Published
Weekend Reading — 😎 Good morning LA
Good morning LA! I just moved to downtown LA to experience the nice weather and delicious food, though you're more likely to find me at a coffee shop drinking iced Matcha latte because that's the Z thing to do.
Tech Stuff
Just a QR Code When you need to generate a QR code quickly and easily and without getting distracted by annoying ads.
Principles & Practices Linear has a really good list of Principles & Practices. For example:
Cycles create a healthy routine and focus teams on what needs to happen next. 2-week cycles are the most common in software building. They're short enough to not lose sight of other priorities, but long enough to build significant features. Cycles should feel reasonable. Don't overload cycles with tasks and let unfinished items move to the next cycle automatically.
platformatic/php-node Run Wordpress in your Next.js frontend. Ok, don't run Wordpress, Automattic is very problematic, try Ghost instead, but this is a cool concept — run any PHP code in your Node.js app.
DeskMinder Do you get easily distracted? You might like this simple app for quickly creating reminders. Full-screen notifications (for the ADHD in you), sync with Apple Reminders, quick shortcuts, lives in menu bar, and such.
One of the most harmful pieces of advice is to not reinvent the wheel.
It usually comes from a good place, but is typically given by two groups of people:
• those who tried to invent a wheel themselves and know how hard it is
• those who never tried to invent a wheel and blindly follow the advice
DoubleMemory Instantly and effortlessly capture and recall everything. No accounts, no servers, no tracking. Just press ⌘ + C + C. $3.99/month, so not super expensive for helping you remember things.
Two different approaches to debugging a software problem:
The Sudoku approach: stare at the limited set of clues you have, and think harder and harder about them until you find a way to deduce something useful.
The Minesweeper approach: don't even try to figure out the solution from only the clues you have right now. Instead, focus on finding a way to acquire another clue, and then using that to get another, and so on. Eventually you've collected so many clues that the answer is obvious.
Sometimes the Sudoku approach is necessary, because you've got all the clues you're ever going to get. But I think my new motto is "Never Sudoku a problem when you can Minesweeper it."
DaFont A collection of different fonts you can download and use (freeware, shareware, public domain, etc).
People need to be told about your project multiple times, in multiple places [personal note, this applies to open source software, open source hardware, any project really - a press release or launch blog post != a successful launch that everyone has seen, read, or heard about]
@badosz/holy-time Yet another (type-safe) date time library
HolyTime
.in(4, 'days')
.add(2, 'weeks')
.subtract(4, 'minutes')
.isWeekend()
Lovable Talk with Claude and it will build a web app for you which, for many use cases, what more could you ask? Free for public projects, $25/month for private projects with custom domains. Integrated with GitHub, Supabase, Stripe, et al.
rands 👍
Code I have not written in the past month: weather checker, watch watching script, finance tracking scripts, NHL stats checker, tool to explore my tweet corpus, updated .zshrc, script to check git status, tool to look up town populations, and email scanner.
Projects I’ve completed thanks to robots. All of the above.
Smashing Animations Part 3: SMIL’s OMG I miss Yogi Bear and glad they used him to illustrate SMIL animations in SVG:
While there are plenty of ways that CSS animations can bring designs to life, adding simple SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) animations in SVG can help them do much more. Andy Clarke explains where SMIL animations in SVG take over where CSS leaves off.
An incomplete list of things that make computer programmers obsolete:
- COBOL
- SQL
- BASIC
- Smalltalk
- HyperCard
- VisiCalc
- Visual Basic
- Fourth-generation languages
- No-code platforms
- LLMs
Lentävä Kalakukko “Turbo Pascal vs. Pedro Pascal.”
Variable naming conventions by programming language:
Python: the_thing
JavaScript: theThing
TypeScript: theThing: any
Java: AbstractFactoryPatternSingletonInstanceManagerThing
C: i
Go: thing, err
Rust: maybe_the_thing
anonymoushackerIV/Duolingo-Pro-BETA When all you care about is farming Duolingo to collect more XP points!
Water loves to look at perfectly good metal and say "Rewrite it in Rust"
Christian Lawson-Perfect “When you finish writing your parser”
Eye for Design
Designing for Serial Task Switching On the web, even simple tasks, like reading or searching, draw on similar cognitive resources, making it nearly impossible to truly multitask without sacrificing performance. In these cases, we are not multitasking, we are serial task-switching:
Serial task switching, or rapidly shifting attention between tasks, is a natural user behavior that lowers productivity and increases stress and the chance of errors.
call me old-fashioned but I miss the days where you could just enter your username and password to log into a fucking website
robmesure Related, “I have been logged out of my toothbrush.”
Peoples
Also, I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but I'll say it again:
Part of your job as a senior is to tell your juniors about your fuckups. The embarrassing cringe reckless and lazy bullshit that you did when you were new, and the various times you brought down Prod. We ALL did it sometime. And then tell them: the moment you realized you fucked up, I know, the impulse is to try and cover it up, but don't do it. Come to the seniors you trust, and they'll help you unfuck it, and fight management tooth and claw like mamma and pappa bears to defend you from any shitheads in management. Because that's what our seniors did to us.
The Pac-Man Rule at Conferences
When standing as a group of people, always leave room for 1 person to join your group.
Your 30/60/90 is too slow for startups ⏲️
This 3/6/9 isn't easy, but it's effective. Remember that bug-triage call I took over? By the end of week two, we'd tweaked the agenda, clarified roles, and it was finishing on time. Small win, but it unblocked engineering and made Tuesday mornings a little less dreaded. You build trust and authority through collaboration and contribution, not just talk. You learn faster by doing. You give immediate relief to your boss and colleagues. You avoid career-limiting early missteps and finish your first two weeks on an upswing.
Granola The AI notepad for team meetings: records the audio, creates a transcript, and uses AI to summarize the key points. Super useful, and I just tested it on face-to-face meeting and a team video call, and it captured all the key points that I need for future reference. 👍
Business Side
It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.
Google claims users find ads in AI search 'helpful' Who am I to doubt an ad company telling me that human demographic finds ad useful based on internal data they don't want me to review:
Google AI mode and AI Overviews now have ads, which, according to the search engine giant, are "helpful."
Google won't share the numbers or methodology of its "internal data," but it wants you to believe that ads are helpful, especially in AI search results.”
Machine Intelligence
What makes LLMs work isn't deep neural networks or attention mechanisms or vector databases or anything like that.
What makes LLMs work is our tendency to see faces on toast.
The "Artificial" in AI is a MacGuffin. The taproot of this ideology is intelligence: that is, an intelligence that can be measured and ranked, an intelligence that is both quantifiable and presumptively quantified. Presumptively, because those asserting its value rarely bother with the measurement itself, preferring instead to infer it from other characteristics.
Insecurity
The GitHub MCP server suffers from the lethal trifecta for prompt injection: access to private data, exposure to malicious instructions + the ability to exfiltrate information
Be really careful with this stuff: attackers can trick your "agent" into stealing your private data
Everything Else
Mike L Tilford “Maybe we should go around this truck.”
Hard to believe 1980 was 20 years ago
There should be an app that lets you feel the satisfaction of sending an angry email, but which delivers the diplomatic one.
SunSeekr Find a sunny cafe around you — this is a super cool app that can map any address and show you the sunny and shaded areas for any time of the day. Look up cafes, bars, restaurants, or any other place where you might want to enjoy — or avoid — the sun.
If I could give past me 1 piece of practical advice, it would be: keep a spreadsheet w the start/end dates of every place you lived, job you had, and trip you took. The SHEER NUMBER of times I've needed some of this info and had to go email spelunking…😭
At least a song told me to wear sunscreen 🙃
A wave of new owners brings fresh energy to independent bookselling Bookstores are making a comeback because of the one thing Amazon could never deliver you which is the sense of community:
In the age of social media, people are craving genuine connection and community," Salazar says. "And books often provide a catalyst to that feeling of community.
am i supposed to meet no one? Contrast that with the antisocial tech bro revolution:
So what exactly is this timesaving and hassle-free living for? What will be our freetime if it's not with people or many creative hobbies? Watching more ads and consuming more online content? Online shopping? 15 step skincare routine the takes 2 hours twice a day?
A Hawk in New Jersey Figured Out Traffic Signals and Used Them to Hunt
Perched low and hidden behind the car queue, the raptor would bide its time. Then it flew — low, swift, and nearly invisible beneath the canopy of vehicles — before crossing the street and plunging into a yard frequented by sparrows, doves, and starlings. They gathered each morning to feed on crumbs left behind by a family that dined outdoors the night before. The hawk struck with shocking accuracy.
If at any given point in your life, you need some minimalistic pigeon feet for your Ikea stool, I made this free 3D print model
Enjoy and share!
