Labnotes

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Weekend Reading — Evening-oriented people will understand

Design Objective

Introducing Design Systems Ops An interesting way to deal with the gap between design and engineering:

A Design Systems Ops is a person who is part of a design systems team … At the same time, Design Systems Ops need to understand the engineering requirements … In a way, a Design Systems Ops is the translator between these two worlds.

The Veil of Ignorance This is something that I often struggle with, when working with young designers: how do we make design more inclusive?

Finding your own style as a designer Don’t worry about finding your style, it will find you:

You see, having your own style is impossible to avoid. But I like to see my “style” more as a definition of how I approach my work. How I work with people, how I deliver results, and how I solve problems.

This Is Why I Never Hire Product Managers When you hire for the role of product manager, look beyond the usual suspects.

Mathias Verraes

There are surprisingly few software design books that recommend taking a walk, a shower, or a nap, as an important step.

Apple, Google, And The Race To Create A Skeuomorphism You Don't Hate Skeumorphism is not just leather stitch in a notes app, it’s also objects that work in their environment, like screens that adjust to ambient light.

BTW the screen on the new 9.7" iPad Pro is fantastic.

Connie Chan Read this first, to decide if conversational commerce is right for your product:

1/ Conversational commerce is unproven, even in Asia. If texting takes more time than clicking a button on a webview, why is it better?

6/ THIS is what a WeChat transaction actually looks like (ordering McDonalds); not a chat but an app-within-an-app.

Tools of the Trade

Developers can run Bash Shell and user-mode Ubuntu Linux binaries on Windows 10 Who are you and what did you do with Microsoft?!

This isn’t Bash or Ubuntu running in a VM. This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself. It’s fast and lightweight and it’s the real binaries. This is an genuine Ubuntu image on top of Windows with all the Linux tools I use like awk, sed, grep, vi, etc. It’s fast and it’s lightweight.

Spreadsheets are dead, long live reactive programming environments! A spreadsheet that is testable, and git-table? Yes please!

ServiceWorker Cookbook The Service Worker Cookbook is a collection of working, practical examples of using service workers in modern web apps.

State of affairs: Bootstrap 4 vs Foundation 6.2 Need a help deciding between the two?

Apple launches Safari Technology Preview for developers “Apple tells TNW it will update Safari Technology Preview every two weeks or so, and will sign and validate each release.” A way to test new Safari features without messing with WebKit nightly.

The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World

  1. cheap parallel computation
  2. big data
  3. better algorithms

Lingua Scripta

What if we had a great standard library in JavaScript?

A standard library would make it a lot easier to write JavaScript by eliminating the need to come up with similar or same solutions to small issues. It would effectively make code easier to read and write as a lot of “searching for a library” and “or maybe I should write this quickly myself” would be eliminated.

The npm Blog — changes to npm’s unpublish policy Follow up to last week’s catastrophe/mishap (depends on who you ask), npm is going immutable(-ish). Limits unpublishing to 24 hours, although packages can still get unpublished and replaced with something else, at npm’s discretion, so really more of a “trust us” architecture.

Why using _.chain is a mistake

There are two not insignificant problems with any application or library that makes use of _.chain: its most common use promotes importing the entirety of lodash to work, and it’s hard to extend with new methods.

Node.js ES2015/ES6 support ES2015 support matrix in Node 4.x, 5.x and upcoming 6.0.

async-csp CSP style channels using async/await:

const ping = await table.take();
await table.put(‘pong’);

Lines of Code

Unit Tests For Algorithm Time Complexity How would you test and algorithm to prove that has a time complexity of O(N log N)?

don't read comments

Today’s overloaded CS term: “pass by reference”. You can’t tell if they mean that or if they mean “pass reference by value”

Rick "This GitHub search says everything about the art of programming"

18,164,823 search results for "This should never happen"

Architectural

This week in Architectural, we look at the highs and lows of memory usage:

Peter Seibel

OH: it is amazing how many people reach for some complex distributed system when really all they need is a PC with 256 gigs of RAM in it.

Bill Budge

Older programmers are like people who grew up in the Great Depression. Thrifty with code and memory because we grew up with so little.

Techtopia

Modstock Modern stock photography for the lives we really live.

We have to go out for dinner. The refrigerator isn't speaking to the stove

Startup Life

How to Decrease the Odds That Your Startup Fails

We chose the wrong market, we didn’t understand the value drivers, we didn’t do enough planning and we did what we thought was cool but the market didn’t validate that.

Peopleware

On leaving your politics at home

I totally understand that from a white male atheist perspective leaving your politics are home is a thing you can do, should do, and is a thing you want everyone to do, but this is not a thing I can do.

Late sleepers are tired of being discriminated against. And science has their back TIL that I’m “evening-oriented”:

Camilla Kring is the founder of the B-society, an international advocacy group calling for increased acceptance of the evening-oriented.

None of the Above

mortenjust/cleartext-mac Write better, with a text editor that only allows the top 1000 most common words in English.

Pádraig Belton “Spare a thought for the @nationaltrust staff, up at 2 am to change the time at Stonehenge. #TimeChange”

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