Labnotes

Galit Ariel "Because – Tuesday."

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Design Objective

The Design Process of “Why Do Cats & Dogs ...?” A long and thorough read, exploring the visualization of related search terms.

Mitch Goldstein What about the prequels?

Graphic Designer
Product Designer
Interaction Designer
Web Designer
Digital Designer
UX Designer
Design: Ragnarok
Episode VII: The Designer Awakens
2 Graphic 2 Design
The Lord of the Fonts
Designers: Infinity War
The Designer Identity
Digital Designer & the Prisoner of Azkaban

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Tools of the Trade

Up to 20% of your application dependencies may be unmaintained This number feels like it's on the low end, I venture to guess closer to 80%. But not the point. Tidelift's business model is selling maintenance contracts to businesses, and using that money to pay open source developers to maintain their codebase. Different from Gitpay. I hope both work out, and we find a sustainable model for open source development.

Matt Galligan It works! Maybe QR codes are useful after all …

First time seeing a QR code to join a guest WiFi network w/ a password at an office. Worked great on both my iPhone and iPad…had no idea this capability existed!

Found this generator for WiFi-specific QR code. Could be useful: www.qifi.org

Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old As a child of the 70's, I find these top-of-the-line computers fascinating. Back then, massive boards with blinking lights were both science fiction, and the cutting edge. Also, Mythical Man-Month.

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Web-end

Nathan Froyd I can't even …

"...the user agent string for the latest Dev Channel build of Microsoft Edge: "... Edg/74.1.96.24" We’ve selected the “Edg” token to avoid compatibility issues that may be caused by using the string “Edge,”..."

We are now deliberately misspelling words in the User-Agent string.

Rob Dodson Have you noticed it as well?

The thing about position: sticky is that it only works in articles which explain how to use position: sticky.

Lynn Fisher This thread full of awesome CSS looping videos …

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Lingua Scripta

Jordan Scalesz "Friendly reminder that "o_o" is a valid identifier in JavaScript if you want little buddies to watch over your functions"

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Architectural

Jeff Atwood True!

Of all the technical debt you can incur, the worst in my experience is bad names -- for database columns, variables, functions, etc. Fix those IMMEDIATELY before they metastasize all over your codebase and become extremely painful to fix later.. and they always do.

Software Maintenance, Understanding the 4 Types Not all software maintenance is the same, and it helps to know the difference:

Every time that you make changes to a software system, it is essential to identify the type of maintenance that you are performing. Keeping track of it gives excellent insights into your engineering practices. For example, the percentage of time that you spend in each of the four maintenance types gives you an idea of the maturity and skill level of your software engineering organization. It can also give you an idea of the maturity level of your product and codebase.

Reconciling GraphQL and Thrift at Airbnb So long REST, and thanks for all the fish.

Vallery Lancey The infinite cycle:

XKCD "Sandboxing Cycle" is an evergreen slide when talking about abstraction layers.

It's not just security... abstractions are inherently leaky, which means sometimes you want to access the layers below, which voids many of the benefits of the abstraction.

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Locked Doors

Colm MacCárthaigh Patching in production, a thread:

I think right around this minute is just about exactly 5 years since the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL became public. I remember the day vividly, and if you're interested, allow me to tell you about how the day, and the subsequent months, and years unfolded ...

Kevin2600 "Perfect Social engineer example. Happy hacking 🤓"

Facebook Boots 74 Cybercrime Groups From Platform This is what happens to your meme data:

Researchers said a simple search on Facebook for keywords like “spam,” “CVV” or more returned results for a slew of groups carrying out these illegal services. In total, the groups had approximately 385,000 members – and some had been up on Facebook for as long as eight years, researchers said.

And, of course, the algorithm:

Ironically, when researchers joined some of these groups, Facebook’s algorithm suggested that they join other groups promoting illicit activity under its “Suggested Pages” tab.

Evan Osnos Lovely security "feature" in older iOS:

Uh, this looks fake but, alas, it’s our iPad today after 3-year-old tried (repeatedly) to unlock. Ideas?

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None of the Above

Nature News & Comment "Dr. Katie Bouman, who led the creation of an algorithm that helped capture the first ever image of a black hole, tells us what this breakthrough means for science 👩‍🔬 #EHTBlackHole #BlackHole"

How to make sense of the black hole image We have turned the entire Earth into one giant telescope!

Ronan Farrow "Ah yes, the classic homeowner’s problem of checks notes bees paying off your mortgage."

What happened when Oslo decided to make its downtown basically car-free? Don't worry. It turned out for the best.

A couple of decades ago, it was perfectly normal to smoke cigarettes inside. Today, very few would do that. I think it’s the same with cars in the city center: One day we will look back and ask ourselves why we ever thought that was a good idea.

Shockingly Good Smartphones You Can Get for $350 or Less Let that video be a cautionary tale about removing your phone battery.

Luuuda You can never be too prepared:

A couple years ago in central park I saw a lady on her phone looking panicked and I overheard her say “ok what we need to do is run a chi-squared test immediately!”

I still think about that emergency chi-squared test

Ana Oppenheim "My German might be very basic but this headline is hard to disagree with"

Seth Masket "Oh, honey."

The Hill Switzerland's highest court overturns referendum for first time ever after finding voters were poorly informed

The Guardian’s nifty old-article trick is a reminder of how news organizations can use metadata to limit misinformation Simple tech tricks that can help combat misinformation.

The key to glorifying a questionable diet? Be a tech bro and call it ‘biohacking.’ Not mincing words:

It's fascinating to watch the language of food consumption mutate as it travels across genders. For decades, "dieting" was the domain of women. It looked like Weight Watchers, it looked like Snackwells, it looked like South Beach, but whatever it looked like, it was always portrayed as something simultaneously necessary, shameful, pride-inducing, hated and ever-present.

The term became a victim of “gender contamination,” as Amanda Mull wrote in the Atlantic — which is “when a product or idea becomes so female-coded that men are no longer willing to engage with it.”

Instead men — and the companies that cater to them — found new ways to describe food restriction. Not “weight loss” but “performance-enhancing.” Not “look great” but “perform better.”

Mashable "These sculptures are not what they seem"

dracomallfoys "actors in period costumes behind the scenes with modern technology will never fail to be the funniest thing"

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Design Objective

Everything you need to know about Loading Animations I love the creative animations in this article.

Joe Schmoe Get an avatar from a link. Try https://joeschmoe.io/api/v1/jess.

Mistakes, we’ve drawn a few The Economist learning from their errors in data visualisation. Important lessons there, because we're all bound to repeat these mistakes, even if we mean to do better.

Mark Dalgleish 🤔 oh, that's a good way to build awareness!

If a developer says they don't really care about design, change their editor theme to Hot Dog Stand.

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Tools of the Trade

The world’s first code-free sparkline typeface So simple and so useful, and will work with static HTML.

rvpanoz/luna "Luna - npm management through a modern UI 🌺"

The Illustrated Word2vec I still don't fully grok Word2vec, but I did learn a bunch from this article, enough to get started on a prototype.

terraform-provider-dominos When you provision new infastructure, and it's running late and you're hungry, and you end up ordering pizza …

data "dominos_store" "store" {
  address_url_object = "${data.dominos_address.addr.url_object}"
}

data "dominos_menu_item" "item" {
  store_id = "${data.dominos_store.store.store_id}"
  query_string = ["philly", "medium"]
}

resource "dominos_order" "order" {
  address_api_object = "${data.dominos_address.addr.api_object}"
  item_codes = ["${data.dominos_menu_item.item.matches.0.code}"]
  store_id = "${data.dominos_store.store.store_id}"
}

Dare Obasanjo "I was a tester for my first year at Microsoft. This reminds me a lot of that time 😆"

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Web-end

Thomas Wang This is a great concept for dealing with break points:

Keep things feeling snappy using a CSS media query breakpoint and transition!

transition: 0.8s cubic-bezier(0.2, 0.8, 0.2, 1) 👌

Ian Devlin And it's friend background: red:

Fancy browser developer tools are great and all, but border: 1px solid red; has helped me figure things out more often than I can remember.

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Lingua Scripta

jfet97/csp Communicating Sequential Processes in JavaScript using async and for-await-of.

Cassidy Williams The JavaScript life:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Unexpected token ',' on line 32

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Lines of Code

93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs I always suspected there's a relationship between Perl and LSD:

In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?

Storing UTC is Not a Silver Bullet TL;DR UTC is good for times past, but timezone changes make it less than ideal for future time:

Part of the point of writing this blog post is to raise awareness, so that even if people do still recommend storing UTC, they can add appropriate caveats rather than treating it as a universal silver bullet.

jwcarroll 👍

Alternative Big O notation:

O(1) = O(yeah)
O(log n) = O(nice)
O(n) = O(ok)
O(n²) = O(my)
O(2ⁿ) = O(no)
O(n!) = O(mg!)

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Architectural

Sahil Lavingia This is ballpark similar to our costs, and I imagine other startups as well:

The rough cost behind shipping a product like Gumroad:
Fixing a bug costs about $1,000-$5,000.
A small feature improvement costs about $2,000-$8,000.
Shipping a major feature like product ratings costs $60,000-$100,000.

Graham Lea 👇 The case that was NOT prematurely optimized:

So I applaud the simple code. The code that was based on a reasonable assumption, and continued working for years after that assumption was broken before it complained. And I applaud the developer that was mature enough to just write an O(MN) function cause it worked. It's #agile

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Peopleware

A Magician Explains Why We See What’s Not There Slight of hand is our brain constantly predicting what the future should be.

Nathan W. Pyle I can relate (used to freelance on and off):

me: it’s not that I mind freelancing, I love it. It’s just that the social interaction is pretty minimal and extremely uneven day-to-day and sometimes I wonder how that will affect me long term, you know?

barista: ok are you going to order

BBC - Future - Are we close to solving the puzzle of consciousness? TL;DR No. But this is an interesting read nonetheless, on our attempt to define what separates humans from lobsters:

From these axioms, Tononi proposes that we can identify a person’s (or an animal’s, or even a computer’s) consciousness from the level of “information integration” that is possible in the brain (or CPU). According to his theory, the more information that is shared and processed between many different components to contribute to that single experience, then the higher the level of consciousness.

Why the Human Mind Can Become More Motivated After Watching Cute Animal Videos According to science, I need to watch more cat videos on the internet. Something something baby schema something but who cares … science says so!

…it turns out that taking a break to view some cuteness might actually benefit your work there’s a lot we’re still learning but according to some research looking at cute animals is associated with a boost and focus and fine motor skills.

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Teamwork

How NOT to hire a software engineer Excellent article with beautiful illustrations:

Wrong directions? Delayed tickets? A questionnaire that requires installing the original Adobe Reader specifically? Cheap ultrabook with unfamiliar keyboard layout and poor web-based editor with no shortcuts whatsoever that lags even on a local machine? Excuse me, I am in the office of the most capable IT-company in the world, am I not?

Ron Jeffries Hrmmmm…

I may have invented story points. If I did, I am sorry now.

Assaf "Estimating story points"

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Locked Doors

@wiredferret That punch line 🥊

I’m so interested in all these people being shocked and appalled that AirB&B hosts don’t do good accessibility, or have secret webcams, or whatever.

You know this is why we have a regulated industry for lodging, right? It’s more expensive because fire alarm checks, insurance…

I prefer to deal with people who have been sued into minimum standards.

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Techtopia

Ben Cohen "This is the best text message interaction I’ve had in some time."

Dieter Bohn Oh no!

My Roomba has gone missing. It's not an outdoor Roomba either so I'm really worried about it.

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None of the Above

Iron Spike 👇 Such an interesting thread about Flemish art and its symbolism.

Hey, so.

Let's talk about one of the most misunderstood genres in European, specifically Flemish, art.

Molly White "I need this button for more than just my taxes"

Qasim Rashid, Esq. "If you need a reason to smile then remember that someone built a water slide for ducklings & they are totally here for it😃"

Bruno Martin 👇 Some borders are formed by nature, some borders are formed by laws:

1/ A vulture can fly up to 400 kilometres each day in search of carrion. Little should it care whether this flight takes it from one country to another. The vultures of Spain, however, skirt around the Portuguese border with uncanny accuracy.

potch Yes, please.

There should be a hotline you can call where you can safely pronounce words you've only ever read out loud for the first time, and they say "oh sweetie" and kindly explain how it's pronounced.

saac "Some mailman had a real fucked up day"

Julian Shapiro 💡 Great tip:

I had to stop reading business books. It's aggravating to read only 20 pages of insight that's spread across 400 pages of blatant filler.

The workaround?

Listen to the author's podcast appearances. They summarize the book for you.

Then Patreon them to give back :)

Mac William Bishop 👇 If Seinfeld was reporting at the Ecuadorean Embassy:

Hello Twitter. As you may have heard, WikiLeaks is asserting that Julian Assange will be forced to leave the Ecuadorean Embassy in London within “hours to days.”

Emily Grace Buck 💯

It’s really ridiculous that we expect adult femme game devs & members of other nerd professions to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Mario, Batman, & Star Wars, but dudes are rarely criticized for not knowing the names of the Babysitter’s Club members or Barbie’s younger sisters.

This man was the only passenger on a Boeing 737 to Italy That is what my dream flight looks like (plane would have flown with or without him).

When We Say 70 Percent, It Really Means 70 Percent 538 trying to explain how statistical probabilities work, what calibration is, how to judge the success of their models (*), and also stay patient with their critics. The last part, not so successfully:

If you say there’s a 29 percent chance of event X occurring when everyone else says 10 percent or 2 percent or simply never really entertains X as a possibility, your forecast should probably get credit rather than blame if the event actually happens. But let’s leave that aside for now.

(* They have been the most accurate source for predictions, if you understand the difference between "85% chance to win" and "guranteed win")

Scott Barolo 👇 This is how you review assorted gummy bears:

12 flavors? Let’s see what this is all about

This Week’s Mail Bombs Are No Surprise TIL about stochastic terrorism — individually random, but these days, statistically predictable. (h/t Dare Obasanjo):

In recent years, a term has begun to circulate to capture this phenomenon — “stochastic terrorism,” in which mass communications, including social media, inspire random acts of violence that according to one description “are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” In other words, every act and actor is different, and no one knows by whom or where an act will happen — but it’s a good bet that something will.

Brett S. Vergara "This is the best video I’ve ever seen oh my g—"

On the Hunt for Japan’s Elaborate, Colorful Manhole Covers Street art.

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Design Objective

How to simplify your design 👍 This article itself is well designed, with 21 illustrated examples and just the right amount of text.

Rules for Autocomplete If you're doing any work on autocomplete UI, this is a fantastic list:

• Exact matches always come first. If the user types in an option exactly, other options must always go below the one matching what they typed.
• Besides exact matches, prefix matches come first. If I type “Fr” I want “Fresno” not “San Francisco.”
• After prefix matches, it can fall back to substring matches. Starting with substring matches would almost always be the wrong thing to do since users start typing words at the beginning not somewhere in the middle.
  …

Speak Human "Generate human centric microcopy for all purposes."

Dawnstar Australis 🤔

I believe I just overheard a software bug being described as an "unexpected user story"

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Tools of the Trade

Announcing Lucet: Fastly’s native WebAssembly compiler and runtime The future of serverless is instant startup, and running code in the same metro area as the user:

Lucet is designed to take WebAssembly beyond the browser, and build a platform for faster, safer execution on Fastly’s edge cloud. WebAssembly is already supported by many languages including Rust, TypeScript, C, and C++, and many more have WebAssembly support in development.
…
Lucet can instantiate WebAssembly modules in under 50 microseconds, with just a few kilobytes of memory overhead. By comparison, Chromium’s V8 engine takes about 5 milliseconds, and tens of megabytes of memory overhead, to instantiate JavaScript or WebAssembly programs.

Karl Stratos Well, that explains it …

Request’s Past, Present and Future Good bye request. You did great for Node developers everywhere. 👋

Jeff Forcier I feel ya:

Also: examining old image files marked as 'wallpapers' which are almost literally postage stamp sized on a modern (not-even-HiDPI!) display is, uh.

It makes a body feel old, is what.

clean slate True, true:

[inserting row in excel]
Excel: copy font format from the row above?
Me: no I’ll handle it
Excel: and copy border from below?
Me: no why?
Excel: idk :/
Me: *typing number* w-why did you make 31,320 a date?
Excel: it’s my birthday :)

Samsung just unveiled the widest computer monitor you can buy Apropos Excel, you can now view spreadsheets thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis wide!

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Web-end

Nicolas Goutay 👇 Web Performance metrics explained in a single tweet each. Good, quick reference.

amy nguyen "this whole interaction is why i am still on twitter"

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Lines of Code

Sindre Sorhus I support this linting rule:

The prevent-abbreviations rule encourages you to write variable names like error instead of err and event instead of e. Of course, all of this is configurable. You can even use it as a general variable name blocker/replaces. Default replacements: https://github.com/sindresorhus/eslint-plugin-unicorn/blob/2f8f3d38e1c8058ac9bacb8bc318a66cda006307/rules/prevent-abbreviations.js#L17-L172

In the end, the biggest time efficiency happens between the ears:

The "writing" part of the code should not be the constraint. I personally spend much more time thinking about code than writing.

Jason Karns 😭 (the responses are funny as well)

Bought a mechanical keyboard with more resistance so my code will be strongly typed.

Sebastian McKenzie I'm going on 30 years …

This has been my debugging strategy for the past 10 years and I don't see it changing

Meowlivia_ How to ace a job interview:

Interviewer: Tell me about a time when you had to solve a difficult problem

Me: I had a bug in my code and couldn't find any helpful answers on stackoverflow. I persevered and eventually found the solution from a link on the second page of Google search

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Architectural

Kent Beck 👍 I couldn't agree more:

If there’s one lesson I would like the next generation of developers to learn, it is to spend less time doing hard things and more time making hard things easy. Customers benefit from the former. Customers and peers and we ourselves benefit from the latter.

Aaron Patterson The Big Sort:

I like to take bad code, mix it with good code, turn it in to AAA rated technical debt, then sell insurance on the debt

cyberglot "most tech discussions in a nutshell"

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Teamwork

Sophie Alpert How is that not "a product team"? Product needs ops and infrastructure to work, roadmaps and design specs by themselves don't deliver value to customers.

anyone have a good name for the combined roles of

• software engineering
• product design
• UX research
• product management?

“eng” sounds like just coders; “product” can sound like PM only (and excludes infra work).

“tech”? something else?

On second thought, this is a much better name jimthe.dev:

A group of these people is called a Jira.

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None of the Above

Katie Mack "#TimeManagement"

Kimberly Blessing ☎️ This is the friendly thing to do:

I practically weep anytime anyone uses the one tap format (DIAL-IN,,CODE#) in a calendar invite.

TrinaCharlotte "I hate everything"

sophy wong "My new USB cable from @adafruit is reversible on BOTH ENDS! I could do this all day!"

Your AirPods Will Die Soon "The surprisingly short life of new electronic devices" Mine barely hold charges, and incidentally, started failing a week before Apple announced the 2nd generation AirPods 😤

The first iPhone prototype A look at Apple’s red M68.

The New Social Network That Isn’t New at All The NYT predicts personal email lists making a comeback. I certainly hope so, Weekend Reading readers. Meanwhile, Google wants to make email interactive.

Scientists rise up against statistical significance A must read for anyone doing research, whether into medical treatment or A/B testing link colors. Using P < 0.05 as a pass/fail test can easily lead to the wrong conclusion:

It is ludicrous to conclude that the statistically non-significant results showed “no association”, when the interval estimate included serious risk increases; it is equally absurd to claim these results were in contrast with the earlier results showing an identical observed effect.

There's no silver bullet, we need to be statistically literate:

Our call to retire statistical significance and to use confidence intervals as compatibility intervals is not a panacea. … But eradicating categorization will help to halt overconfident claims, unwarranted declarations of ‘no difference’ and absurd statements about ‘replication failure’ when the results from the original and replication studies are highly compatible.

Lizzie Swann Epic:

Me: Husband, please stop leaving empty wrappers on the kitchen surface. Husband:

hardmaru “Pongdrian”

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Design Objective

The Value of Inconvenient Design Take a cue from nature, and design your app with a healthy dose of friction:

But nature is the ultimate optimizer, having run an endless slate of A/B tests over billions of years at scale. And in nature, friction and inconvenience have stood the test of time. Not only do they remain in abundance, but they’ve proven themselves critical. Nature understands the power of friction while we have become blind to it.

Brigid Johnson ✓ Note to self:

Pro-tip: When naming a product always run it by urban dictionary. You learn so much.

Liam O "Just another day being Irish on the Internet"

Kyle Russell 👇 A thread for founders that don't come from an enterprise background:

Something technical founders often don't appreciate when building an enterprise tool for the first time is the extent to which companies outside of Silicon Valley/big cities generally buy technology as if they haven't only hired brilliant people

Pavel A. Samsonov Related:

All enterprise software competes with Excel.

All productivity software competes with emailing things to yourself.

John Cutler "I found it! I found it! I found the CUSTOMER! #agile ?"

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Tools of the Trade

Generate a Chart Image from URL Replacement for Google Charts API (RIP). Useful for adding charts to email, SMS, etc where you can't use client-side charting libraries.

Howard M. Lewis Ship 🛠 These are great for scripting APIs from the command line:

The triumvirate of httpie, jq, and gron are so useful in combination with each other if you ever touch JSON. And you do.

https://httpie.org/
https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

I know I've tweeted this before, but it's worth a reminder!

John Burn-Murdoch This is captivating. Also, you can use Observable to create your own bar chart race:

A “Bar Chart Race” animation showing the changing ranks of the 10 biggest cities in the world since 1500.

Fascinating to watch giant cities vanish after falling in conquests, and amazing that three UK cities were in the top 8 in the late 1800s.

ffsend Command line tool for using Firefox Send. Firefox Send is the easiest way to send files security, with end-to-end encryption and links that expire after a few days or downloads.

Why you shouldn't use Moment.js... A thoughtful analysis of moment.js and how it compares with date-fns, Joda, and friends. I agree with the main points: moment.js is hard to debug, the mutable API is a recipe for subtle bugs, and it's not particularly fast. It is a good choice, though, is you need some of its unique features or plugins.

Bringing black and white photos to life using Colourise.sg — a deep learning colouriser trained with old Singaporean photos Interesting:

To colourise black and white images, we employed a technique in deep learning known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). This comprises:

• A first neural network — a ‘generator’ — with many mathematical parameters (> 20 million) that tries to predict the colour values at different pixels in a black and white image, based on features in the image, and
• A second neural network — the ‘discriminator’ — that tries to identify if the generated colours are photo-realistic compared to the original coloured image.

Microsoft Teams gets inventive new conference call features to make Slack users jealous Absolutel jealous!

Microsoft has developed a way to mask out someone drawing on a physical whiteboard, allowing remote meeting members to still see the physical whiteboard when it’s in use. This works by using any regular webcam, and it will even capture the physical whiteboard and import it digitally into Microsoft Teams so remote workers can participate in meetings or the contents of the whiteboard can be archived for future use.

Brian Roemmele Moore's law is alive and well:

Apple AirPods H1 chip (SOCs) has the processing power of an iPhone 4—in each ear!

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Lines of Code

Elegance Explores what it means for code to be "elegant", by looking at a few game algorithms:

The workaround is certainly not elegant. “Look for an actor in this direction, twice” is not what I wanted to express. And yet it’s not a hack, either. The code above demonstrably does the correct thing in all cases, and is suitable as a permanent solution. It occupies that nebulous third category of “complete, but not pretty”.

tef of the author 🔥

programmers tend to read essays until they getting to the first line they disagree with and then tweet about it, like a compiler

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Architectural

Erik Wilde The "for hipsters" jab … probably true. The "enterprise-grade GraphQL management" is a thing that already exists, and one reason I'm currently looking at GraphQL. To me, GraphQL doesn't feel like ESB, more like early Rails "RESTful APIs": easy to get started, powerful if you need it to be.

GraphQL is ESB for hipsters. for now... it also is a new opportunity for companies to sell you heavyweight centralized GraphQL management. just wait for the "enterprise-grade GraphQL management" products to appear... there, i said it first!

Mark Dalgleish Funny because it's true.

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Peopleware

Chris Young Beware of long meetings in small rooms:

This is crazy. Study shoes three people in a conference room over 2 hours can result in a Co2 level that can impair cognitive functioning. Ie. If you’re making decisions at the end of the meeting, you’re mentally less qualified to do so.

Why are you not designing your day-to-day experience? I wouldn't design every moment, see benefits of friction, but I do see the appeal in applying design principles to various life tasks:

Look at the world around you with the eyes of a designer. Aren’t there too many pictures on your living room wall? Too many objects sitting on your desk? Too many apps on your phone home screen? Take a pass at every environment you interact with throughout your day and ask yourself the question: what can I eliminate from here to open up more breathing room for my eyes and brain?

Changelog "Work smart, not hard 💪

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Locked Doors

The unescape() room A game to test your XSS skills.

Firefox to add Tor Browser anti-fingerprinting technique called letterboxing It's amazing how sophisticated adtech has grown, in the race to extract the most money from advertisers:

Advertising networks often sniff certain browser features, such as the window size to create user profiles and track users as they resize their browser and move across new URLs and browser tabs.

Called "letterboxing," this new technique adds "gray spaces" to the sides of a web page when the user resizes the browser window.

Sebastian Bicchi "We don't take your security seriously. We really don't care that much." Hey Facebook …

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None of the Above

Santero "Best film I've seen in ages" #ParentOps

Elle Gato 😱

Me: I would like to go to sleep now
Brain: you can't
Me: why?
Brain: you haven't Done Enough
Me: done enough...what?
Brain: Enough
Me: enough what??
Brain: Enough. Just Enough. You have not Done Enough
Me: I'll do enough if you tell me enough what
Brain: You have not Done Enough

Geistlicherin 😭 "This hurt my feelings real bad"

kaye toal 😀

Every single episode of Queer Eye is like four of the fab five having a fun week doing makeovers and Bobby working 19 hours a day putting up drywall

Nathan W. Pyle I have a "no foreign transaction fees" credit card, and this is what happens when I try to use it while travelling outside the US.

Steven Cassidy 💌

The Patron Saint of copying people into emails is St Francis of a CC

Chris Owens "Is a router that "Works with Alexa" kind of like when all the headphones put "MP3 Compatible" on their packaging in the 2000's?"

Drive-Thru Workers Can Hear You Even When You Can't Hear Them Just a friendly reminder that the drive-thru is a hot mic. It's like Alexa, always listening. 🎙

RyansAverageLife Next time you feel like yelling at a computer, try this instead! (Watch this video with the sound on)

okay this is the funniest game I have ever played in my life

Facebook, Axios And NBC Paid This Guy To Whitewash Wikipedia Pages Masters of bureaucracy:

Sussman’s main strategy for convincing editors to make the changes his clients want is to cite as many tangentially related rules as possible (he is, after all, a lawyer). When that doesn’t work, though, his refusal to ever back down usually will.

He often replies to nearly every single bit of pushback with walls of text arguing his case. Trying to get through even a fraction of it is exhausting, and because Wikipedia editors are unpaid, there’s little motivation to continue dealing with Sussman’s arguments. So he usually gets his way.

Rob Hunt "I have exactly one iOS feature request." 👍

France’s EU minister names her cat ‘Brexit’ because ‘he meows loudly to be let out but won’t go through the door’ Troll level: 11.

رنا محمد TIL there’s an “oh snap” kitten

nathanwpylestrangeplanet Love this Instagram account and merch!

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Design Objective

Jared Spool 👇 Design is more than shapes and colors:

“The product’s design was excellent, but the product was buggy, so I couldn’t recommend it.”

This is used as an excuse for why design-led orgs don’t work.

Yet, that’s the heart of issue. A truly design-led org would focus on the user’s experience. Bugs are part of that.

Paul Ford 😭 "This just happened on my home screen and quarters started spraying out of my USB jack."

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Tools of the Trade

THANOS JS "Reduce the file size of your project down to 50%, by randomly deleting half of the files."

Using the iPad Pro as my development machine Using Mosh, Tmux, Docker, and other cool tricks that work around the limits of iOS, and can turn an iPad into an almost MacBook replacement. But the inevitable conclusion (also my experience):

I have decided that the iPad is the perfect mobile device for most of my work, but it can’t replace my main work devices (MacBook or iMac). I know it sounds cool to use the iPad as the main development machine, however, the constant limitations you’re hitting is just frustrating. I agree with most of the people out there that iOS is still limiting in several ways.

Axel Rauschmayer "Awesome! Chrome 73 lets you install Progressive Web Apps natively on macOS."

Jen Gentleman "Cannot unsee"

x

Justin Searls 😭

PSA: a lot of Ruby web apps have been hacked by the Russians. To find out if your site is infected, look for a config.ru file in the root directory of your app.

Can't believe they named the file that. Dead giveaway.

Kenn White "I meant merkle tree not merkel tree but thanks the chuckle, google"

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Web-end

Chet 🎂

30 years later... This morning a dusty but frisky Steve Jobs NeXTstation just started again and WorldWideWeb 1.0 Alpha build succeeded!!! Happy #Web30 Birthday @timberners_lee @CERN @webfoundation @jmhullot @bserlet

Brad Frost Reminder that things like account numbers and social security numbers aren't really numbers — use HTML appropriately:

Story time! Just got a call from my bank about a wire transfer. Everything seemed right except the last 3 digits of the account number.

Turns out they're using <input type="number"> for their account field, which means one up/down mouse swipe or keyboard changes the account # !

CVS Receipt Finally, a legitimate use for infinite scroll!

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Lines of Code

Emma Wedekind "Just a simple fix!"

💿 Sh*t Devs Say: Greatest Hits 💿

“We can get it done this sprint”
“Just pushed please approve: No need to review my newest changes”
“It’s not that hard”
“Sure, it’s accessible”
“I forgot to push”
“Who broke the tests?”

Joop Lammerts "I love this one! I'm going to print it and put on the wall as a reminder #DDDEU @maaretp"

Hakan Yuksel "developer test vs tester test"

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Architectural

Denise Yu 👇 Thread:

Just learned a real-world example of the cost of “meh, we can refactor this later”:

Japan is the only modernized country in the world to run on two independent electricity grids, by historical accident. When the 2011 tsunami happened, half the country was knocked off-grid...

Ben Burton 🍻 Beer scale!

A devops engineer walks into a bar, puts the bartender in a docker container, put kubernetes behind the bar, spins up 1000 bartenders, orders 1 beer.

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Peopleware

Eugenia Zuroski 💡 Brilliant!

I’ve decided, from now on, to field hostile questions at conferences by first asking, as a point of clarification: “What is it you hope to get from my answer to this question?”

At the very least, it may make these interactions more interesting.

Sarah Federman The goal of the interview process is to hire future employees, so do whatever to help the candidate succeed:

Unpopular tech opinion. There is always going to be a better interview experience depending on who the candidate is and the only real solution is to just ask them which they prefer (and yes, I do believe this can scale).

Rika 💡 Plus you don't have to tidy up before an important meeting:

Work From Home is overrated.

Instead, I propose Work From IKEA. Go to IKEA when it’s absolutely dead during the week and join a video conference from a different mock room every hour until your team notices.

Robyn Frost "The creative process"

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Techtopia

Li Jin 👇 Future marketplaces are more than aggregators of demand and supply (but likely still contributing to the erosion of income):

In the future, marketplaces may not even feel like marketplaces to the end user. Because they connect all the dots behind the scenes--and provide such a high level of standardization and quality--people feel like they’re interacting with a high-quality, concierge-level service.

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Startup Life

Suhail 👍 x 1000

◾️Dark mode for founders: disappearing & getting shit done.

Joseph Ruscio 🔥

OH: "startup mantra: may we survive long enough to be forced to implement Jira"

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Locked Doors

Beto O’Rourke’s secret membership in America’s oldest hacking group Remember Cult of the Dead Cow? There's a book about it coming soon, and it features a presidential candidate:

The hugely influential Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, is notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows. It’s also known for inventing the word “hacktivism” to describe human-rights-driven security work.

Laurie Voss 😭

A major international bank accidentally published a private package of their own to the public npm Registry, took 3 years to notice, and then sent DMCA takedown notices to Amazon and Cloudflare for hosting "stolen code". Now I have to pay a lawyer to explain this to them.
...
Our lawyer is also going to need to explain to a bank why a React package does not constitute "Stolen Financial Credentials" oh lord

Save the date: GPS Week Number Rollover Event – April 6th 2019 GPS experiences the Y2K problem every 19.7 years:

The week number is encoded into the data stream by a 10-bit field. A binary 10-bit word can represent a maximum of 1,024 weeks, which is approximately 19.7 years. Each 19.7 year period is known in GPS terms as an “epoch”.

At the end of each epoch the receiver resets the week number to zero and starts counting again – a new epoch begins.

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None of the Above

Jason Spraitz "Hands down the best wedding invitation that I’ve ever received. Hopefully, #reviewer2 doesn’t get invited."

Ashley Mayer Where is the lie?

I've run the numbers twice and can confirm that a 60 degree day during a New York winter is 15 degrees warmer than a 60 degree day during a San Francisco summer.

Jane Manchun Wong "Null Island is definitely on my bucket list now! 😍"

LRB Bookshop 🐝 What the …???

if you were or are the friendly gent (blue coat) who was in the shop half an hour ago and left a big jar of bees on the table in the poetry section, please come back and reclaim your jar of bees. if you aren't, please rt until we find him #FindTheBeeGent
…
charlie says they're too large to be bees but i've started the hashtag now so it's too late to change it

WILD NATURE "This baby horse is so damn happy, imma have to rt for good luck"

Death of the calorie Explores the junk science behind counting calories:

Officials at the WHO also acknowledge the problems of the current system, but say it is so entrenched in consumer behaviour, public policy and industry standards that it would be too expensive and disruptive to make big changes. The experiments that Atwater conducted a century ago, without calculators or computers, have never been repeated even though our understanding of how our bodies work is vastly improved. There is little funding or enthusiasm for such work. As Susan Roberts at Tufts University says, collecting and analysing faeces “is the worst research job in the world”.

Why Machines That Bend Are Better Mighty interesting: "compliant mechanisms"!

Seattle traffic deaths and injuries down slightly last year; most of the fatalities were pedestrians Your city can do this too!

In addition, SDOT is implementing signals that give pedestrians at crosswalks a three- to seven-second head start before drivers get a green light to make turns. The system, called leading pedestrian intervals, makes pedestrians in the crosswalk more visible to drivers making turns.
...
In New York City, the transportation department has installed the technology at more than 2,000 intersections since 2014. A 2016 study found that deaths and serious injuries among pedestrians and bicyclists dropped nearly 40 percent at crossings with the systems.

Reconsidering Cinema "Mad Max Fury Road without CGI is straight insane"

Steadman USA …

This quote is actually illuminating. "Why didnt the rich people just exert their influence the socially acceptable way?"

Yashar Ali US Attorney re the Huffman/Loughlin (among others) college scam: "We're not talking about donating a building...we're talking about fraud."

Agosto o lo otro "Es viernes y tu cuerpo lo sabe"

Why Does the U.S. Tolerate So Much Risk? Rhetorical question. US values corporate profits over human lives:

Britain, which acted separately, and slightly before the Pan-European regulator, offered an even more explicit account of its reasoning, explaining that it was grounding the Boeing planes because authorities did not know the cause of the most recent crash, of an Ethiopian Airlines plane on Sunday.

The Federal Aviation Administration, by contrast, said until Wednesday that the absence of information was the reason it was letting domestic airlines keep the planes in the air.

After a Lion Air 737 Max Crashed in October, Questions About the Plane Arose This article from February has more details about the financial calculus that lead to the death of 346 people in two avoidable plance crashes. And don't blame the software for this tragedy.

Good doggos "What a professional!"