 👇 This is what monopolies do:

Hello everyone who's mystified by all the blackout posts coming from California's #Powerpocalypse , here's an explainer thread:

Supreme Court hands victory to blind man who sued Domino’s over site accessibility Good news. ADA is here to stay.

“The blind and visually impaired must have access to websites and apps to fully and equally participate in modern society - something nobody disputes,” he said. “This outcome furthers that critical objective for them and is a credit to our society.”

The best Untitled Goose Game memes So that explains the random goose sightings in my timeline.

Meriel “This is amazing! Look at the last one!”

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Design Objective

The Subtle Technique Mailchimp Uses to Emotionally Hook Customers Outcome selling vs feature selling:

Here’s what Outcome-Selling basically means: Don’t sell your product. Sell the best possible outcome that a customer can get from using your product. What can be achieved if your product is used to its potential.

The outcome of Tinder is not the hundreds of people I swipe, but the possibility of meeting someone special. (Please Susan, wherever you are. I’m waiting.)

---

Tools of the Trade

Julie 👍 How to build anything:

My design process is: me thinking for days about what I'm gonna do and finally doing it in 13 minutes and 42 seconds between two bathroom breaks.

allisongrayce … anything that matters:

Me in my 20s: but that corner radius isn’t quite right

Me in my 30s: Literally no one cares. Just get that shit out & see if anyone even uses it

Jenny Shen … to other people and to yourself …:

In my 20's:
⭐️I shipped/wrote/created a thing!
⭐️I'm starting this project!
⭐️I joined this cool thing!

In my 30's:
🧐 What problem will it solve and is it the right problem?
🧐 What's the impact this thing is going to have?
🧐 What value am I gonna get from my involvement?

Dates, Times, Calendars— The Universal Source of Data Science Trauma “A list of most of the major crazies out there, and survival tips”

Lucas Pardue “Cache invalidation is hard.”

---

Lines of Code

Kelly Vaughn Does this move take place in the Marvel or DC universe?

I'd love to watch a movie where programming is accurately depicted.

A team is trying to quickly build an app that will save the world. The app won't compile. Someone keeps adding to the scope. The project manager is asking for an update every 15 minutes.

Code Glitch Art Dress Generator “Get your open source code turned into cool looking glitch-art dress, with pockets!”

---

Architectural

James Tucker Outside perspective is useful to a point:

Periodic reminder: getting architecture or pattern advice from contractors is biased - they generally don't maintain what they write for the long term, and sounding good is part of their job.

---

Peopleware

Auren Hoffman 👇 Explainer of written interviews:

1/ Written interviews can help companies better hire thoughtful people.

As an interviewer, my goal is not to hear the first answer … I prefer to hear the candidate’s best answer.

To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight By analogy, our brain puts on headphones in an open office:

In effect, the network was turning the knobs on inhibitory processes, not excitatory ones, with the TRN inhibiting information that the prefrontal cortex deemed distracting.

---

Teamwork

Scott Belsky I'm a big fan of smaller/focused teams:

the benefits of preserving the intimacy of high performing teams - and the proximity of great product leaders to product, exceed the costs of slower scaling.

David Mimno Me too! That could be entertaining and informative!

TV people: why do all reality shows involve elimination? I want to watch a show called “Onboarding” where two teams compete and must accommodate one new member each week

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Techtopia

Jared Yates Sexton For context, read the transcripts:

Tells you everything you need to know about Facebook and Big Tech that they’re unworried about election tampering, fascists harnessing their tools, and endangerment of users but are actively terrified and mobilizing against Elizabeth Warren, who might challenge their monopolies.

Elizabeth Warren This in a nutshell is the policy that got Zuckerberg scared:

Imagine Facebook and Instagram trying to outdo each other to protect your privacy and keep misinformation out of your feed, instead of working together to sell your data, inundate you with misinformation, and undermine our election security. That's why we need to #BreakUpBigTech.

Termyotter I'm going to binge watch this show like there's no tomorrow:

I want a program called "Clear Eye for the Tech Guy"

In the program 5 obviously weary people listen to tech bros pitch their new "disruptive" ideas and explain to them how they've just invented something that's already been done.

Tell me this wouldn't be fun to watch.

---

Business Plan

Ryan Reeves 👇 Thread:

Costco is a fascinating business.

You know all those groceries you buy?

Yeah, they basically sell those at breakeven and then make all of their profit from the $60 annual membership fees.

At What Point Does Malfeasance Become Fraud? The cost of WeWork's collapse …

We’re probably talking about several thousand people who were going to be millionaires. Now most of them are probably thinking that in the next 30 days there’s a one-in-two chance I don’t have health insurance. You want to talk about the sheer human toll? The notion that Adam Neumann was fired? My God, he got on the last helicopter out of Saigon.

Gross Domestic Product: Banksy’s New Homewares Store Banksy opens a storefront … not a store … to settle a legal dispute with a greeting card company:

GDP is the homewares brand from Banksy and this is our first and only
store. The showroom is for display purposes only and the doors will not
open. All sales will be conducted online when the website opens soon.

This shop has come about as a result of legal action. A greeting cards
company are trying to sieze legal custody of the name Banksy from
the artist, who has been advised the best way to prevent this is to sell
his own range of branded merchandise.

---

Locked Doors

Kurt Opsahl Context is important …

Context is important in when considering the FBI's claim of "going dark" due to encryption while in the Golden Age of Surveillance. These numbers show it's about mass surveillance, scanning all the messages, not targeted surveillance, with a warrant.

Ryan Singel: There were 1,457 federal criminal wiretaps in 2018.

74 federal wiretaps were reported as being encrypted in 2018, of which 58 could not be decrypted.

Legit-Looking iPhone Lightning Cables That Hack You Will Be Mass Produced and Sold And it looks just like the real things:

It charges phones and transfers data in the same way an Apple cable does, but it also contains a wireless hotspot that a hacker can connect to. Once they've done that, a hacker can run commands on the computer, potentially rummaging through a victim's files, for instance.

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None of the Above

Mr. Meowgi “When you finally figure out why your floor is always wet”

AndrewWrites 😭

iOS 13 will be released every day until morale improves

Best of Nextdoor “Nextdoor in two posts:”

Sumanth 🔥

Don't ask me to back up my opinions with data, this is Twitter. I didn't even read the article we're talking about.

NickPitarra “This is the clearest explanation of #ToxicFandom I’ve ever heard.” This is so true in so many contexts, and debates in the software industry are no exception:

Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge … you can form an opinion with little or no actual information, and then you can go around and spout it off as if it's a real fact, when it's nothing more than theory/conjunction/assumption … real knowledge is not information, it take a matter of information and experience together that makes real knowledge

The Military Origins of Layering So apparently not invented in San Francisco:

The designers intended the jacket to be used as the outer shell in different climates around the world—global outerwear for global war. In extreme cold, a soldier would pair the M-43 with multiple thin layers underneath. In warmer climates, he (the jacket was designed for men’s bodies) could keep the outer shell but peel off the other layers.

Dogs are the best people “The only sport that matters”

Dogs In Action Amazing photo collection! (via greywulf)

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Design Objective

Cheat sheets: UI terms 👍 Super helpful:

Using professional UI terms aligns with the efficiency and accuracy of communicating your thoughts in a cross-functional team. It benefits you as a product designer in various aspects.
However, It is time-consuming of looking at different guidelines. Thus I decided to compile them into one place (UITerms Sheets). The sheet will give you a bigger picture of the UI terms in product development.

Patrick Neeman 💯

I find it amusing when heads of product or design are asked “what are you going to do to make the UX better?”

The biggest barrier to good UX in most organizations is tech debt. If there a lot of it, improving the UX is a difficult proposition.

What Makes For a Good Product Manager? “Founder’s Feel” is the one thing that's hardest to hire for:

The most effective product teams are those where the leads on Product, Design, and Engineering (and sometimes other functions like marketing, customer service, and data science) are all mutually bought in to being experts at understanding the vision, the customer, and have shared ownership of the outcome. This means that a Product Manager should often defer to Engineering or Design when key decisions need to be made, specifically when those other functions are better fit to make those decisions. And that’s often the case! I would argue that a great PM also shows “Founder’s Feel” by referring to the right person in the room to make the decision.

Alex For context, ok as time spent, makes no sense as skill level:

Designers,

■■■■■■■ please
■■■■ stop
■■■■■■■■■ using
■■ charts
■■■■■ to show
■■■■■■■ your skills
■■■■ in your
■■■■■■■ resume

---

Tools of the Trade

Text Rendering Hates You Random collection of weird problems you need to deal with when rendering text.

foone 👇 This thread goes in unexpected directions:

So if you want to use a USB floppy drive, you use a USB protocol called the UFI: Uniform Floppy Interface.

What's UFI? A way to embed ATAPI commands in USB.
What's ATAPI? A way to embed SCSI commands in ATA.
What's SCSI? A mass storage protocol. Floppy drives don't use it.

Tomek Sułkowski So basically a modern day defrag?

"npkill" is a nifty little tool that shows all node_modules in your system - and allows to remove the selected ones.

You can quickly free up some serious gigs by taking care of the old/demo projects!

Jason Yip 👇This:

1. Original source expresses something;
2. Cargo cultists practice without understanding;
3. Observer assumes cargo cult practice reflects original intent;
4. A new approach is proposed that corrects the problems that is just repeating the original source;
5. Go to 1.

git-blame-someone-else “Blame someone else for your bad code.”

---

Web-end

Tomek Sułkowski “That feeling when you first discovered document.designMode”

Kitze “webdev in a nutshell”

---

Lines of Code

Nick Canzoneri Always …

Always nice to see honest variable names like HALF_HEARTED_EMAIL_REGEX

Ondatra iSchoolicus Some days Twitter is amazing:

When you finish a PhD in computer science, they take you to a special room and explain that you must never use recursion in real life. Its only purpose is to make programming hard for undergrads.

RT Brendan O'Connor When you finish a PhD in computer science, they take you to a special room and explain that you must never use recursion in real life. Its only purpose is to make programming hard for undergrads.

RT Zoe When you finish a PhD in computer science …

/jojojoris “The counter was reset today, we were almost into the double digits”

---

Architectural

How Architecture Improved My Coding Skills Lessons learned from looking at the bigger picture:

This is the biggest change. Early on in my dev career I assumed that the best way to prove my abilities was to get my task and complete it. Yet over time I've learned that the biggest source of failure is often due to people and teams. A lack of communication and coordination can cause serious problems.

---

Teamwork

How to Make Meetings Less Terrible TL;DR Better agendas, smaller invite lists, and an embrace of healthy conflict:

One startling meeting fact that Rogelberg shares: 50% of meeting agendas are recycled. “When you are thinking about your agenda,” he says, “consider framing it not as topics to be discussed but as questions to be answered. By framing it as questions to be answered, it’s easier to determine who needs to be there.”

Product Team Mistakes, Part 1: Communicating Company & User Needs Applies to anyone who makes changes to the product:

Whatever you think about splitting up roles within a product team, most people agree that understanding and explaining the business side of a product is more the PM’s job than the designer’s. If they don’t understand the business or if they’re not sharing it in a way that helps everyone know what is being built, that’s a pretty serious problem. Still, let’s not let designers off the hook here. Everybody making changes to the product should understand the business needs, but it sounds like there are quite a few folks out there who don’t.

What do executives do, anyway? Good summary, that also tackles smaller companies:

Also, in a small company, strategy and values are usually not well defined yet, so a primary goal is to discover them incrementally. You learn from mistakes and refine together until the strategy (and thus the values that will produce the strategy) become clear.

---

Startup Life

Aaron Levie All true:

Almost everything I've learned about startups:

• Aim to get to cash flow positive early
• Don't overly optimize for private market valuations
• Build a great team and culture
• Make sure the business model works
• Focus, focus, focus. Dilution of effort will crush you

Rob Walling Consistency.

The founders I see succeeding show up every day. Even when they don't feel like it.

Many hack their own psychology using coffee, loud music, an accountability partner, or self-imposed goals.

It's not about working long hours. It's about showing up consistently.

Roof’s Take: When Does It Make Sense to Oust a Founder? TL;DR VCs consider it only as last resort:

Some venture firms, including Founders Fund, say that they will never do it. Last year, for example, the firm opted to relinquish its board seat at HQ Trivia rather than choose between feuding founders.

Benchmark, on the other hand, held board seats at both WeWork and Uber at the time of their CEO departures. In the case of Uber, Benchmark pressured then-CEO Mr. Kalanick to resign.

---

Locked Doors

ipwndfu Based on the checkm8 bootrom exploit, can jailbreak iPhone 4S (A5 chip) to iPhone 8/X (A11 chip). From Trail of Bits:

We strongly urge all journalists, activists, and politicians to upgrade to an iPhone that was released in the past two years with an A12 or higher CPU. All other devices, including models that are still sold — like the iPhone 8, are vulnerable to this exploit.

Alex Stamos 👇 Thread if you want more insight into the CLOUD ACT:

So anyway, the CLOUD Act is controversial in some ways but absolutely does not do what The Times and Bloomberg assumed. The fight over encryption continues, but the US/UK agreement hopefully reduces some of the pressure by giving UK LE the same options as US LE.

André Staltz 🔥

2009: uploading my data to the cloud because I don't trust my computer

2019: downloading my data to my computer because I don't trust the cloud

Pulp Librarian 👇 Pulp Librarian looks at … The Masked Hacker:

If stock photography has taught us one thing it's how to recognise a hacker! But how much do we really know about these shady characters, with their balaclava and their Windows 7 laptops?

For today's #SundayMotivation here's my essential stock photography guide to #cybersecurity

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Techtopia

Standard Cognition to deploy cashierless tech at Polar Stadium It can also detect shoplifters based on … not making this up:

It’s also capable of preventing shoplifting. Standard Cognition’s AI algorithms can recognize telltale signs of theft from behaviors like trajectory, gait, gaze, and speed, all of which it helpfully flags via text message for store attendants. Learning those behaviors wasn’t easy — the bulk of sample data came from 100 actors who shopped for “hours” in a mock setup — but the result is an accuracy rate that’s above 99%.

Ben Schwarz “Add to list of things I never thought my projector would say”

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None of the Above

brando “I didn’t know I needed this video till now”

Chuck Wendig Every morning I wake up to an unjust universe:

The fact that one must make coffee without having first had coffee is proof we live in an unjust, chaotic universe.

Chloe Condon (don't tell anyone, I got about 72 tabs open right now)

I like my coffee like I like my browser tabs:

An excessive amount to the point where it causes me mild anxiety ☕ 😬

Alex Cornell ☕️ Does anyone sense a theme?

Excited and humbled to announce my $4 investment in espresso this morning. Proud to be a part of such an incredible journey 🙌

Christoph Niemann “My cover for this weeks tech issue of The @NewYorker”

Thomas Limoncelli 🤔

TIL: expense reports are PRs for money

nicole_pumpkins 👀

If you were the type of child that hoarded stickers because you couldn't commit to sticking them onto something and not be able to remove them in one piece.. congrats, your now an anxious adult!

Octopus Dreaming “Watch the brilliant color changes of a sleeping octopus that indicates she may be dreaming.”

Robin Houston 👇 Thread on the cultural history of this pangram:

This tweet contains exactly four As, one B, three Cs, two Ds, thirty-two Es, six Fs, one G, five Hs, twelve Is, one J, one K, three Ls, one M, twenty-one Ns, sixteen Os, one P, one Q, five Rs, twenty-five Ss, twenty-one Ts, two Us, seven Vs, nine Ws, five Xs, six Ys, and one Z.

How aviation watchdog’s secret airline rescued stranded Thomas Cook tourists Fascinating!

“We had to put together a secret airline, with nobody else noticing, to be ready from the off,” said CAA chief executive Richard Moriarty. “You don’t actually know until the directors decide there is no hope and they file for insolvency.

“What you really don’t want to do is precipitate failure. You have no idea how much we torture ourself on a simple question: how on earth do you hide 45 planes?”

Company That Provides Tech to ICE Not Renewing Contract After Code-Deletion Protest Direct action works.

Catalin Cimpanu “Every time I visit the dark web...”

divinetechygirl “And then there’s this accurate depiction of everything tech twitter 😂”

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Design Objective

Mind the gap, user centered design in large organizations with Luke Wroblewski Why most "user-centered" design isn't, and how we can address that. (Slides)

Chris Owens Copy is UI:

"Note: Hiding a shared mailbox from address list will make it impossible for new shared mailbox members to add the hidden mailbox to their Outlook profile until the shared mailbox is again shown in the address list."

Honestly, I have more questions now than when I started.

Ha Phan You need to think deeper:

Good research doesn’t necessarily translate to good product. A novice will mistaken an extensibility problem for a need for new features or new product. Adding features without a plan to scale the system or connect the dots with data is essentially multiplying UX debt.

Jason Lemkin Related:

The customer that always complains, it's annoying.
But that probably means they care. And will renew.
The customer that has never complained in years, but is complaining now ...
That means it's a real issue.
Fix it now.
They are already looking for another vendor.

Katerina Borodina 🌖🌗🌘

the only reason the day/night cycle exists is because god said "let there be light" and developers said "where's dark mode"

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Tools of the Trade

Gabriele Petronella 🤖 These robot overlords aren't all bad:

So this just happened:

• a bot found a vulnerability in a dependency
• a bot sent a PR to fix it
• the CI verified the PR
• a bot merged it
• a bot celebrated the merge with a GIF

Marcin Wichary 👇 This thread brings back memories:

I’m glad you decided to join me on this impromptu tour of a somewhat forgotten era of computing: the time when Screens Were Expensive – and so computers had no choice but to use smaller screens, small screens, and even ridiculously tiny screens.

---

Lines of Code

Ben Orenstein 👇 Thread:

Most commit messages are next to useless because they focus on WHAT was done instead of WHY.

This is exactly the wrong thing to focus on.

You can always reconstruct what changes a commit contains, but it's near impossible to unearth the reason it was done.

Michael Feathers I think that's correct:

I think it's good to resurrect the term "unit test." Sure, people will ask what a unit is, but unit testing gives us an answer:

- a 'unit' is whatever we can test in complete isolation without pain.

Matt Pennig 😱

Once a year, for 12 hours (7a-7p), any Pull Request will be accepted without any review whatsoever. All tech debt is legal.

Introducing: The Merge

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Architectural

my engineering standards How do you codify when your software is good enough? Rich runs through a list of items, similar to what we're using at Broadly:

…

• Work was ordered to eliminate risks instead of making linear progress.
  Where possible it was built from standard technologies.
• There is sufficient instrumentation that the system is considered observable, especially in times out outage.
• It was shipped in many small releases rather than one bigger release.

…

Ryan Singer I feel like a broken record saying this, but always use the tools that are right for your project/product/company size:

This is part of a broader mistake. Small companies copy big companies. Big companies have different problems than small companies and pay extra costs to solve them. Small companies should copy what big companies did WHEN THEY WERE SMALL.

For example:

Here's another example: maintaining feature flags. Small companies don't need to do this. It's not worth the overhead. Just don't merge to master until you want a customer to see it. We don't use them at Basecamp. Only massive companies with lots of parallel projects need them.

Dan Saffer “It’s just a minor UI change.”

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Devoops

agentdero Honest job posting be like …

Let's call it what it really is.

I'm officially hiring a Senior YAML Engineer to help us migrate our infrastructure into AWS.

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Teamwork

Andrew Clay Shafer 😭

everyone believes collaboration means doing things their way

FLEEKNIK It does …

nobody tells you that success requires so many emails.

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None of the Above

The Tylt “IT'S NOT SEPTEMBER UNTIL EARTH, WIND AND FIRE SAY SO”

Naama 😭

My dad just realized that the apartment his unmarried aunt has been living in for the past 20 years with her "best friend" Irene has one bedroom.

He's so confused.

"Does Irene sleep on the couch? She's 83! She shouldn't be sleeping on the couch!"

I'm......

dopegirlfresh 😴

i just woke up but i need a nap: a memoir.

Auckland adman hires professional clown for redundancy meeting That is one creative way to get fired:

In lieu of the usual suspects of a friend, colleague or family member, the member of the creative team at FCB hired a professional clown to attend the meeting with him.

The Herald understands that the clown blew up balloons and folded them into a series of animals throughout the meeting.

It's further understood that the clown mimed crying when the redundancy paperwork was handed over to the staffer.

The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving Re-classifying chess as an athletic sport:

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters' stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

Dana Schwartz 🔥

There should be a reality show where we all have to try to explain this news story to our parents

Jared Holt Disgraced far-right speaker Milo Yiannopoulous bought a ticket to a furry convention in December. Other attendees are predictably upset and the conference announced it was investigating its options.

'Everyone Should Have a Moral Code' Says Developer Who Deleted Code Sold to ICE My Twitter feed is debating whether that was the right action, but he took a stand, and to me that matters more:

"I was having trouble sleeping at night knowing that software—code that I personally authored—was being sold to and used by such a vile organization," he told Motherboard in an online chat. "I could not be complicit in enabling what I consider to be acts of evil and violations of our most basic human rights."

That's when he decided to delete the Chef Sugar code from his own Github and RubyGems, the main method for distributing Ruby code.

Daniel Sinclair “The AR future we deserve”