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Weekend Reading — ASCII stupid question

This week we have tiny wins, good and bad zips, integer overflow, dishwasher cartridges, robots with lasers, and cats dropping things.

Weekend Reading — ASCII stupid question

your secret is safe with me


🪑 Design Objective

The UI & UX Tips Collection: Volume Two Round two, more UI/UX tips, simply explained and beautifully illustrated.

Tiny Wins The big benefits you reap from a habit of making little changes.

The first of these changes took just under a week and the second took only a few minutes. Both changes affected very small sections of the platform, yet both enjoyed a passionate, almost euphoric reception. Users were excited.

I believe that getting into the habit of shipping Tiny Wins can do wonders for your brand. It can set you apart from competitors. It can show your users that you’re listening to them and that they can trust you. It can turn those same users into promoters, boost your NPS, and lead to organic growth. Most importantly, it’ll make your product, and the lives of your users, that much better.

Lenny Rachitsky 👇 “14 habits of highly effective Product Managers”

What is this “shape design” thing? I like these illustrations.


🧰 Tools of the Trade

Peter Steinberger “Comparing React Native with Flutter on Google Trends is quite interesting. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=React%20Native,Flutter

Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages This is a clever bit of engineering:

Firstly, SQLite (written in C) is compiled to WebAssembly. … sql.js only allows you to create and read from databases that are fully in memory though - so I implemented a virtual file system that fetches chunks of the database with HTTP Range requests when SQLite tries to read from the filesystem: sql.js-httpvfs. From SQLite’s perspective, it just looks like it’s living on a normal computer with an empty filesystem except for a file called /wdi.sqlite3 that it can read from.

Jean Yang 👇 Interesting thread:

When we talk about "developer experience," we really need to separate dev tools into two categories: ones that simplify things away and ones that help developers engage with complexity. DX needs are different for simplification tools vs complexity-embracing tools!

The history of CSS Always interesting to read how technologies are born.

Emily Strickland TIL

gzip is short for “good zip” and bzip means “bad zip”

i will take no questions at this time


📓 Lines of Code

The True Meaning of Technical Debt Reframing technical debt as a disagreement between business needs and how the software has been written.

Matt Rickard Integer overflow:

Wow, so Berkshire Hathaway is so expensive it broke NASDAQ data feeds.

Apparently the feeds transmit stock prices as int32. The highest number they can handle is $429,496.7295.

Berkshire class A hit $421,000 and disappeared from the feed. Fix is slated for May 17th


🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Teamwork

Jennifer Kim It sure looks like it:

seems like everyone i know is either actively moving to leave their current job, or is preparing to in a few months.

the great covid talent shuffle is coming.....

And after 2020, it might be quite the rebound. Eryn O'Neil:

We are about to see a year's worth of natural attrition hit all at once. It's likely every company will get a little shakeup. But companies who haven't been treating their people well?? They are REALLY going to feel the pain.

Mekaelia Davis 🙏

Can we please stop using the language "return to work" in our planning? We never stopped working. We weren't on vacation. In fact, we've been working even more. Language is important, please and thank you.

Microsoft 💪

Normalize providing agendas with meeting invites.

Yale study shows class bias in hiring based on few seconds of speech Maybe bring Alexa to the job interview?

They discovered that speech adhering to subjective standards for English as well as digital standards — i.e. the voices used in tech products like the Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant — is associated with both actual and perceived higher social class. The researchers also showed that pronunciation cues in an individual’s speech communicate their social status more accurately than the content of their speech.


📈 Business Side

Tarak Parekh “This chart by @kevinrooke - 🤯”


🔒 Locked Doors

The Instagram ads Facebook won’t show you Signal runs multi-variant Instagram ad that show people the data that Facebook collects about them. Not surprisingly, Facebook shut it down.

Renew and Refill Bob Cassettes for 98% Cost Saving! So apparently there are desktop dishwashers, and like printers they make all the money on cartridges:

Therefore, refilling it yourself is more than 60 times cheaper, resulting in a massive 98% cost saving compared to buying new!

Unnecessary Inventions “I invented the Password Keyboard. The fastest way to enter your password and ONLY your password.”


⭐ None of the Above

Dan Barrett “Lies.”

John Hays 🤣

ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSII

Yelitsa Jean-Charles

Everyday my emails get closer to just saying:

“Thank you. Unfortunately, I just don’t want to.”

Alasdair Beckett-King “If Columbo were anime:”

Cargo Pants and Outdoor Slippers Are Hot, as Americans Return to Stores It’s back to buttoned shirts and zipped pants. 🤷‍♂️:

Farming Robot Kills 100,000 Weeds per Hour With Lasers Imagine this technology but in a Roomba?

A farmer moved the border between France and Belgium so his tractor could have more room I wish we can resolve all border disputes this easily:

“I was happy, my town was bigger,” David Lavaux, the mayor of Erquelinnes, told French TV channel TF1, according to the BBC. “But the mayor of Bousignies-sur-Roc didn’t agree.”

Why Cats Knock Your Stuff Over—and How to Stop Them I don’t have a cat, so my opinion is that you catch them in the act and post the clip to Instagram and that would shame the cat to stop … or at the very least entertain the rest of us.

Is Night Shift really helping you sleep better? TL;DR probably not. I love Night Shift. I'm at the age where I can feel how it helps relieve eye strain. For sleeping, though, what I found most helpful is using dark mode and on lowest brightness. Reading in the dark with only the letters lighting up, instant snooze.

Liz Slade “This dad press conference is excellent 😂”

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