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

Design Objective

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

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

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

Tools of the Trade

Julie 👍 How to build anything:

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

allisongrayce … anything that matters:

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

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

Jenny Shen … to other people and to yourself …:

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

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

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

Lucas Pardue “Cache invalidation is hard.”

Lines of Code

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

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

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

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

Architectural

James Tucker Outside perspective is useful to a point:

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

Peopleware

Auren Hoffman 👇 Explainer of written interviews:

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

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

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

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

Teamwork

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

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

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

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

Techtopia

Jared Yates Sexton For context, read the transcripts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell me this wouldn't be fun to watch.

Business Plan

Ryan Reeves 👇 Thread:

Costco is a fascinating business.

You know all those groceries you buy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Locked Doors

Kurt Opsahl Context is important …

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

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

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

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

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

None of the Above

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

AndrewWrites 😭

iOS 13 will be released every day until morale improves

Best of Nextdoor “Nextdoor in two posts:”

Sumanth 🔥

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dogs In Action Amazing photo collection! (via greywulf)

Design Objective

Cheat sheets: UI terms 👍 Super helpful:

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

Patrick Neeman 💯

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

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

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

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

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

Designers,

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

Tools of the Trade

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

foone 👇 This thread goes in unexpected directions:

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

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

Tomek Sułkowski So basically a modern day defrag?

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

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

Jason Yip 👇This:

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

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

Web-end

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

Kitze “webdev in a nutshell”

Lines of Code

Nick Canzoneri Always …

Always nice to see honest variable names like HALF_HEARTED_EMAIL_REGEX

Ondatra iSchoolicus Some days Twitter is amazing:

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

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

RT Zoe When you finish a PhD in computer science …

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

Architectural

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

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

Teamwork

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

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

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

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

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

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

Startup Life

Aaron Levie All true:

Almost everything I've learned about startups:

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

Rob Walling Consistency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Locked Doors

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

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

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

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

André Staltz 🔥

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

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

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

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

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

Techtopia

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

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

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

None of the Above

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

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

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

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

I like my coffee like I like my browser tabs:

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

Alex Cornell ☕️ Does anyone sense a theme?

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

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

Thomas Limoncelli 🤔

TIL: expense reports are PRs for money

nicole_pumpkins 👀

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design Objective

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

Chris Owens Copy is UI:

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

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

Ha Phan You need to think deeper:

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

Jason Lemkin Related:

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

Katerina Borodina 🌖🌗🌘

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

Tools of the Trade

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

So this just happened:

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

Marcin Wichary 👇 This thread brings back memories:

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

Lines of Code

Ben Orenstein 👇 Thread:

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

This is exactly the wrong thing to focus on.

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

Michael Feathers I think that's correct:

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

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

Matt Pennig 😱

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

Introducing: The Merge

Architectural

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

…

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

…

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

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

For example:

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

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

Devoops

agentdero Honest job posting be like …

Let's call it what it really is.

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

Teamwork

Andrew Clay Shafer 😭

everyone believes collaboration means doing things their way

FLEEKNIK It does …

nobody tells you that success requires so many emails.

None of the Above

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

Naama 😭

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

He's so confused.

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

I'm......

dopegirlfresh 😴

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dana Schwartz 🔥

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Sinclair “The AR future we deserve”

system32comics “Printers Nowadays”

Design Objective

Designing a chair: A story about Junior vs. Senior Designers. An explainer of the famous quote:

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

— Eliel Saarinen

Norgard Important point:

If you build products it’s extremely important to understand preference falsification.

“The trouble with market research is people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say" -David Ogilvy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification

Luke Wroblewski 🔥

consistency.
it's like catnip for UX designers.

Josh Reich “… they didn’t stop to think if they should”

Thankfully the developers at Whirlpool made sure to check the time zone every night to cover the situation that we move our oven to a new continent on a regular basis.

Tools of the Trade

Can I email Like caniuse.com but for email clients.

One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Microsoft Excel That's only a 20% error rate …

The errors often arose when gene names in a spreadsheet were automatically changed to calendar dates or numerical values. For example, one gene called Septin-2 is commonly shortened to SEPT2, but is changed to 2-SEP and stored as the date 2 September 2016 by Excel. The researchers, who published their analysis in Genome Biology, say the issue can be fixed by formatting Excel columns as text and remaining vigilant—or switching to Google Sheets, where gene names are stored exactly as they’re entered.

Harrison Weinerman “The SwiftUI ‘Disable Autocorrection’ modifier icon is ‘no duck’ 😂🚫🦆🚫”

Tim Pope “when people ask me to recommend a text editor”

Lines of Code

Senior Oops Engineer Whiteboard interviews test the opposite skills you need to be successful at the job:

One of the problems with whiteboard coding in interviews (there are many) is that the whiteboard gives zero feedback -- not even syntax errors! I go to great lengths to get my computer to give me feedback on the programs I write (TDD, dependent types, etc.). This is a good thing!

Kelly Vaughn 😀 You caught me:

How I code:

1. Make it work
2. Make it pretty
3. Make it work again because I probably broke it while trying to make it pretty

Andrew Clark Truth:

"Readable" is programmer for "written by me"

Architectural

Monoliths vs Microservices is Missing the Point—Start with Team Cognitive Load h/t mikehadlow

Software architecture is largely about addressing the human constraints of developers, not the technical constraints of computers.

Norgard Yes:

One of the most powerful signals of overbuilding or poor product strategy is working on things that don’t touch the core.

Jaana B. Dogan This needs to be a t-shirt:

“But it worked on my cloud.”

Peopleware

Ben 👇 How to build a better relationship with your manager: make your goals clear, help them help you (h/t cattsmall):

1/18 I've been working as a professional programmer for ~9 years, worked at 5 companies, and had 19 managers (14 in ~4 years at Twitter). As a result, I've had a lot of experience establishing new relationships w/ a manager, and here's a thread about it.

Detritivore Biome 👇 If you're early in your career, read this thread for important perspective:

To sum up: as an entry-level dev applying for your first job you probably believe that you are entering a shining utopia of smart people doing Hard Things.

You are not.

You are applying for a better-paying job in a field that is just as fucked up as the field you are leaving.

Teamwork

Dare Obasanjo 💯

There are 3 qualities that distinguish great PMs from merely good ones

• Empathy: Ability to balance stakeholder perspectives
• Product sense: Has intuitive framework for making product decisions
• Credibility: Exudes subject matter expertise and integrity in communication

Carmel DeAmicis 👇 Thread on the constant cycle of death and rebirth that is growing a company:

1/ Twetestorm time: As Figma hits that crazy growth point, I’ve been reflecting on the role grief plays in startups. The company is shedding its skin on a daily basis, a constant cycle of death and rebirth. If you stick along for the ride, you’re always saying goodbye...

Tanya Reilly Why change is difficult:

If you're improving something, you're a threat to it. You're a new risk. And if you forge ahead without involving the people who care, they'll happily tell everyone "I said this was a bad idea🤷‍♀️" the first time something small goes wrong. It's an uphill struggle after that.

Locked Doors

NY Payroll Company Vanishes With $35 Million Wow:

MyPayrollHR, a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people having money drained from their bank accounts and has left nearly $35 million worth of payroll and tax payments in legal limbo.

Equifax is going to make you work for that 125 bucks it owes each of you Update on the Equifax settlement scam:

Yep, you are really going to have to work for that $125. And the truth is that even if you do jump through all the hoops Equifax has put in the way, you are still unlikely to get the $125 promised.

What is going on? Put simply, Equifax and the FTC are embarrassed that their smoke-and-mirrors approach to settling a massive data breach has been exposed as such.

None of the Above

JohnBelski “In Wyoming a tornado warning has been issued for a population of 1 person and we are not sure if that person is even at home.”

ruby 😭

Tea:

• calming
• many flavours
• the answer to all problems

Coffee:

• Anxiety Juice™
• 3 heartbeats for the price of 1
• more than 4 cups and you can talk to electricity

Rachel Coldicutt 😭

Why do “morning routines of successful people” never include 15 minutes saying, “Can you get dressed now?” to a small child and involve coming back into the house to take off and put back on an entire school uniform that is somehow all in the wrong way round?

Nicola Meighan “I have read this, and read this, and read this. I’m not sure that I ever need to read anything else.”

Paraic O'Donnell 👇 Thread:

I’ve been reading some historical fiction for review, and it’s inspired me to create some writing tips for the genre.

Follow these simple guidelines, and you too can produce immersive and convincing period fiction – all without ever setting foot in the actual past.

Eve Forster “Single slit experiment”

Laurie It's easier to self-select, than to get rejected by others, still:

Don't self select out of things you want to do.

Apply to the job, submit to the CFP, submit that PR.

Let them tell you it's not a good fit. You never know, they might say yes!

MalwareTech PSA for Twitter users engaging with trolls:

The new twitter recommendation algorithm means that just replying to an account boosts their profile. When someone is being an ass, ask yourself if telling them they're an ass is worth being their PR agent for free.

jordan “Shot. Chaser.”

Remove Richard Stallman Why do we tolerate this?

Scott Galloway Definitely nothing weird going on here:

More news from WeWTF today.

i) Adam’s shares reduced from 20x to 10x voting power; ii) The board can now remove him; and iii) @Softbank to purchase $750mm in shares at IPO.

Aussies Doing Things “There are two types of dogs...”

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

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.

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.

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.

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...”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”