Published
Weekend Reading — An “inbox 3” kind of week
This week we face the reality of a non-empty inbox, celebrate dyslexic font choice, murder a laptop, blink once, and hallucinate over Garfield.
Chris Wallace “when you present two mockups to the client and they like both” (source)
I started Friday morning with 5 emails in my inbox(*), and finished it with 2 emails in my inbox. 💪 It was by all means a successful day, even if I only finished half of what I was hoping to get done.
Today these 2 grew up to 4. So this really resonates with me. But I'm not giving up. I will inbox zero at least once next week!
Wish me luck.
* I don't count newsletter, because I read those in the evening – or not — they don't weigh on me.
Design Objective
Ben Halpern “Open-dyslexic is now available as a font config option on http://dev.to” More of this!!! Whenever designers show me UIs with carefully chosen delicate fonts that screenshot well, I cringe. Function ahead of form.
The Onion “Man Taking Phone Out Of Case For First Time In Years Struck By Forgotten Beauty” 😭
Tools of the Trade
playwright The next version of Puppeteer, but cross-browser!
We are the same team that built Puppeteer. Puppeteer proved that there is a lot of interest in the new generation of ever-green, capable and reliable automation drivers. With Playwright, we'd like to take it one step further and offer the same functionality for all the popular rendering engines. We'd like to see Playwright vendor-neutral and shared governed.
Kevlin Henney I have to remember this the next time someone brings up DSL in a conversation:
dsl — A domain specific language, where code is written in one language and errors are given in another. — source
Erik Torenberg Microservices!
What’s the best term for the phenomenon by which people create additional complexity in order to preserve their role & importance?
Addy Osmani “TIL you can animate range slider thumbs! Nice demo using <input type="range"> & CSS variables: https://codepen.io/pwambach/pen/MWWNaJO”
Shahed Khan Brilliant business idea!
Negotiation as a Service (NaaS)
Hire a firm to negotiate all of your cloud contracts on your behalf and let them keep 25% of savings or $1k (whichever is greater).
No real downside for company.
Surprised this doesn’t exist!
Dan Hett 😱 “Yesterday my colleague called me a 'laptop murderer' because I cut my computer in half to make it more portable. Does anyone else do this? Is it just me?”
Lines of Code
Mouse Reeve “done, perfect, absolutely without flaw, the most elegant solution." Glaxay brain solution to the fizzbuzz problem.
Peopleware
Aureylian “I get people ask a lot “how do you do it all” and I always jokingly say “I cry a lot” but holy heck this explains a LOT”
One time, I was at a Q&A with Nora Roberts, and someone asked her how to balance writing and kids, and she said that the key to juggling is to know that some of the balls you have in the air are made of plastic & some are made of glass.
Ok, 9:08 still good in time
blinks once
9:25 how!!!!!
Why procrastination is about managing emotions, not time To be on theme, I didn't read the entire article, I'm sure I'll get to it later …
Myrick’s research also highlighted another emotional aspect to procrastination. Many of those surveyed felt guilty after watching the cat videos. This speaks to how procrastination is a misguided emotional regulation strategy. While it might bring short-term relief, it only stores up problems for later. In my own case, by delaying my work I just end up feeling even more stressed, not to mention the gathering clouds of guilt and frustration.
Teamwork
Erik Torenberg This is key, and I've seen this happen more than once. Work that doesn't feel mission critical gets dropped, but if you can't walk a mile, your manager will not bet on you running a full marathon:
A trap some employees fall into is they slack off on lower level work because they want to be given higher level work but because they don’t earn the trust of their employer they stay doing the low level work until they excel at it.
Jennifer Kim I had to deal with this scenario before. Make sure you have these checks in your hiring process:
1% of the population is estimated to be sociopathic (and overrepresented in business, positions of power). So it’s worth building in a “check” in your hiring process to take a closer look at seemingly “perfect” candidates that has won everyone over a little too easily.
Here's one story and a way to check yourself:
I was stunned. Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the phone.
Jennifer Kim I talked about adopting this perspective, in What Does Success Look Like?
These kind of interviews are still too rare.
Companies can build an unfair recruiting advantage, by designing interviews that surface candidates’ growth. Let them show you their trajectory, their potential.
Or keep on keeping on with the same, broken approaches 🤷🏻♀️
Locked Doors
Jeff Bezos hack: Amazon boss’s phone ‘hacked by Saudi crown prince’ What a story!
The two men had been having a seemingly friendly WhatsApp exchange when, on 1 May of that year, the unsolicited file was sent, according to sources who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity.
Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos’s phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Guardian has no knowledge of what was taken from the phone or how it was used.
Tim Medin I suppose we're all leaking data, we just don't all know it yet:
The more I use AWS the more I’m suprised everyone isn’t leaking data.
Google says Apple Safari’s anti-tracking feature can be used to track users Quite ironic I would say:
As noted above, most browsers keep lists of the most commonly used third-party trackers and limit the amount of data that those trackers can get -- for all users. It's a one-size-fits-all, top-down approach.
Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention works from the bottom up instead. It counts how often a given third-party tracker is loaded by the websites a user visits.
The problem is that this block list is going to be different for each user. By deliberately forcing ITP strikes from specific websites and seeing what kind of information is blocked, an external party such as an ad network can get a pretty good idea of what each user's ITP block list looks like.
Techtopia
The Future of Politics Is Bots Drowning Out Humans TL;DR “Democracy requires two things to function properly: information and agency. Artificial personas can starve people of both.”
Judd Legum 👇 Democracy is bad for Facebook (consumer protection, anti-monopoly), and so Facebook is bad for democracy. No surprises here.
- I don't think people fully understand how dysfunctional and dangerous Facebook's political ad policy is
Yes, people know Facebook allows politicians and parties to lie
But it's so much worse
This is important, so I'm going to explain in detail.
Available To Hire
Signal boosting people looking for a job. If your company is hiring, or you know someone who is, reach out to them. If you'd like to get included next week, email me at assaf@labnotes.org
jgoulah Looking for a remote eng leadership position. I love helping to develop and grow people, teams, and companies. Recently built a startup from seed stages through series C and prior to that Sr Engineering Manager at Etsy.
Daniel Lindsley Senior engineer, specializing in Python, JS, testing, search, APIs, mentoring, & building resilient apps. Remote is a must. http://toastdriven.com/daniellindsley/
g_Smith Infosec. Have IT experience and working on my Security+ cert. Willing to relocate.
None of the Above
Charlie O'Donnell “What really killed @WeWork: NYC subway co-working.”
In Chicago we don’t say “I love you”. We say “yes, I can pick you up at O’hare” and I think that’s beautiful.
Phillip Henry This is the most NYC thing:
Someone: Im in town!
New Yorkers: OMFG!! That’s so great! Have fun!!!!
Maxim Leyzerovich “GANfield” Mesmerizing …
alex 🔥
ppl shit on outlook but gmail is still out here looking like 2003
Derek Thompson Me. This entire week has been inbox 3. Send help.
i reject the notion that there are only two kinds of email ppl—inbox zero and inbox 20,000. i am an "inbox 3" guy.
i answer/delete all email except for 3 stressful ones that just sit there for days or weeks, as the inbox grows and shrinks around them, like little inbox barnacles
let me know how i can be helpful Is that the BlockChin everyone is talking about?
What does this (completely real) product do? Wrong answers only
The good thing about insomnia: it sharpens your Math skills, because you spend all night, calculating, how much sleep you'll get, if you're able to "fall asleep right now."
Kerri Elizabeth Miller Overheard at The Airport:
Hey, pro tip for managers - don’t do a performance review on speaker phone in the airport.
Maggie: your boss is horrible and you should quit. Don’t listen to his promise of having a “transparent conversation”.
Erik Peterson “I think it’s awesome you can now rack mount your employees”
Selective Emigration and Personality Trait Change This is interesting. One time opportunity to witness social change at scale, based on personality traits. Unfortunately, not a research we can easily replicate:
… the emigration of 25% of the Scandinavian population to the USA 1850–1920 was driven in part by more ‘individualistic’ personality factors among emigrants, leading to permanent decreases in mean ‘individualism’ in the home countries.”
Dolly Parton “Get you a woman who can do it all 😉” (what are the odds? Jolene playing now in the background …)
