How could I not buy a beer called main frame that also looks like a CSS Grid tutorial?

Design Objective

How Uber uses psychology to perfect their customer experience Don't like the company, but the app is pretty good:

There’s no doubt that a large part of Uber’s revenue comes from optimizing their experience using science. When an experiment was run with Uber Pool that applied Idleness Aversion, Operational Transparency, and the Goal Gradient Effect, the results were impressive.

How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit This indirect question is my favorite trick:

With this in mind, I sought to pinpoint Superhuman’s HXC. We took only users who would be very disappointed without our product and analyzed their responses to the second question in our survey: “What type of people do you think would most benefit from Superhuman?”

Jonathan Shariat When the “creative process” gets in the way of progress:

Something I've been mulling over recently, would love to discuss.

Design is slowly learning lessons that engineering teams have already solved. Why don't we embrace them more?

Versioning✅, components✅, documentation🤷‍♂️, ticketing🚫, agile planning🚫, architecture reviews🚫etc

Tools of the Trade

Amanda Silver Want!

Massive progress in IntelliCode, powering your AI-pair-programmer. Our unsupervised model makes Python feel like a typed programming language. Uses GPT first developed by OpenAI.

Philip Salter Free advice that's worth more than gold:

Taavi Kotka , former CIO of Estonia, on the low £100m price tag for being the most tech-savvy government in the world: “If you don’t use Accenture or McKinsey, you’d be amazed at what you can get done.”

Shane Parrish Why I practice README Driven Development:

Writing is often the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about.

Henri Virtanen Someone needs to make a coffee table book with all the good Vim jokes:

When i get stuck in vim i just buy a new server from another vendor (easier).

Web-end

freezydorito 💯

ui is when you make the links blue and ux is when you underline them and development is when you do nothing because browsers do that already

Diana Smith Magical!

Did another CSS-only art.
Flemish/baroque inspired.
Two weekends. Made for Chrome.

Cassidy Williams Point:

Fun fact! Baby elephants are born weighing ~250 pounds, making them the world’s biggest babies, right next to the people who complain that CSS isn’t really coding 🧠✨

Jack Daniel I tried this. Works every time.

If you ever find you have too many friends in tech, try this line to resolve the problem:

"Well actually, that's a URI not a URL."

Lines of Code

Bryan Helmkamp No lie.

Programmers are the only group who gain an hour from daylight savings time then immediately lose six to debugging

Hsing-Hui Hsu “Code comments”

Devoops

wen (Chen) Shapira System reliabilty is a “guess and pray” game:

In my experience, every system has about 500 things that could be done better. You have time to fix 5 per Q. So you pick the ones most likely to grow into big problems. And sometimes you pick wrong and get outages.

A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day Distributed systems is hard. And also, this one company you never heard of is handling your text messages:

A company named Syniverse, which provides networking services, later took blame for the messages being delayed. Syniverse said a single server was at fault: that server failed on February 14th, trapping messages waiting to be sent out; the server was only brought back online on November 7th. When that happened, all of the messages were finally delivered.

Peopleware

Avoid Burnout Before You’re Already Burned Out This:

You don’t need a dream job. But in your overall life, you do need to find time to take care of your health, do things you find refreshing and have a sense of purpose. The closer you are to living your truth, the less likely you are to burnout.

mykola 🧵 For people on the spectrum who don't know it:

Hey, how's this for autism 'awareness' month: some percentage of you who are reading this tweet are #actuallyAutistic and aren't aware of it.

I'm going to post a bunch of questions I wish I had been asked in this context, years ago. This is not diagnosis! But it's instructive.

Gabriel Szatan A lesson in stereotyping.

Teamworks

Cameron Moll Stories are powerful 🎙

Tell a story. Always.

When writing, tell a story.
When presenting, tell a story.
When resolving conflict, tell a story.
When leading a meeting, tell a story.
Whenever in doubt, tell a story.

Ha Phan Related, make story telling memorable:

One of the tricks we used to use when we present synthesis & strategy was, we’d plan organic interruptions where one person would share an anecdote, bc this makes the preso memorable. We also repeat certain words, so that when people describe the product they’d use the same words

Dare Obasanjo “Almost fell over when I saw this candle on a coworker's desk ”

Locked Doors

WIP: Support Engineer Job family country-of-residence block The reality of global politics in 2019:

In e-group on Monday October 15, 2019 we took the decision to enable a "job family country-of-residence block" for team members who have access to customer data. This is at the expressed concern of several enterprise customers, and also what is becoming a common practice in our industry in the current geopolitical climate.

The countries involved are:

• China
• Russia

FakeUnicode 🧵 Was not aware. These are some serious considerations for keeping your passwords to lower code points:

Because it keeps coming up, how about a thread on Emoji in passwords. So we (and you) can link to it in the future.

Should they be allowed? For all practical purposes they can't not be. So, yes.

Should they be heavily warned against? Yes.

But why? Well...

Vulnerability In Ring Doorbells Left the Door Open for Hackers to Open the Door TL;DR They used HTTP instead of HTTPS because of course.

matt blaze The three laws …

The three most important things experts understand about software security:

1. Software is unbelievably unreliable and insecure.

2. No, really, you have no idea.

3. It’s actually even worse than that.

Techtopia

Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours Computer files are going extinct:

Files feel like a good bellwether for what’s happening. We’re in this funny in-between time right now where our phones are fully in the future: apps are services kind of by definition, and it’s really hard to access the file system. But our computers are still kind of in the past: to me, at least, the two most important navigational anchors on my computer are the desktop and the downloads folder.

David Pierce (Context)

“Without antitrust regulation we would all be using Windows Mobile” is an A+ argument in favor of antitrust regulation

How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash This is all fine.

Talia Shadwell 👇 Creepy:

Because I had forgotten to log a cycle, the app likely concluded I was pregnant and began communicating the information to third party apps and algorithms

Kelly Eng “can’t wait 2 get hunted down by one of these”

None of the Above

Steve Stewart-Williams “No big deal; just a guy playing fetch with a beluga whale... 😮”

OhNoSheTwitnt (if you don't know the meme, “OK, boomer”)

Just so we’re all clear since there’s a lot of disagreement about birth years:

Boomer = Anyone older than you that you don’t like

Millennial = Anyone younger than you that you don’t like

Bri Schwapp 😂

and quicksand. I was extremely worried about quicksand

JB as a child i thought i'd have to deal with the bermuda triangle a lot more than i have in my adult life

Pulp Librarian “Soviet. Nuclear. Zeppelins. Three words that always inspire confidence...”

richee ⛽️

gas pumps be like:
credit or debit?
do you want a car wash?
do you want a receipt?
is it stupid that i love you?
was it all just a big mistake?
do i wanna let it happen?
do you wanna just walk away?

Brett O'Connor 💥

been getting a lot of new followers lately! just wanted to welcome you all and remind you of my script that detects unfollowers and launches killdrones.

Horse Girl Autumn 🧵 The equestrian code point:

A thread of rating every horse emoji:

Apple, iOS 13.2

Total lack of withers explains lack of saddle. Back flatter than my coffee table explains lack of rider. Horse is ewe-necked, with a tiny head. Best suited for liberty training, would not recommend for performance work. 6/10

Blair Amadeus Imani 🧵 Word game Twitter is the funniest:

That’s a hierophant. A hymen is an award that the NCAA gives to outstanding college football players.

Pinboard 🧵 This thread:

Usually this happens because the EU citizen on one side of the conversation thinks they are communicating with a compliance officer in a tasteful 10-story Pinboard office complex, while the other party to the conversation is wearing pajamas and eating an off-brand hot pocket

stephanie The SoftBank 30 year vision is just …

every morning i meditate on this deck for 28 minutes to achieve a state of higher consciousness with which to start my day

I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb Something to consider before you book your next AirBnB.

Kevin Robillard All metrics will be gamed:

This is super messed up: Elite colleges are buying SAT scores, then recruiting students they know have no chance of getting in, all so they can decrease their admittance rate and look more exclusive.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-sale-sat-takers-names-colleges-buy-student-data-and-boost-exclusivity-11572976621

elatticus “They are playing tetherball and this is peak level wholesomeness”

Jimi Fletcher “It's Halloween, 2019. This is the very last day we can refer to Blade Runner as a film that's set in the future.”

Design Objective

Perfectly Cropped Pixel perfect UX mistake.

Jonathan Waddingham “NOvember” 💡

Product people - for the next month, try to push back on those ad hoc requests, respect the work in progress limits, don't let one customer's demands ruin your carefully planned roadmap.

Let's make it a campaign. We could call it...

NOvember

A Framework for Making Better Product Decisions Starting with step 1:

If everybody just did this first step, their products would improve significantly. This is without question the most important thing you can do to make better decisions. Write down your goals and expectations before you start building.

Allison Grayce “it’s fine, lets just make a guided tour to explain it to first time users“ - 🤩 pm

Peter Lewis I want to see these levels used in job ads:

entry level designer
junior designer
designer
senior designer
principal designer
final designer
final final designer
final final final designer_v2
designer v3 FINAL
designer_v4_finalfinal_thisone_2

HELLvetica “Like helvetica, but with like, much shittier kerning for Halloween”

Tools of the Trade

What nobody tells you about documentation The four types of documentation, why you need them, and how to make them work.

cartwrightian The one tool that can do everything:

There is one feature I consistently hear that users value about big vendor IT solutions: export to spreadsheet. Whenever I see that "company X runs solution Y" type of advert I just think: "they run the whole place off of excel"

Logic gates using fluid Simply explained:

Steeeve 😭

The plural of regex is regrets

atomicthumbs “chaotic evil website”

Web-end

Alex Russell 🧵 No surprise, Apple has strong financial incentive to hold the mobile web back:

There seems to be confusion about how, exactly, Apple keeps the web second-class on iOS. Understandable! It's the interplay of several interlocking effects. Let's examine them (thread).

Lynn Fisher One! Div!

Started with a repeating bookshelf pattern and kept going with a little animation.

#divtober 26: 🔦 Dark https://a.singlediv.com

Inspect This Snake Brilliant. Open web inspector to play Snake.

Lines of Code

David Neal 📣

My most embarrassing mistakes as a programmer:

• I didn't ask for help
• I was afraid of what others would think
• I didn't follow through on a promise
• I didn't step up and take responsibility
• I avoided conflict

My biggest mistakes had nothing to do with programming.

@nekorug 😂

"so, your resume is empty here between 2014-2016. what were you doing during this time?

"bug fixes and performance improvements."

Sahil Lavingia It's kind of exactly like this:

Learn to code so you can get paid six figures to rearrange z-indexes until the problem goes away.

@ScribblingOn “Burnout visualised”

Architectural

@ErrataRob 🧵 Great thread on technical debt, and what it's not:

Building a business case for something doesn't mean using business buzzwords you don't understand. It means actually understanding the business case. "Debt", "ROI", and so on are widely misunderstood by techies.

…

Your concept of "debt" comes largely from consumer debt. Instead of studying it, you've reverse-engineered it. You observe it, and then come up with your own principles that explain to yourself what you see. These aren't the principles business types use.

Alan Dayley TIL “intensive support period” is a thing people say unironically:

“We delivered all the scope on time. We are now fixing all the escaped defects during this 3-month intensive support period.”

If you always plan intensive support periods, you didn’t actually deliver the scope, nor was it on time (whatever that means). #agile #dealwithreality

Charity Majors This is absolutely true. Infrastructure is a product with end-users and stakeholders:

if i could go back and do one thing different in my career as db/infra engineer, it would be this: build some fucking product. not only in the darkest hour of our need, but like during the day. with a PM and that culty scrum shit.

it is harrrrrrrd leveling up on this shit now.

Devoops

Adrian Sanabria 🤔

I'm consistently disappointed by how often "scaling in the cloud" involves emailing support and waiting a few days to get an artificial threshold raised.

I understand the reasons for it, but it goes hard against the kind of a lot of the cloud marketing we see.

Jake Williams “When management "helps" remediate the incident...”

Peopleware

Indi Young 👂

While in a listening session with a person, listen closely if you sense frustration. This is a marker that something is interfering with the person's purpose, keeping them from achieving what they want to get done.

Dani Donovan “Your words matter.”

Teamwork

@dxna 💯

The more senior you are on a career ladder the more the optics of small behaviors matter, eg ending a meeting on time if others are waiting. Because as inconsequential as it seems it sets optics around organizational standards around consideration and privilege

Rodolphe Dutel ☕️

Teacher: what do your parents do?
Kid: they work remotely.
Teacher: what does that mean?
Kid: they hang around the house, talking to their computer and drinking coffee.

Christopher Jones “Academics complaining that departmental service obligations interfere with their research and teaching. Assyria, mid 7th century BC:”

Locked Doors

City of Johannesburg held for ransom by hacker gang Ransomware with a new twist:

A hacker group going by the name of Shadow Kill Hackers is holding South Africa's largest city for ransom, demanding 4 bitcoins from Johannesburg authorities, or they'll upload stolen city data on the internet.

SIM-Jackers Can Empty Your Bank Account with a Single Phone Call The weakest link is customer support at scale:

"One of the reasons SIM-swap attacks are so effective is that many mobile phone carrier representatives are easy to socially engineer," explained a former black hat hacker, who dabbled in SIM swaps before going straight and becoming a white hat hacker. "An attacker can call your phone provider, pretend to be you and spin some story to get the support agent to transfer your number to a SIM. If he runs into any friction, he can hang up and try again with another agent."

Stephanie 🧵 Thread:

Doing a quick deep dive on reCAPTCHA for the @webwewantfyi session this weekend and HOLY SMOKES folks. I had no idea what was being collected from your browser when you mark that little "I'm not a robot" checkbox.

None of the Above

WeRateDogs “This is Benjamin. He is Froot Loops. 14/10”

@lavendersheeps 👏

"the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog":
-overdone
-juvenile
-has no impact or weight to it

"sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow"
-holy shit
-literally the most metal way to test out your font
-raw as hell

@higgzorz “this is so fucking funny the internet really was better 10 years ago”

@ArfMeasures Every. Single. Time.

Netflix: Should I play this movie?
Me: No no I'm just looking at it for a second
Netflix: I'll put it on
Me: I'm just literally reading what it is
Netflix: It's playing :)

Best of Nextdoor "Serious inquiries only, DALE"

stephanie 👨‍💻

light bondage but with the 10 different charging cables i need to maintain for my 3 apple products

Command Line Magic “Whoever labeled this USB-A port is having a good laugh right now.”

Anthony Ha “This is a perfect email”

Bradford Pearson 📣 “Shoutout to whoever scheduled these Deadspin tweets, changed the password, and walked out the door.”

Debbie Moon 👍

Time to remember the best voting advice I ever heard: voting isn't marriage, it's public transport. You're not waiting for "the one" who's absolutely perfect: you're getting the bus, and if there isn't one to your destination, you don't not travel- you take the one going closest.

Dave Roberts “Anyone want to buy a cat? Still in its packaging, perfect condition.”

Dare Obasanjo Sadly true:

The idea that historians will write the equivalent of mean tweets about you in the future is probably the least effective threat in the world yet turns out to have been the primary accountability mechanism for politicians in the 2nd largest democracy on Earth. 🤦🏾‍♂️

Jim Stansel 🧵

The five types of fossil fuel tweets:

1. Are you wasting too much water when you wash your hands? Use our calculator to find out!

Quinn Nelson “Best wireless in-ear charging case lid sound competition!” Watch this to the end.

Stevie Mat 💥 (in reply to)

White men did not produce great art and literature, white men produced art and literature that spoke to other white men, so they all just collectively agreed amongst themselves that it was great.

A lot of it ain't that great.

@HerDreadsRock “And whoever added the background music is going to hell” 😭

Will McPhail Happy Halloween.

Design Objective

Steve Schoger Which of these UIs would you rather use?

🔥 When making a design responsive, don't stop at simply making things fit on smaller screens – look for ways to borrow usability patterns from native mobile apps, too.

For example, anchoring modals to the bottom of the screen instead of the center, making them easier to reach.

Enterprise Software Is Dead It’s just software for the workplace now:

If you’re an executive making a buying decision in 2019, sure, your board won’t fire you for making a conservative choice. But a mutiny in the rank-and-file will take you down just as fast. So you need to buy a tool that your employees like, and that they find useful. You need to care about design and user experience just as much as SLAs and Magic Quadrants.

I’m not sure if anyone has been fired for refusing to buy Slack, but I do know that a whole era of executives’ lives got a heck of a lot harder until they finally agreed to buy Slack.

On Small Seasons and Long Calendars Wonderful essay on a different way of connecting with time:

Where spring is our “large” season, lasting roughly from March to June, the sekki calendar breaks it down into six small seasons: start of spring, rain waters, the going-out of the worms, vernal equinox, clear and bright, and rain for harvests.2 Both describe a similar period of time, but one does so with a precision that feels much more human.

Tools of the Trade

A Guide To New And Experimental CSS DevTools In Firefox Grid and flexbox inspectors, inactive CSS, accessibility panel, and more.

Google is improving 10 percent of searches by understanding language context Interesting:

The way BERT recognizes that it should pay attention to those words is basically by self-learning on a titanic game of Mad Libs. Google takes a corpus of English sentences and randomly removes 15 percent of the words, then BERT is set to the task of figuring out what those words ought to be. Over time, that kind of training turns out to be remarkably effective at making a NLP model “understand” context, according to Jeff Dean, Google senior fellow & SVP of research.

IBM Says Google’s Quantum Leap Was a Quantum Flop Alternate headline: Google Discovers a Superposition of Leap and Flop.

Manisha Agarwal 50:50

Darrell Huff on how to lie with Statistics:

It's like the tale of the roadside merchant who was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap.
"Well," he explained, "I have to put some horse-meat in too. But I mix them 50:50. One horse, one rabbit."
😁

Ben Lesh Points for accuracy:

6 out of 5 people on Twitter misuse statistics.

Yvonne Lam “My cat opened a file in VSCode and started “helping”.”

Web-end

Playing Beat Saber in the browser with body movements using PoseNet & Tensorflow.js Browsers came a long way since VRML.

Ryan Florence 👇 Thread, on where and how SPA lost their way:

There’s a chance I believe client side routing on the web is usually not preferred. Which is ironic.

Might be best for screens where the majority of the UI persists, which is the edge case.

Browsers handle page transitions really well.

Still working through my thoughts 🤔

Introducing Concurrent Mode (Experimental) Looks very powerful. And deeply confusing.

Lines of Code

Jenn Wallis What about code review?

As an editor, I can spot the exact moment in your copy where you basically said "fuck it".

Amjad Masad This explains why developers are so eager to add dark mode to every app:

Architectural

HeyChelseaTroy 💯

90% of engineering decisions I make, from the architectural to the semantic, start here:

"How is another developer going to try to extend and maintain this code?"

That's all about people, and my skill at it directly translates to the longevity and impact of the code I write.

Jaana B. Dogan 🤔

There are two types of systems: those you can’t restart and those you don’t want to restart.

Tomasz Łakomy “Is this Docker?”

Peopleware

Malware Unicorn Time management is everything:

One thing I've learned over the years is knowing how to manage time for your brain to switch subjects. Context switching is hard. Staying organized, writing lots of notes, and blocking out calendar time helps.

Gabe Yes.

All of the talented and successful people I know agree on the following:

1. There isn’t any secret to what they do.
2. Getting the basics right provides the most value over time.
3. Nobody got to where they are without help.
4. Luck plays a massive role in success.

calico_patches 🙄

It's called executive dysfunction but I'm not sure there's actually any executives in my brain. Highest ranked in there is probably an overworked assistant store manager existing entirely on energy drinks and cinnamon rolls.

Tom Gauld “Please tick the box”

Teamwork

betsythemuffin 👇 That question got me thinking. Check the replies for more double-sided phrases:

"You are not your code":

• in toxic environments, it's an excuse to tear people down.
• in supportive environments, it's a tool that encourages a growth mindset.

What are some other phrases like that that y'all have seen?

Locked Doors

Valerie Aurora Friendly reminder:

Y’all, keep work/personal email separate if for NO OTHER REASON that when the lawyers are going through your emails for the lawsuit involving your employer, they won’t be making jokes about your taste in sex toys

And it's not something you can actively avoid. You don't have to be a party to the lawsuit to have your work emails included in discovery.

gduffy Admire the honesty:

Former co-founder & CEO of Dropcam (Nest cam) here.

There's no way to say this humbly, but imo stuff like this is the reason that companies lose their way when they lose an empowered "buck stops here" product-oriented CEO with enough engineering chops to modulate product decisions.

...

This whole privacy mess in home & so-called "IoT" is a result of people who don't even know what would be required to operate ethically with such powerful technology in the first place. I believe they are mostly good people, they just don't have the mindset or philosophy to know what to do. It kinda makes me misty-eyed. They know where to find me if it sounds like some of this could help... I'd be happy to try and get the band back together again.

Grim Reaper

Happy halloween 🎃👻🧟‍♀️

UnrealAlexander “Just found out you can buy real human remains on Amazon and it just acts like it's super normal like "Hey you want some human fingers to go with those ribs?"”

CascadianSolo “It's always a wild ride reading the voters pamphlet for local elections. See if you can tell what's wrong with this...”

Will McPhail Again because his stuff is hilarious. Check out his Instagram.

None of the Above

Sam Mintz “Grim news for those of us who write for a living”

Grace Segers 👀

Me, writing an email:

I'm using an exclamation point so you know I'm friendly and excited! But now I'm using a period so that you know I'm not crazy. Here's another sentence with a period as a buffer, proving my normalness. Thanks so much!

Sophia Armen “all I see is hummus”

markpopham 🎤

one thing you forget about star wars is how much of the original trilogy is just darth vader flying in some place to chew some guy out about construction delays

Mark Serrels “Women's speed climbing record was smashed. Under 7 seconds. Inhuman.”

Chillie Franxiety 😭

Dungeons and Dragons is popular because it appeals to the human fantasy of having a group of friends who can come over at a regular time

WebMD Magazine Just saw this at the doctor's office. Weird that WebMD — emphasis on the "web" — has this print magazine … don't doctors hate people who self-diagnose using the internet?

Inside R/Relationships, the Unbearably Human Corner of Reddit “How a subreddit seemingly destined to devolve into chaos stays remarkably sane” TL;DR moderation.

The fact that these rules exist at all is a reminder of something we tend to forget about the internet, which is that we’re as responsible to one another here as anywhere else. Sometimes more. … It’s the rare place with consequences, which come from a crude system, but one created by people who actually have to live within it—not people who are simply getting paid by the people who named the app.

Migrating Russian eagles run up huge data roaming charges Okay well …

Russian scientists tracking migrating eagles ran out of money after some of the birds flew to Iran and Pakistan and their SMS transmitters drew huge data roaming charges.

Kieran Healy 😿 Context: Rats taught to drive tiny cars to lower their stress levels

In Phase 2, rats will be assigned to drive other rats in mazes. Rat drivers will be given a 1-5 star rating by rat passengers. Rat passengers must rate rat drivers or they will see their own rating go down. (This is the origin of the word "rating" btw.)

WeWork HR Invites Employees To Sign Goodbye Checks For Departing CEO Too soon.

Encouraging staffers to give him a good send-off, the WeWork human resources department reportedly invited employees Wednesday to sign goodbye checks for departing CEO Adam Neumann.

rat mic “psychologists dont want you to know this video is the cure for depression”

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

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.'"

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.”

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. 🤦🏽‍♂️

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.