Labnotes

Jeff Steck “Patented today: A heated decoy keyboard to keep your cat off your laptop. Patent No. 10398125.”

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Design Objective

Design critiques at Figma Six different ways to do design critique.

Exploring the reasons for Design Thinking criticism TL;DR Design thinking brings business and design together, good framework, misleading name:

If used properly, design thinking is here to stay. It helps solve problems, brings divergent voices to the table, and carries a low risk. On the other hand, the classic design process is distinct from the design thinking process-it should remain so and continue to stand on its own.

Ha Phan That's a powerful way to say that:

Team mate: I especially like your disdain for “vomiting your database onto the page.”

Sometimes I say these things randomly and you never know what stays with people.

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Tools of the Trade

Mozilla WebCompat Super useful: “Another gem from @FirefoxDevTools contextual information in the inspector.”

rickhanlonii 🥂

It’s actually only JavaScript if it’s created in the EMCA region of France. Otherwise, it’s a sparkling Java

My favorite CSS hack “Different depth of nodes will use different colour allowing you to see the size of each element on the page, their margin and their padding.”

Robb Owen I second that!

HTML Email requires such specific subset of unsemantic layout methods and workarounds that I propose we redefine it as an independent markup language - I'll float the acronym FML to the committee

Regex Crossword Test your regular expression skills.

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Web-end

CSRF is (really) dead Chrome 78 is getting stricter on cross-domain cookies:

TL;DR: SameSite=Lax by default. Folks who require cross-site access can opt-into the status quo via SameSite=None, but doing so will require asserting Secure as well.

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Lines of Code

Olivia Liddell If you do this one thing well, everything else seems falls into place:

With documentation, I like to take the approach of backwards design, and start with the end goals in mind first.

Ex: By the end of this section, what should someone be able to do?

This helps me to stay focused on just that single topic and not go off on tangents. #DevDiscuss

Against Method Every code I ever wrote:

A codebase is more like a wardrobe. Full of things you thought were good ideas at the time, and that you know you're going to hate in the future.

Vlad Magdalin “I'm just going to fix this lil' bug in the legacy codebase real quick...”

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Architectural

nateish 🎯

Fun things to have to communicate: software isn't like making canned goods you can put on a shelf and come back to 5 years later, it's like making dairy products. If you want to be able to use it, you have to keep the farm in operation, or it goes bad quick.

Kelly Sommers 🔥

Every sci-fi movie is like a sprint estimating meeting. Nobody follows orders and nobody has a clue what’s going on and nobody agrees about anything.

Today in "IP Over Avian Carriers" news TIL

I think every day about how cable internet is IP over MPEG. this is a literal fact. DOCSIS sends downstream data in MPEG frames because that's what the cable networks are optimized for and what all the switching equipment understood when cable broadband took off.

So Netflix on Comcast is MPEG over IP over MPEG.

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Peopleware

Self Portraits over the Years This graph applies to every creative professional.

Think about it next time you're going through that inevitable period of frustration. (h/t batshaped)

17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager Wondering if being a manager is the right career move? Read this first. I don't agree with all the cons listed in that article, but worth knowing what you're getting into. If nothing else, it will help you prepare for the road ahead.

Jaana B. Dogan Related:

Progression of tech careers:

• code, code, code
• code, review code, code
• review code, code, design
• design, review code, code
• design, review design, review code
• design, review design
• delegate the review work effectively

Norgard Worked every time I tried it:

The greatest management tool in history is a focused, leisurely walk and conversation.

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Teamwork

Janna Bastow 👇 I learned the hard way timelines don't work, and switched instead to time horizons. Hope this thread saves you the self-learning:

Most roadmaps are setting up their product teams to fail.

That's because, even today, most roadmaps still follow the dreaded timeline roadmap format 😱

And here's why that sucks. THREAD 👇

What we get wrong about meetings – and how to make them worth attending Short, powerful essay on meetings, and how to use them effectively:

But nothing undermines a meeting more than a lack of agreement as to why it’s happening. I know a school that invites parents in for curriculum meetings. The teachers think they’re explaining their approach to the parents; the parents are under the misapprehension they’re being asked for their input. Nobody goes away happy.

Kienna 👇 How to communicate with more impact:

If there's one piece of advice I can give based on what I've learned and use in school/work/game dev/life...

Learn how to communicate your ideas in a way that is:
🌟 Clear
🌟 Concise
🌟 Compelling

(a thread by a tired knowledge development/communications trained person)

Selling data science If your job is to help drive decisions from data, then consultancy is part of your job:

How do you know you’re a bad data scientist? You never get to present to executives. Your analyses go unused. People don’t send you emails with questions about your numbers. A good in-house data scientist does a good job by putting together good data, and, just as importantly, commanding attention to that data.

See also, I love data science, but I hate consulting.

Preethi Kasireddy 👍

Surround yourself with people who will tell you how it is.

Subtlety is a waste of time.

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Locked Doors

A very deep dive into iOS Exploit chains found in the wild Couple of things going on here.

First, a reminder that iOS is not the most secure operating system in the world. In fact, it has so many security holes, that attackers are willing to pay more for Android 0-day hacks than iOS. But these expensive exploits are used for targeted attacks, so not targeting you, relax.

Second, since Apple went big with "privacy first" (throwing shade at Google), Google's Project Zero has dedicated itself to exploring iOS security issues. Corporate drama at its finest.

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None of the Above

Jody Avirgan “Very accurate forecast today.”

Russell Keith-Magee 😖

I really love the way that headphones have evolved from a mildly inconvenient, but 100% reliable, 100% available cable, to a never-charged-when-it-matters, buggy as all get out Bluetooth interface where the only UI is an undocumented pattern of flashing red and white lights.

Phyllis Fagell Next time you run a Q&A session (kids or adults, all the same):

Kindergarten teacher to class: “Does anyone have any questions?”

24 kids raise their hands.

Kindergarten teacher: “A question is when you need more information. If you want to tell me something about yourself, there will be time for that later.”

Lucas Zanotto “Mood-swings” (Lucas's other eyenimations are just as cool)

Leigh Honeywell Sorry, Akron …

Overheard a friend describing being a straight woman on dating apps: “It’s like Linkedin: the inbounds r always worse on average than outbounds. The guys you message are your dream job and the guys messaging you have an exciting 6-mo java contracting opportunity in Akron, Ohio.”

Celeste Brash Good business model, you'll never run out of mansplainers:

A friend wrote a well-performing tech article on Medium. It's a good article with one small error - its click success has come from dudes clicking and sharing and explaining how she's wrong. So she keeps the error in and makes roughly $100/month off of mansplaining.

Mine CetinkayaRundel Can one thing be scary and reassuring?

As a statistician I like this “I can’t report the estimate because the standard error is too large to be meaningful” attitude, as a passenger I’m thinking “oh boy, what are we in for?”

David Powell ✈️

If you told someone 15 years ago that in the future their computer would have something called “airplane mode,” they would be incredibly disappointed by what that actually did.

Best of Nextdoor “NOT FROM THE JOINT ACCOUNT 😩”

Brian Armstrong Impact takes resilience:

It's easy to bounce from one new idea to the next, exploring your intellectual curiosity. But having an impact requires a decade of moving the ball forward one yard every day, sometimes in a very mundane way, through multi-year ups and downs.

A Rare Universal Pattern in Human Languages Small sample size, but suggests the speed of information exchange is universal:

Both Pellegrino and Futrell predict that the average information rate for casual speech would be lower than 39 bits per second, but it would still be roughly the same across languages. At least in this select group of 17, exchanging one language for another shouldn’t significantly change the amount of time it takes to get across any given idea.

Billy Freeland “It’s the third anniversary of the shortest, and most correct, article in the history of the New York Times.”

Elizabeth Warren Says Talk of Light Bulbs and Straws Is a Distraction Funny story. Today in Santa Monica, I was served iced coffee in a single-use plastic cup with a lid. Had to ask for a straw, told “we only give straws on request”, and got the stinky eye for asking.

“This is exactly what the fossil fuel industry hopes we’re all talking about,” Ms. Warren said. “They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your light bulbs, around your straws and around your cheeseburgers. When 70 percent of the pollution, of the carbon that we’re throwing into the air, comes from three industries.”

Column: Hi, I’m David. I’m a drug addict No, you're not. You're taking antidepressants.

But who was I? Was I me or was I the product of chemical enhancement? If I came off the drug, what would happen?

Listen. I need to wear glasses to use the computer, shave without cutting myself, go places without bumping into things. Not to mention, I get headaches if I use the wrong prescription lens.

Am I not my true self because I wear glasses? Is it really me, or the product of ocular enhancement produced in a lab?

Bob Malak “A millennial when they get a phone call instead of text”

Sketchplanations Delightful blog: “A weekly explanation in a sketch” (via peterritchie)

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Design Objective

Why you’ve got UX and UI all mixed up My opinion as well:

You can’t divorce UI design from UX design. If you are a UI designer you are effectively impacting the user experience. The interaction design is common to both. So let’s get past the dichotomy in this arena and let’s call UI design what it is: a subset of UX design. They are not disparate and opposing professional fields. In this regard UI is UX.

Helen Tran So true:

And all her little things kind of piled up. They weren't grand gestures... they were the opposite of "tiny cuts." Tiny hugs.

If you look at luxury service, it's the same thing. It's all the tiny hugs, "oh. that's nice."

Luke Wroblewski 👇 Thread:

how can we maintain great user experiences on the Web in the face of business pressure? let's look at app install promos as an example... 1/6

Designing address forms for everyone, everywhere The nuances of designing forms for a global audience.

Adam Sedwick Design is what ships:

“The person writing the CSS is finishing the design.” - @jensimmons

Like it or not, until a web design is in code it’s not finished. Getting both devs and designers to understand new css layouts and share a lexicon is imperative to successful design.

Luke Wroblewski Shade: “your design system is a distraction.”

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Tools of the Trade

Addy Osmani “Super cool. Dynamic colour picking for objects by overlaying an SVG with CSS blend-modes by @KyleWetton” https://codepen.io/kylewetton/pen/OJLmJoV

dade 😭

I wanted to know what version of react I was using. I googled "check version of react" and click a stack overflow link. Guy gives an answer that explains how to check. Someone else responds "not working for me" and the guy replies "works for me, what version of react are you on?"

chart.xkcd Every project needs some XKCD styled charts.

Goes to eleven Touch sensitive, HTML input control, goes all the way to 11!

Brooke Watson 😮

just learned with horror that deleting any of the "family" emojis in google slides does not remove the emoji, but rather kills off each individual family member one by one, starting with the children

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Lines of Code

Mx. Aria Stewart 👍

In fact, the primary contribution every developer makes to software is decisions.

Code is the implementation of decisions. It's the details.

what to build and how, with and for whom are the actual contributions. They also outlive any specific piece of code.

Ben Williams “A developer copying code from @StackOverflow”

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Architectural

Martin Fowler Solid fundamentals age well:

No need to be a grumpy old man to say this. The fundamentals of good software development have stayed more similar than not in my 30+ years in the industry. Details change, sure, but energy spent honing core skills will continue to pay.

Rob Graham 👇 Thread:

Yea, I've got 3 hours to kill here in this airport lounge waiting for the next leg of my flight, so let's discuss the "OSI Model". There's no such thing. What they taught you is a lie, and they knew it was a lie, and they didn't care, because they are jerks.

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Devoops

Gabriel Gonzalez Where is the lie?

How to choose a logging level:

• FATAL: I need this to not fail
• ERROR: I expect this to not fail
• INFO: I am pleasantly surprised if this does not fail
• DEBUG: It failed

Connor Roberts When testing in production goes wrong:

This week's round of fake parking tickets. Testers, you can harm actual people with your careless production testing. These are all "in collections" at this point. SMH.

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Teamwork

The 15-minute weekly habit that eased my work anxiety and made my boss trust me more Simple trick that will boost your career:

The approach was simple. Every Friday afternoon, I’d send my boss a short email with three categories:

• The work I had completed that week
• What I was working on, including any deadlines that may have shifted or obstacles I’d encountered
• What I was waiting on—that is, tasks that I’d completed, but require sign-off from my boss or contributions from someone else

Andrew Chen Always pick the processes that are right at your size:

Every blog post / book on business processes — OKRs, hiring, PRDs, launching, etc., etc., almost need a label to describe the stage of co the ideas are for. The workflows that are effective in the big co stages are simply not appropriate for early stage startups with <10 ppl

When to Take Initiative at Work, and When Not To Being proactive can set you for success, or failure. Learn to find the right balance:

Crucially, it is the balanced combination of the above three elements that makes proactivity truly wise. We can all think of someone who takes proactive steps to benefit themselves but rarely considers the organizational context or the needs of others. This is not wise, and is unlikely to lead to effective outcomes. Likewise, someone who carefully considers others, yet overdoes their proactivity to the point of exhaustion, is not going to be successful either.

Parker Henderson Yes.

I firmly believe that you can have the strongest top-level leadership (C-suite, VP, etc.) and A player individual contributors, but if you don't have middle management that is capable, things will fail and break no matter how hard you try.

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Locked Doors

Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome When your marketing is user focused, but the product is not:

I do think that privacy can be a selling point for a web browser. Google has certainly made some user-hostile choices recently, but they aren’t visible to the average user. Firefox, on the other hand, appears to have made a number of user-hostile choices right out of the gate, by including sponsored articles on the default new tab page.

Houston astronaut accused of hacking ex-spouse's bank account from space 😮

According to Worden, in 2019, McClain broke into her bank accounts while she was on board the International Space Station. Worden gave KPRC the letter that her attorney sent to the NASA inspector general documenting the alleged breach.

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Techtopia

Bloom County “Vintage Wednesday, Bloomers. In 2005, I had no idea how bad it was gonna get. -bb”

how to unsubscribe from a marketing newsletter I'm laughing and crying at the same time:

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None of the Above

Marcus “I’ve never seen someone give less of a fuck.”

banana belt betty 💯

Tattoos should actually make you more employable because it shows you can sit in place for hours while tiny needles are jammed into your skin and that’s what every corporate meeting I’ve ever been in has felt like

Paul Krueger The real Game of Life:

I place "Per My Last Email" in attack position. "Per My Last Email" allows me to summon my previous email from the discard pile. I place my previous email in defensive position, then place "No Worries If Not" face down and end my turn

Dennis “Me vs All the competing items on my to-do list”

Michelle Rial When is it too late to start?

I initially didn't tweet this out myself because it was part of 70 new charts exclusive to my (recently released) book — but the internet had other ideas so here it is from me, the person who made it 😊

Danny Deraney “You guys, the otter is telling the human how to pet it and I am now deceased.”

Bertram The Pomeranian has an Instagram and it's too cute for words

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Design Objective

This is the skill most “good” designers are missing TL;DR Product Thinking

Before pushing a single pixel, open up a text editor and start by designing with words. Who is the user? What is their problem? What solutions might solve their problem? What is their journey? What are their emotions along that journey. Tell a story about the user using your product before designing it.

Eric Lawrence “The hardest problems in computer science must be delegated to the user.”

Be an Elegant Simplifier “Elegant simplifiers create designs that are crystal clear.”

If you were a connoisseur of wine, would you choose a clear, crystal goblet to drink from, or a gold, ornate one, studded with jewels? You’d choose the crystal goblet, she answers. Why? Because the design reveals the content. It elegantly and succinctly solves a purpose. It guides the user toward the objective, without distraction. Good design is transparent.

Performance Matters Performance is key to usability:

It wasn’t even that slow. Something like a quarter-second lag when you opened a dropdown or clicked a button. But it made things so unpleasant that nobody wanted to touch it. Paper was slow and annoying and easy to screw up, but at least it wasn’t that.

I think about that a lot.

4 Rules for Intuitive UX I like the squint test, simple and effective:

If you squint your eyes, the Most Important Thing should catch your eye first - and the least important elements should catch your eye last.

Apple says clean Apple Card with a microfiber cloth, avoid contact with leather and denim Only if you want your card to keep looking like new. I keep my cards in a leather wallet in the pocket of my jeans, and sure enough they wear out, and need to be replaced frequently.

But I do think Jessie Char has a great point:

Apple’s biggest strength can be its biggest weakness. Everyone’s so focused on flawless execution that they forget consumers aren’t also going treat the products with white gloves. To them it’s a sculpture, to us it’s a thing we want to use and not worry about.

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Tools of the Trade

Sy Brand “I made a GitHub Action which replaces all the files in your repo with a picture of Nicholas Cage.”

SeanTAllen 🔥

Modern software tooling is amazing. I can go from zero to working thing that I don't understand at all and have zero chance of debugging in a timely fashion quicker than you can say "thank god I don't have to support this thing".

Rick Viscomi “How mad at your CSS do you have to be to add 274 zeroes to your z-index?”

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Lines of Code

Chris McMahon 🎤

Two paths diverged in an app, and I—
I tested the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Wes Chow Tech parenting be like:

Kid: are we there yet?
Me: no

Kid: are we there yet?
Me: no

Kid: are we there yet?
Me: no

Kid: are we there yet?
Me: let me tell you about exponential backoff

lexaloffle 👀

┏┓ 
┃┃╱╲ in
┃╱╱╲╲ this
╱╱╭╮╲╲House
▔▏┗┛▕▔ 
╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲ 
   We do our own memory management.
╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓ ╲╲ 
▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔▕▔W} +A ┗▕▔┛┛┛r&┛9J┛2Segmentation fault (core dumped)

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Architectural

Allen Holub Not everything ages well:

Think of your backlog as a refrigerator. Every so often its worth throwing out those disgusting leftovers that have been growing furry mold in the back of the top shelf. All they do is stink up the place. Don't let anything rot in there—nothing but fresh!

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Teamwork

How to manage up effectively Managing up is the most important skill that no one is teaching!

However, most broadly, thinking about these 5 aspects – sharing progress, uncovering work preferences, building both trust and rapport, clarifying expectations, and sharing feedback – are things you can experiment with as you aspire to have a strong working relationship with your boss.

Marco Rogers 👇 A thread with tips on being an effective manager, and making space for yourself:

My final tip. In order to cultivate those wins, you may need change your expectations of how long things take. Changing things for the better takes time. Just like anything worth doing. Good management is more about gardening than firefighting.

Bryan Haggerty True story:

How most modern meetings end now:

“Alright we’re getting kicked out of this room...”

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Locked Doors

Oliver Hough Esq. 😭

Being hacked?

Remember tell the hackers that this is out of scope.

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None of the Above

DaveApnea 😭

I don’t know what’s more upsetting, that my wife uploaded my snoring to spotify, that 44,000 people have listened to it, or that she took the time to release an instrumental version!

doubletexts 110%!!!

During my interview today i poured some water into a cup and it overflowed a little bit

“Nervous?” asked the interviewer

I simply replied, “No I just always give 110%”

Brandy Jensen But without that "science", we'd have to cancel half of TV programs:

it’s weird we don’t talk more about how it turns out a ton of forensic science is bullshit. blood spatter? made up. fiber evidence? nonsense. arson investigation? basically astrology

blaine capatch “this is DoorDash for bears”

Mashable “Why camp by a river when you can camp on one?”

TikTok Is a Wake-Up Call to Silicon Valley Interesting take on how the Great Firewall has mostly limited Chinese tech to the local market. With escalating trade wars and worsening immigration laws, everything is about to change:

The Firewall started very much out of a desire for information control. But it’s almost accidentally had this larger benefit of creating a space in which Chinese companies can grow.

Opinion Leader 🔥

Just got back from the centrist rally. Amazing turnout. Thousands of people holding hands and chanting “Better things aren’t possible”

Mr. Meowgi “What is this witchcraft!?!?”

Move Over, Shareholders: Top CEOs Say Companies Have Obligations to Society File under "things I never expected to read in the Wall Street Journal":

The Business Roundtable on Monday changed its statement of “the purpose of a corporation.” No longer should decisions be based solely on whether they will yield higher profits for shareholders, the group said. Rather, corporate leaders should take into account “all stakeholders”—that is, employees, customers and society writ large.

Rex Sorgatz 👇 At least they tried to do something interesting:

Logging into my bank (Chase) this morning, the background photo caught my eye. It was my neighborhood (eerie!), which caused me to wonder, "Does everyone see this photo?"

This thread is an investigation into that question. Let's call it: BANK STOCK PHOTO REGIONALIZATION. 1/18

eric jaffe 👇 If you want to understand car culture:

1/ Today a special 20-tweet thread all about @greg_shill's fantastic law review article on how the law subsidizes driving. Finally found time to read the whole thing. Highly recommend for all urbanists and policymakers. Here are my favorite moments. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3345366

Sam Whyte 💯

People snarkily asking why the homeless have mobile phones; it's because phones are really useful and they cost much less than a house.

fearowe ☔️ That move …

Erin “when the requirements change but you already finished the feature”

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Design Objective

Nobi Hayashi Legacy software be like:

Why is the “Save” button on MS Excel represented by the picture of vending machine? (with purchased drink at the bottom)
— a question by young Japanese caught a buzz in Japan

Assaf “The UI is very intuitive”

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Tools of the Trade

Lily Scott Cool!

I just released eslint-plugin-esquery, which lets you use CSS-like selector strings to write simple ESLint rules, right in your ESLint config.

José Miguel Arroyo Where is the lie?

We should update SemVer to have one more leading number:
<marketing>.<major>.<minor>.<patch>
Major, minor and patch keep their original meanings
Marketing: Meaningless number for libraries that don't want to change the first one because of "reasons"

Tracie W “This makes me feel less alone”

Amara Graham Related:

Me until I'm dead:

Developers are, at best, going to skim your documentation unless they have hit a problem, in which case they are going to switch to frustrated/frantic skimming.

This is why your documentation has to be extra clear and inviting.

How Things Work “This is how a mechanical binary counter works”

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Web-end

Jennifer Soloway Yeah, waffle lasagna doesn't sound that appealing.

I'm making a form, so I use the form elements. You wouldn't make lasagna out of waffles, don't make forms out of divs and spans.

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Architectural

Sasha Goldshtein Truth!

The hardest parts of SWE are consensus building, weighing multiple plausible alternatives, risk estimation, team coordination, expectation management, and so many other things that are not “coding”. One of the best SWEs I’ve known used to say “coding is easy and boring”.

Tim Ottinger IMO "the right way" is all about code that you can change:

There is this idea... I don't know who started it... that if you write code "the right way to begin with" that you'll never "have to" change it.

It's one of the most ridiculous ideas on software development, and the root of many dysfunctions.

annika We were promised 1,000 vacuum tubes!

"Where a calculator like the Eniac is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 tubes and perhaps only weigh one and a half tons."

• Popular Mechanics, Mar 1949

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Peopleware

Tina Roth Eisenberg 💯

@scottbelsky Agreed! My friend once pointed out how negatively I spoke about sales. She looked at me and said: “Tina, selling is a transfer of enthusiasm. Nothing else.” That was a game changer for me.

Jessica Rose 👇 The replies to this thread are just …

Tech Twitter: tell me about your most memorable bosses or managers?
Best, worst or just the most baffling?

Jennifer Kim 👇 TL;DR don't hire for the stereotype:

When I think back on the best hires I’ve ever made, there’s a clear pattern of people who defy the stereotypes of their jobs, e.g.

• high EQ engineers
• thoughtful sales people
• assertive support reps
• courageous HR
• imaginative finance

I can think of 2 reasons why… 👇

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Teamwork

Get your work recognized: write a brag document If you want recognition, put it out there:

It’s frustrating to have done something really important and later realize that you didn’t get rewarded for it just because the people making the decision didn’t understand or remember what you did. So I want to talk about a tactic that I and lots of people I work with have used!

Sam Jarman 👇 I think it comes down to ownership and empowering others:

What are your top 3 things you think defines senior software engineer?

Curious because everyone has a different definition of senior. And I know 280 chars isn’t enough, sorry.

Serious thread be serious, but can't argue with Amy Potter:

Airpods
All birds
Hoodie

Melissa Perri 👇 Thread:

I’ve been a part of many #agile or #prodmgmt transformations in large and small companies and there is one thing I keep coming back to.

Leadership owning the change is the biggest barrier to actually changing /1

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Techtopia

Beth Dean “Guy who literally wrote the book on using behavioral psychology in tech to manipulate people now selling how not to be manipulated... life comes at you fast, etc.”

---

None of the Above

dulcedecommie “the newest twitter rabbit hole i’ve fallen down is the fact that amazon makes some of its employees write tweets that are not at all suspicious”

And good people followed up with their own parody posts, which is why my timeline is full of "Amazon FC Ambassador".

meera 🤔

Your salary is just your company’s monthly subscription of you

Madison Kanna How do you know me so well?

Me: Oh I’m going on a 90 minute flight

Me: Carries on laptop, 3 books, 2 journals and a movie downloaded onto my iPad

World of Engineering “It’s called a flip-flop winch and it’s a very handy piece of knowledge to keep in your memory banks”

Why speaking to yourself in the third person makes you wiser Maybe I should give this a try 🤔

If I was considering an argument that I’d had with a friend, for instance, I might start by silently thinking to myself: ‘David felt frustrated that…’ The idea is that this small change in perspective can clear your emotional fog, allowing you to see past your biases.

Mohubedu “Americans will measure with anything but the metric system”

41 Action News
A sinkhole roughly the size of six to seven washing machines has closed the northbound lanes of State Line Road near 100th Street in Kansas City, Missouri.

Ellie Murray “Remember, just because we can get a number, doesn’t mean we have a meaningful answer.”

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Design Objective

Stop designing products for random people An alternative for demographics and personas:

The High-Expectation Customer (HXC) is a 3-in-1 customer who is a benefiter (Someone who is going to benefit the most from your product), a hacker (Someone who is using multiple hacks to solve the problem), and an expert (People aspire to emulate her).

Erika Hall 🔥

If you every think to yourself "Well, a general survey isn't the right way to go about informing this decision, but the CEO really wants to run one. What's the worst that can happen?"

Brexit.

Changelog “We've found it! The only developer in the world who made their website too accessible 😆”

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Tools of the Trade

GitHub Actions Github rolling out CI/CD, free for open source.

Linux, macOS, Windows, and containers
Hosted runners for every major OS make it easy to build and test all your projects. Run directly on a VM or inside a container.

lynn cyrin On building better command line tools:

• error messages are a part of your interface, perhaps the largest part. Writing good ones is hard
• clearly demarking when an error is with you, or with something else, is phenomenally important
• executing multiple commands on one line will always betray you

Sarah Drasner Casual shade:

My coding speeds:

• Fast: I already know how to do this
• Slow: I’m learning something new
• Stopped: damnit why can’t I ever remember if it’s splice or slice

Erin “ancient legend states he turned to stone waiting for his 'npm install' to complete”

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Web-end

Introducing Duotone Font Awesome adds depth with two-tone fonts.

Mark Dalgleish 😭

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Architectural

Mike Veerman In summary:

There are no recipes for building quality software. No framework. No step-by-step-plan. No guarantees.

A good chef continuously tastes her soup. Good devs work on feedback, not prediction.

Sebastian Markbåge 👇 Stateless programming enables time travel, and time travel enables cool UI tricks:

Using computer science magic to make the user experience magic trick work.

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Devoops

Jessica Rose 👇 You know the responses to this thread are gold:

Tech Twitter: Folks often focus on posting our wins on social media.

What's the most bafflingly stupid tech mistake you've made that you're willing to share?

RT for more sympathy-cringe responses?

Here are a couple oops that definitely absolutely did not happen to me:

Nicholas Corgan:
I spent days diagnosing an issue that ended up being caused by me attempting to store 256 in an 8-bit number.

Ash Wilson:
I once nuked some data in a production database because I thought I was logged into staging. Then we discovered that instead of backing up staging and production, we’d actually just been backing up staging twice

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Peopleware

tychon That's a good way to think about it:

Planning is important to me, but not in a micromanagement sense. It's important not to delude myself into believing I have control, but also important to not lose sight of the fact that hope without action is dreaming. Planning is believing there could be a future, if I act.

John Cortexiphan People not asking questions is an early sign of trouble to come:

some more hot takes, for those starting out with being a developer lead or similar... or a project manager... or even just a regular developer...

If someone isn't asking questions about a project or task, they've like not understood what is being done or what is expected of them

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Teamwork

All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people Stop what you're doing and read this article. Here is one interesting takeaway:

But trust also degrades naturally over time. Italian researchers Cristiano Castelfranchi and Rino Falcone have a model of trust in which it’s observability not success that is the key factor. Under their theory an entity that is silently successful can end up seen as less trustworthy than an entity that visibly fails. If we recover from failure quickly and efficiently, trust increases. Whereas when we succeed and no one notices we become more and more unknown and uncertain. This explains what is known as the service recovery paradox, when consumers trust a service provider more after a failure than they did before the failure.

Adrian Sanabria This general principle also applies to “a better UI”, ”more reliable architecture”, etc:

If you know how to make things more secure but you can't convince people to implement it, you won't make anything more secure.

In other words, execution and feasibility are more important than ideas.

Conversation 💯

Given that tech people know what happens when CPU is 100% and RAM is full and you're hitting the swap file, it's pretty weird how many places focus on keeping everyone busy and working on more things than they have teams for.

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Locked Doors

A Technical Analysis of the Capital One Hack Horrible press release aside, this is absolutely right. There's a common factor behind many data leaks, and it's one particular vendor:

While it may be easy to blame Capital One’s developers for the loss of data, the truth is that IAM role misconfigurations are likely present in nearly every single AWS account.

Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data Raise your hand if you did not see this coming:

The security expert contacted dozens of UK and US-based firms to test how they would handle a "right of access" request made in someone else's name.

In each case, he asked for all the data that they held on his fiancee.

In one case, the response included the results of a criminal activity check.

Other replies included credit card information, travel details, account logins and passwords, and the target's full US social security number.

Andy Greenberg “Things that get airdropped to you by strangers at #DEFCON27”

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Techtopia

The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News Why Hacker News feels the way it does (and probably by design):

Hacker News readers who visit the site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of Yuval Noah Harari.

Section 230 Was Supposed to Make the Internet a Better Place. It Failed Section 230 of the CDA shields internet companies from liability for what their users publish. One sentence in particular, and how it shaped the internet of today, the good side and the horrors:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

freia lobo “this new Telegram groups feature is so interesting” (Slow Mode for group discussions 👍)

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None of the Above

Lewis Vaughan Jones “When your drone runs out of battery over a lake, timing is everything...”

Carrick 🤣

Someone else: You’re kind of quiet and boring.
Me: Known issue, closed as duplicate.

Alex Fisch This is how we spend money in the US:

About every 7 months, Uber loses the equivalent of the cost of building a subway from UCLA to the San Fernando Valley!

relationships.txt “My (25m) bf had angered crows and magpies and now they're defecating on my car” (original post removed)

Or as Cullen says:

Murder a crow and deal with the consequences from a murder of crows. Nature is poetic.

Martin “The migration of birds in Europe traced by GPS. 😮😮😮”

A Crashed Israeli Lunar Lander Spilled Tardigrades on the Moon TIL there are no fines for littering the moon:

Fortunately for Spivack and the Arch Mission Foundation, spewing DNA and water bears across the moon is totally legal. NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection classifies missions based on the likelihood that their targets are of interest to our understanding of life. As such, missions destined for places like Mars are subject to more stringent sterilization processes than missions to the Moon, which has few of the necessary conditions for life and isn’t at risk of contamination.

Justin E. Ray Must … resist … urge … to … pet …

Hey, you.
This is important.
Cheetahs don't roar, they meow like housecats.