Published
Weekend Reading — 🏇 How much HP in a horse?
This week we got fast chickens, cows in earmuffs, fishy bots, powerful horses, and one scared alligator.
🪑 Design Objective
The Golden Ratio and User-Interface Design You may also recognize it as the rule of thirds (h/t):
cmd+k is quietly becoming a user expectation in software.
A good cmd+k interface combines fuzzy search and arbitrary action execution. So both a speed and discoverability/usability win.
I recently added Cmd+K on this blog courtesy of Algolia:
🧰 Tools of the Trade
Logtail New (to me) logging service and its super-power: SQL-like queries. You can turn queries into beautiful dashboards, and irregular log volume alerts. Also, long term archiving to S3, and 1/10th the price of Papertrail.
I set Logtail up for one of my projects, so now I have a dashboard that shows errors by volume (group by dt) and top causes (group by code order by count desc).
Neat GitHub notifications in your menu bar. With inline preview, keyboard shortcuts, silent notifications, and more. The project goal is to build a new notification UX, with GitHub being the first supported app.
Fine Tune So I built a UI for OpenAI. I did some experiments with fine-tuning a completion models, and made a few missteps trying to use the API directly. So I made it simpler and easier to use, and of couse open source. And with support for CSV + Excel, because that's more like how you store your training data.
Built with Next.js + TypeScript + TailwindCSS + NextUI. Oh, and credit to OpenAI for helping write some of the code with its smart autocompletion.
z3r0trust “Somebody call the art museum because we're dealing with an artist."
🕸️ Web-end
The State Of The Web The opening presentation from An Event Apart, April 2021. About moonshots, spackling paste, good old Flash, and the dependency diet:
Lean into what web browsers can accomplish today. If you find something missing, that’s the time to reach for a library …but treat it like a polyfill. Whereas web standards stick around, every library and framework comes with a limited lifespan. Treat them as cattle, not pets.
Rik Schennink “🧪 Use CSS numeric factory functions instead of string concatenation to set style unit values.” Super cool but only in Chrome and Edge right now …
🧑🤝🧑 Teamwork
Builder Report Why do builders build, what gets in their way, how it relates to company size, and other stuff you may already know form first-hand experience, but always better to see with statistics:
The best parts of software development are: (1) the relationships with teammates, (2) the technical challenges, and (3) the compensation for their work.
The worst parts of software development are: (1) the time it takes to ship, (2) the software development process, and (3) the tools used for work.
You’re scheduling too many 1:1 meetings It’s not just you … “The calendar app Reclaim.ai found that the average professional now spends 21.5 hours a week in meetings.”
📈 Business Side
Kristen 👍
Been thinking about this one. The idea that these are "growth bets" and not "growth debt" is really appealing.
Reframing your tradeoffs as a gamble (ie there is a reason you do it) makes a ton of sense. Thanks for pushing my brain in public John!
🤖 Machine Inelligence
⭐ None of the Above
Rex Chapman “Alligators? No problem — la chancla …”
I just learned that 1 horse has about 15 horsepower and I'm so mad I can't think straight
Sibin “This is so f*cking cool!”
Me, looking back on every poor life decision I made: “That wasn’t canon.”
I was thinking about the most offensive job offer I have ever received, that I never tweeted about because they had me sign an NDA before we talked about it.
But I just went back and read the NDA and it says I was supposed to be paid for my time and I never was, so…
Jack Daniel “There’s a story here, probably several.”
Sam “I am blown away by this COVID vaccine video, one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time”
Hillel “Played me like a gosh-darned fiddle”
summer stolarcyk “Baby cows in earmuffs to protect them from frostbite😍”
