Labnotes

Artëm Chistyakov "Rembrandt, “A New Message in Slack”, 1633 #devart"

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Design Objective

The Graphic Art of Incredibles 2 Behind the scenes look at the architecture, graphic design, and the two world fairs that inspired the Incredibles 2. The amazing attention to detail make it such a fun movie to watch. Take for example:

One of the hardest things to do was this cereal box where a character illustration appears next to one of our real characters. I turned to Teddy Newton for help on this illustration, and the stylization feels perfect next to Dash. We also play up the humor of it being an over the top sugary cereal so that when it gets swapped out for Fiber O’s, we understand where Dash is coming from.

Learn about Dyslexia for the Web with me! Simple steps to design content that is more accessible to those who have dyslexia:

• Left alignment
• Avoid justified text
• Write in sans serif
• Use headings and images to break up large blocks of text
• Avoid passive voice and double negatives

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Tools of the Trade

Cloud Computing without Containers This is really interesting. CloudFlare is building the fastest and cheapest serverless. They decided to bypass containers (Docker, K8, all that), and instead use V8 Isolates. Tested in the harsh environment that is the Web, V8 Isolates provide strong multi-tenant isolation, probably better than any container architecture. And minimum overhead:

Because Workers don’t have to start a process, Isolates start in 5 milliseconds, a duration which is imperceptible. Isolates similarly scale and deploy just as quickly, entirely eliminating this issue with existing Serverless technologies.

Simon Hearne 😳

Five years using a mac and I've just noticed this little dot in the close button, indicating unsaved changes

Marques Brownlee The new iPad Pro can double as a $800 fridge magnet(*):

(*) I only had mine for two days, so all I have is a first impression. It's expensive but noticable upgrade over last year's model. The new form factor feels like a true tablet, if that makes sense. You get more screen space, noticable speed up, a better keyboard, Face ID that just works, etc.

Steve Troughton-Smith If you're using the physical keyboard, you can also select using the Shift and cursor keys:

I can tell from a bunch of iPad reviews that a lot of people don’t know this, so here’s a pro tip: use two fingers to select text and move the insertion cursor around when editing text. It’s almost as good as a physical trackpad

I Am Devloper $ whois new-year.resolution.gym:

Buying a domain name is buying the wonderful feeling that you’ll actually finish the side project you have planned for it.

How Things Work "This is how Charlie Chaplin did things before CGI"

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Lingua Scripta

Faster async functions and promises The short version is: trust the language implementation to get better with time, and use idiomatic async/await instead of hand-written promises. The long version is a peek into the internals of V8, ECMAScript, promises, and transpiling.

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Lines of Code

The Developer Coefficient TL;DR "‘Bad code’ costs companies $85 billion annually"

While it’s a priority for senior executives to increase the productivity of their developers, the average developer spends more than 17 hours a week dealing with maintenance issues, such as debugging and refactoring. In addition, they spend approximately four hours a week on “bad code,” which equates to nearly $85 billion worldwide in opportunity cost lost annually, according to Stripe’s calculations on average developer salary by country. Nearly two-thirds of developers agree that this is “excessive” and believe that clear prioritization, responsibilities, and long-term product goals would improve their own productivity.

André Staltz 🤔

In programming, natural selection is "survival of the ugliest". Small and simple code gets extended and repurposed. Ugly and complex code stays untouched and becomes legacy.

It's very interesting that efforts to write good code are in direct opposition to the nature of code.

Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work? Behind every piece of software that sells for billions of dollars, there's a mountain of technical debt. Such as (guess the vendor):

Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousands of flags. The whole code is ridden with mysterious macros that one cannot decipher without picking a notebook and expanding relevant pats of the macros by hand. It can take a day to two days to really understand what a macro does.

Sometimes one needs to understand the values and the effects of 20 different flag to predict how the code would behave in different situations. Sometimes 100s too! I am not exaggerating.

The only reason why this product is still surviving and still works is due to literally millions of tests!

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Architectural

Let’s take a crack at understanding distributed “consensus” This article takes a look at the various distributed system consensus protocols, to explain the why and how of the Nakamoto consensus protocol — the core protocol behind Bitcoin.

Moritz Heiber "Microservices™️"

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Peopleware

Nathan Allen Pirtle 💯

To protect your energy ...

It’s okay to cancel a commitment.
It’s okay to not answer that call.
It’s okay to change your mind.
It’s okay to want to be alone.
It’s okay to take a day off.
It’s okay to do nothing.
It’s okay to speak up.
It’s okay to let go.

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Team Work

Alan Cooper Litmus test:

To me, a “Product Owner” is someone who not only has the power to modify its features, but they have sufficient power to kill the product they own. If they don’t have that level of power, then they are not really the product owner, and someone else really owns it.

Ryan Singer To be a successful product manager, you do need all four:

Four literacies for product managers:

1. Design. Will this work for customers?
2. Tech. What’s possible, what’s easy and hard?
3. Demand-side value. What matters to customers?
4. Supply-side value. What matters to my bosses?

laney "When you work alone a lot."

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Locked Doors

Japan's cyber security minister admits never having used computer Here's one security person who's never getting hacked:

"Since the age of 25, I have instructed my employees and secretaries, so I don't use computers myself," he said in a response to an opposition question in a lower house session, local media reported. He also appeared confused by the question when asked about whether USB drives were in use at Japanese nuclear facilities.

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None of the Above

Fluff Society "Making its breed world debut in New Zealand, dubbed 'The Worlds Cutest Sheep' <- these are blacknose sheep"

Alexandra Petri That's me:

ten writing rules

1. find exactly the right place to sit
2. better get coffee also
3. turn off the internet we're WRITING
4. but i have a question only the internet can answer
5. more coffee!
6. maybe i got an important email
7. how is the coffee shop closing
8. oh no

Max "Sweaty Eddy" Eddy "This is the single greatest triumph of technology over itself, boost if you agree."

Writer in Pyjamas 😭

My Mum lost her password for 23andme. Instead of getting a new one, she ordered another spit kit, gave another sample, and had another DNA test!

Today, she rings me: baffled, but excited and happy, that they’ve found a twin she didn’t know about!

Steve Trendall This is next-level pranking:

VM (Vicky) Brasseur Thank you:

English is hard, so here's today's technical grammar reminder…

The noun form is one word. Examples:

• login [page, form, credentials, etc]
• logout
• setup

The verb form is two words. Examples:

• log in(to) [a site, an app, a server, etc]
• log out (of)
• set up

Nick Kapur "Mercator projection vs. the true size of countries"

Igor Schatz "The Britney Spears effect on the labor market"

@1961___ "هذا لا قلنا ابداع 😻"

Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis Oh wow:

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

You Had One Job "Gate with WiFi."

James Corden "Holy shit. This commercial." You want to play this video with the sound on:

Guide to Computing Amazing photos, from when computers doubled as furniture.

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Design Objective

Luke Wroblewski "people will scroll unless you tell them not to."

Early Drafts Every great piece of work starts somewhere.

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Tools of the Trade

Now 2.0 Zeit has built an incredibly easy to use tool for deploying microservices, including support for monorepos:

• A unified deployment type: All deployments are one type, regardless of static or dynamic parts
• Massive build parallelization: Each deployment can kick off many concurrent serverless builds.
• Monorepo support: Define API endpoints in Go, PHP, Node.js, Next.js, and such, in just one repository.
• Zero-instruction builds: Our open-source builders take the build and cache config burden away.
• Universal Cloud: Our platform leverages the best cloud infrastructure, with no lock-in or config.

React lazy, Suspense and Concurrent React Breakdown with Examples Explores the new lazy() loading function, <Suspense /> component and fallback, what works now in 16.6, and what to expect when React Concurrent (16.7) comes out.

enquirer "Stylish CLI prompts that are user-friendly, intuitive and easy to create."

李赛博 "If relational databases were invented today"

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Web-end

e: Why the React community is missing the point about Web Components On point:

React users would love to not have to npm install a date picker and bloat their bundles! If they need to "use the platform" then why doesn't that platform ship the features they actually ask for? Instead of a <carousel> they get an <aside>. Features like service workers are touted as a solution to many problems in the web, but their ergonomics are so under-designed that people actually have to change domains to bust the cache from a broken build (I’m not making this up).

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Lines of Code

Sarah Drasner That will be fun to watch:

I wanna do a “Project Runway” but for creative code projects. Sort of like a hack but many time-boxed specific challenges.

“You can only use these two array methods, you can use canvas, and you have to create a planet. You have 24 hours. Go”

Vicki Boykis "Your code versus the code she tells you not to worry about."

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Devoops

nixcraft "People working in IT will know everyday is a coffee struggle."

Tabletop Scenarios 🔥

A growing number of your engineers are streaming themselves on Twitch while coding.

One of them just revealed a production secret while alt-tabbing.

The chat is now being spammed with a production IaaS secret from your repository.

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Team Work

Alan Cooper Thread:

When I started programming, it was a solo skill, performed by individuals, with little or no sharing and virtually no collaboration. A culture was built around those facts. 1
...
Going from one person coding something, to two persons coding something is not just a 100% increase in staffing, but it changes programming from a solo practice to a team sport. 7
...
If, on the other hand, our goal is to be a good ancestor, then we have to understand that everyone is poor while anyone is poor. Thus we see that collaboration is necessary for a sustainable culture and not just a tool for more efficient programming. 21

Delay Chokes Innovation What the game of poker can teach us about innovation and small iterations:

If exploratory projects take twice as long, you get half as many of them, which is half as good, right? It’s actually much worse than that and here’s why. This is a story of innovation and incentives and unintended consequences, but first it’s a story about poker.

Coding as an Engineering Manager Pretty much:

If you’d like to and still have the time to work on the codebase sometimes, I’d highly recommend picking bug fixes or small features. Bug fixes let you dive into the breadth and the depth of the codebase and understand how it works, while also contributing back something useful to the team.

With features, I’d be more cautious. Your schedule is sometimes unpredictable, as you might be getting pulled into meetings unexpectedly, so you can easily end up blocking your team.

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Peopleware

Damon Edwards 💯

OH: “Culture is how people make decisions when the boss isn’t in the room”

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Techtopia

Kane Baccigalupi 🔥

My wife asked me what machine learning is and I said: remember when we ordered the hot plate for the boat and amazon suggested buying all the equipment needed to make a full meth lab?

UnHookathon: Why & how A hackathon where the end goal is to unhook ourselves from technology.

Facebook Portal Non-Review: Why I Didn’t Put Facebook’s Camera in My Home Product review you can believe in:

I just couldn’t bring myself to set up Facebook’s camera-embedded screen in the privacy of my family’s home. Can you blame me when you look at the last 16 months?

The hardest job in Silicon Valley is a living nightmare A new documentary “The Cleaners,” about the people who do the exhausting, traumatizing work of content moderation.

Óliver Login screen poetry:

"I'm a human.
I'm not a robot.
Remember me."

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None of the Above

@thomasfuchs@mastodon.social I have one of these at home:

Playing a game of Apple Boxes Tetris ¯_(ツ)_/¯

panamapauper 😴

high difficulty escape room: youre laying in bed and you have one hour to get out of bed

Mulboyne "Everyday cosplay":

Just catching up on the 地味なハロウィン ("sober Halloween") event, where flashy fancy dress is banned, in favour of everyday cosplay. This girl has come as the kind of model you see on cheap Korean fashion mail order sites.

Sweatpants Cher 😭

god I wish I was the person I believed I could be when I bought all this produce

Bill de hÓra I'll take "irony" for $500:

Fluff Society "The evolution of the spin cycle"

Quinn Cummings The best intentions …

Gather round, Gentle Readers. It is time I tell the story of the worst decision I ever made in an office. Some of you have heard this. Some have not. Whatever you do in your office today, this week, the rest of this year, you can console yourself by recalling this tale.

chaeronaea "please enjoy this video i found on reddit of a dog trying to steal another smaller dog"

Ian Making a statement:

For election night, I present to you the best thing I learned in my time as a (third-party) sysadmin in the House of Representatives:

From a congressional IP, you can only read one XKCD comic: the climate change/average Earth temperature timeline.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

gaelitegymn 🦄

Evan Kirstel "Genius! #makers #maker #WednesdayVibes"

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Design Objective

Keith Stoeckeler “We know our users/customers"

Ben Thompson Born in a different generation, I still Ctrl+S even when I don't need to:

My daughter deleted an entire report because, after only using Google Docs previously, she had to use Word. She was completely befuddled by the idea of "save", especially because she didn't have a pre-existing folder for her class in the dialog. Finally she just quit the app 😬

iPhones are Allergic to Helium TIL if it gives you a funny voice, it may render your electronics useless. Keep your phone away from MRI machines!

That’s when he posted the issue to Reddit, where other sysadmins speculated that it might be caused by the liquid helium used to cool the MRI machine. So he investigated, and found there was a helium leak at the same time that vented into the building.

Eoghan McCabe Relevant because, did you know MRI machines are just huge magnets?

Apple consistently set the bar for simple yet engaging marketing copy. This is light and easy to read. Yet informative and fun. It makes you want to read more. This part made me smile.

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Tools of the Trade

Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal Fascinating look at the history of the BASIC language, born in a liberal arts college, to make computers more accessible. A feature of every 70's home computer that was lost to time.

IBM to acquire Red Hat in deal valued at $34 billion What a crazy year for open source:

Open source has been the biggest theme in technology this year. Prior to IBM's purchase of Red Hat, two of the biggest tech deals of the year were Microsoft's $7.5 billion purchase of GitHub, a code-sharing service, and Salesforce's $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft, whose technology stitches together disparate software applications, data and devices. Earlier this month, big-data rivals Cloudera and Hortonworks agreed to merge in a $5.2 billion deal.

I Am Devloper Ghost Of Projects Past:

For Halloween I'm dressing up as all your abandoned side projects and domain renewal emails.

muesli Where is the lie?

In other words: XML combines the efficiency of text files with the readability of binary files...

Alex Novemberg "1 new message"

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Devoops

Lorin Hochstein ETOOREAL:

Software engineer (quoting Fred Brooks): The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.

SRE: Your service fell over after it ran out of file descriptors.

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Peopleware

JBD Thread on job interviews and how to present:

Just because you didn't pass via the interview process, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are not eligible to work at that place. It means the signals are not produced. It might be you, might be the system, might be the interviewers.

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Electric Dreams

Google Webmasters I guess Waymo has collected all the data it needs to identify street signs and store fronts (citation):

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of reCAPTCHA v3. Your users no longer need to solve any challenges. You’ll get more visibility to the abusive traffic on your site and more flexibility on what actions to take. Watch this video to learn more →

Reinforcement Learning with Prediction-Based Rewards Neural network learns how to solve Super Mario by avoiding boredom:

RND incentivizes visiting unfamiliar states by measuring how hard it is to predict the output of a fixed random neural network on visited states. In unfamiliar states it’s hard to guess the output, and hence the reward is high. It can be applied to any reinforcement learning algorithm, is simple to implement and efficient to scale. Below we release a reference implementation of RND that can reproduce the results from our paper.

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Locked Doors

App Scams: Sneaky 'Utility' Apps Are Stealing $260, $2500, or even $4700 Each Year ... Per User This is another fascinating use case of how flaws in user experience (aka edge cases) will be exploited:

“Users open the app and quickly tap a “Start” button or “Continue” button on the first page,” she told me via email. “Unfortunately this loads the Apple payment prompt instead of starting the free app as most users would expect. Users then panic and press the home screen to exit the app – unfortunately on fingerprint devices this makes payment or signs up for the free trial.”

Lukasz Olejnik And at the other hand, we got UX of privacy:

Closing (modern, with T2 chip) MacBook lids causes a physical disconnect of miceophone. Protects from eavesdropping even if the system is hacked/infected. https://www.apple.com/mac/docs/Apple_T2_Security_Chip_Overview.pdf …

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None of the Above

Worker at Utah DMV wears best #Halloween costume ever for DMV worker

Max Fagin TIL

November is here, and that means a massive shift is coming. And by "massive" I am of course referring to the redefinition of the kilogram unit of mass that the world has been building up to for more than 100 years. Let me explain:

Fluff Society "Spooky level is rising <- This stuff is why the internet was invented."

Amy Renee "Most accurate time change graphic out there… ⏰😂"

Audrey "The Salesforce tower has turned into the Eye of Sauron for Halloween and I swear it’s staring at me."

Apple’s New Map Fascinating. "Has Apple closed the gap with Google’s map?"

Words matter, and they’re destabilizing the American tribe Bold. We deserve more tech leadership like this:

That’s why we at Twilio banned not just hate speech, but any organization whose primary purpose is spreading hate. It’s in our control to decide who uses our product, and from whom we take money. We choose not to profit from this hatred, or those who spread it.

Nature is Amazing "Look at the happiness on the dog's face after his big jump 😂😂"

The scariest idea I could think of for a spooky pumpkin 🎃👻😱

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Design Objective

UX Best Practices: How to Design Scannable App Screenshots This article walks you through practical ideas for making app screenshots that are more effective, informative, and enjoyable to look at. Which of course leads to more people downloading your app:

1. Explain the most important user story of your app in the first two screenshots.
2. Increase the font size and cut down on text.
3. Highlight UI elements that represent text captions.

Technology Myths and Urban Legends TL;DR

When users don’t clearly understand how systems function, they develop unique (and often incorrect) theories to explain their experiences.

Designing Better Choices for Your Users The power of a nudge in design:

A nudge is any factor that significantly alters the behavior of humans. To count as a nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Putting the fruit at eye level while it encourages for it to be picked up or bought counts as nudge. Banning junk food does not — Richard Thaler, Nudge

Pulp Librarian Advertising has come a long way, from the creative genius of Leonetto Cappiello — you could stare at these ads for hours — to boring annoyances like AdSense:

Today I'm looking at the work of pioneering advertising artist Leonetto Cappiello!

Jon Hicks 😭

Actually what I said was "If it fits between two slices of bread, it's a sandwich"

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Tools of the Trade

Saron Asking questions is a very powerful tool, and not enough people know to use it:

I talk to A LOT of developers, and one of the biggest differences I've see between new and experienced devs is that experienced devs don't wait to ask questions. #CodeNewbie

React v16.6.0: lazy, memo and contextType Reacts gets better at functional composition, object state, and code splitting. Also, RFC for adding hooks, so you can have state without using classes (yes please!):

const MyComponent = React.memo(function MyComponent(props) {
  /* only rerenders if props change */
});

James Long The difference is notable:

I'm tired of demos. It's time to see if this async version of React really works.

I flipped it on in my (changed 5 lines of code) and this is the difference. It completely changes the user experience. There's a lot of little things left to do, but this is huge. Awesome work.

The Intl.RelativeTimeFormat API JavaScript finally gets internationalized relative time formats :

const rtf = new Intl.RelativeTimeFormat('en');
rtf.format(3.14, 'second');
// → 'in 3.14 seconds'
rtf.format(-15, 'minute');
// → '15 minutes ago'

Jesse Engel 🔥

I've started mentally replacing "AI", "Neural Network", and other buzz terms with "Predictive model". It removes a false sense of agency, better reflects reality, and instantly brings the hype factor down by 300%.

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Lines of Code

Practice - Longer than a Code Kata This is an interesting way to find and unwind common practices that you may not be aware you're doing (eg over-engineering, messy merges, slipping on schedule):

But every one of the groups was writing more code than strictly necessary. They wrote code that they knew they would need in later features. This is something very natural for programmers. We write more code than we need to. For me, that is too still a very hard thing - To only write the code that is required, not what I think is required.

Because they wrote more code than necessary, we still did not have a release at the end of the second iteration. The two features worked, but there was code for some of the next features that was only partly working.

Amber Race "some strings are more equal than others" (clue)

Just learned the lesson again that just because a line of code is covered by a unit test, doesn't mean it actually works in reality. In Java, especially, some strings are more equal than others

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Architectural

nicole forsgren The product mindset:

Build the things that differentiate you, buy the things that dont.

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Devops

dvlping "When you've lost your API key"

Jake Williams 🎤

Annie, are you ok?
So, Annie are you ok
Are you ok, Annie
Annie, are you ok?
So, Annie are you ok
Are you ok, Annie
Annie, are you ok?

Michael Jackson understood the requirements for continuous monitoring...

Sky News This is one network rollout that didn't go according to plan:

Drivers in Houston had to negotiate their way around an unusual piece of road traffic - a giant, rolling cable spool.

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Peopleware

Matt Aimonetti Add this trick to The Art Of Avoiding Unnecessary Meetings:

I started messaging people with whom I have a scheduled meeting but no defined agendas. I offer them to cancel/postpone unless they have agenda items to discuss.

So far, all meetings were cancelled which I think is a win/win situation.

Shreyas Doshi Buckle up, long but excellent thread about the journey from product manager to product leader:

More than 8 years after my last public talk on product management, I spoke about PM career management at Products That Count.

What follows is a long tweetstorm with the key content.

It isn't for the faint of heart.

Are you ready?

Fabrizio Ballarini So you're saying that cross functional teams are more effective than silos:

We put SEOs & devs in the same team, to build stuff with same goal. Moving same KPIs makes tangible and eleminates noise of whether is necessary

Takes time + technically prepared SEOs but instead of explaining what SEOs do, we spend energy on what to build for our customers.

Scott Belsky Or even better, cross functional people:

a lot of the magic i’ve observed in teams over the years happens when the talent stack is collapsed - when a designer also codes, when an engineer has a growth hack skill set, when a product leader is great at copy.

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None of the Above

Amy Scott "Ouch, @NYT_Crossword."

Annie Mueller Kids always know. (Also, interesting new friendly social platform, micro.blog)

“You know, I think that cheddar is, like, more dominant. And what’s that other white one? Not mozzarella. Monterey jack. That one’s kind of weak. Swiss is a baby. Cream cheese is soft. And goat cheese is emotional, you know, it just kind of falls apart.”

Zeke, age 9

DJ Sundog - from the spook-lab "Thanks, GMaps!"

Chenoe Hart "Apparently there's names and abstract diagrams for different types of parking garage configurations."

The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture Greek and Roman statues were often painted, so how did we come to believe they're bare white marble? And why this perception is hard to change.

Matthew Dalby, PhD Probably same number of people in both groups, but one is an upper limit on audience, and the other is just a sub-group of all audiences:

If you made a film that was six hours long no one would watch it.

But if you make a six part TV drama with hour long episodes people will happily sit for six hours binge watching them all.

This probably illuminates something deep about human nature.

Patrick Hackett Ooof:

Normal brain: a building.

Videogame brain: through the door, up the pipe, across the ledge, up the ladder, on to the roof.

Apple News’s Radical Approach: Humans Over Machines It's called "journalism". The NYT gets an exclusive behind the scene look at how "journalism" works, and I wish this was an Onion article, and not actually the NYT being schooled on journalism:

For the first time recently — and after extensive negotiations on the terms of the interviews — Apple agreed to let a Times reporter in on how it operates Apple News.

The Surprising Nuance Behind the Russian Troll Strategy How the Internet Research Agency is playing both sides, to sow discord and undermine democracy.

You Had One Job "Not again."

alex "A brief summary of me trying to follow any type of tutorial on the internet."

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Design Objective

Des Traynor 🤔 There's something to it, at least this example proves the point:

The opposite of a good product principle is itself a good product principle.

Everything else just is a truism.

Designing for Cognitive Differences Often people think of accessibility as “design for blind people”, but what about users with cognitive differences like inattention, anxiety, and depression?

If most users are making mistakes on a form, users with inattention will struggle even more. When this happens, figure out exactly where the errors are occurring, and fix the design of the form to target that error. For instance, if you’re receiving the wrong data for a field, it’s a sign that form labels are unclear; if you have inline-only labels, adding regular labels outside of the fields will do more than adding an explanatory note.

The Art of Feature Naming — Four Survival Tips Naming is hard, here are some shortcuts:

1. Keep names simple.
2. Anchor as much as possible to existing knowledge among your customers.
3. Say what your product or feature does or is.
4. Try to use the name.

Sans Forgetica A font designed to help you remember your study notes, by being more difficult to read than most typefaces. The 'desirable difficulty' you experience prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing (or so they claim).

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Tools of the Trade

Suggested Changes Github's Suggested Changes is just the feature I didn't know I needed, and now can't live without!

Zach Holman I … I … I actually like the new JIRA:

This gif of the new @Jira redesign is probably some of the smartest "show don't tell" marketing I've seen in quite some time. Makes it wildly obvious what's happening in the new version.

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Web-end

Smart Bundling: How To Serve Legacy Code Only To Legacy Browsers As you can imagine, it takes a lot of effort to have the ES6/CSS5 cake and eat it too.

Ricky Mondello 😭

OH: “Just because there’s no objective truth, it doesn’t mean you just use divs and spans everywhere.”

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Lingua Scripta

Thomas Sunde Nielsen 🔥

I think I solved javascript.
undefined = function(){};

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Lines of Code

J.T. Grimes This doesn't mean ship shitty code, it means don't spend too much time on code that provides little value to users:

Maintainability is less important than shippability - nobody submits feature requests on software that hasn't been released.

If you have a choice between getting it *right* and getting it *done*, pick *done*.

Heidi Howard 👌

Best advise I every received on software development: You don’t have to (and will not succeed at) fixing everything, just leave things better than you found them.

Kevlin Henney I think data structures were treated more seriously when computers had limited memory:

I'm intrigued by how often I see the wrong choice of data structure in code.

Data structure choice is considered by many to be less of a priority than it once was, but in the last few weeks the usual suspects have popped up in different contexts, and the choice was significant.

Loch Nessa Monster "this is absolute genius"

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Architectural

Sprints, marathons and root canals How to prioritise technical debt, and convince the business side that refactoring is important?

To keep the pace constant, we need the process to be sustainable, of course, but the product needs to be sustainable as well. That second part of the sustainability is often neglected. That is where all that work wanted by the delivery team comes in, even if it’s not necessarily wanted or understood by the stakeholders. Brady, the cleaning supplies company, sells warning labels that perfectly explain this problem: “If You Don’t Schedule Time for Maintenance, Your Equipment Will Schedule It for You”.

Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing - aka RFCs I like this idea, we do pretty much this (except we share, not send, documents), but labelling them as RFC sounds better:

1. Do planning before building something new.
2. Capture this plan in a short, written document.
3. Have a few, select people approve this plan before starting work.
4. Send this planning document out to all engineers in the company and let anyone and everyone comment on it.
5. Have everyone follow the above steps

Mathias Verraes The illusion of structure:

I think historically we've approached software design too much as an attempt to impose structure. Interesting problems are usually interconnected, so our goal should be to manage interconnectedness instead of squeezing it into the illusion of structure.

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Devoops

Belgian Air Force F-16 destroyed by fire during maintenance – Collateral damage on second F-16 Next time you accidentally rm -rf * in production, remember it could be worse:

a technician was working on an F-16 when he accidentally activated the six-barrels 20mm Vulcan M61A-1 cannon of that F-16. The cannon was loaded and some bullets hit another F-16AM (FA-128). That aircraft had just been refuelled and was – together with another F-16 – being prepared for a (training) mission. Due to the bullets, the F-16AM exploded and damaged the other F-16.

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Peopleware

How to Get Things Done When You Don't Feel Like It It happens to all of us, and there are few easy tricks you can use to cheat procrastination:

Next time you are stuck on a project you don't want to start, try doing something that you know will be satisfying. You just might have a bright idea while you're rinsing off your dishes, and that will make you excited to run over to your computer and get to work.

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Locked Doors

Kenn White Know your threat model:

I opened my Linux Chromebook and found my (grounded) daughter was logged in. I guess props for bypassing my "hardened" profile. But it made no sense. Screen-lock-on-close was enabled and guest logins were blocked, and… /1

Don A. Bailey Well played!

As some of you know @InfoSecMouse is closing its doors.

I'm proud to announce that as my Goodbye to infosec consulting, I am dropping an uncoordinated RCE 0day for OpenSSH (all recent versions affected) that is exploitable due to compiler optimization:

https://www.trusted.is/lms-2018-10-18-openssh-rce

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None of the Above

Solid Sanek

Andy Hunt Nailed it!

No, I don’t want to hop on a damn “quick 30 minute call”. WTF is wrong with you. Third time today I had that offer.

I want your terms, conditions, examples, references, in writing. On record. For future reference.

Ah, now I see the problem...

Peacharu_ "Good morning everyone have an absolutely furious mongoose"

Tess Rinearson Got a point!

hot take: the new yorkers who are upset about the bagel emoji are actually upset about the steady and inexorable shift of economic and cultural power from NY to California

Apple Fixes Bagel Emoji Fortunately, on such critical matters, Apple does listen to its customers.

ShAHHH!nnon Miller Twitter does have its shining moments:

Here is a beautiful hill.

Quote tweet this with the pettiest argument that would make you gladly die on this hill.

Trevor McKendrick True:

The weirdest part of being the 1st finance person @ a startup is going back & forth between doing high value strategic stuff (e.g. hiring, raising money, etc.) and then tediously paying some random $70 invoice

Mauly Fright
me: "I think I'll work from home today so I can be productive and relax!"
foster kitten: 😂