Published
Weekend Reading — Anxiety Juice™
Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan. — Eliel Saarinen
system32comics “Printers Nowadays”
Design Objective
Designing a chair: A story about Junior vs. Senior Designers. An explainer of the famous quote:
Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.
— Eliel Saarinen
Norgard Important point:
If you build products it’s extremely important to understand preference falsification.
“The trouble with market research is people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say" -David Ogilvy
consistency.
it's like catnip for UX designers.
Josh Reich “… they didn’t stop to think if they should”
Thankfully the developers at Whirlpool made sure to check the time zone every night to cover the situation that we move our oven to a new continent on a regular basis.
Tools of the Trade
Can I email Like caniuse.com but for email clients.
One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Microsoft Excel That's only a 20% error rate …
The errors often arose when gene names in a spreadsheet were automatically changed to calendar dates or numerical values. For example, one gene called Septin-2 is commonly shortened to SEPT2, but is changed to 2-SEP and stored as the date 2 September 2016 by Excel. The researchers, who published their analysis in Genome Biology, say the issue can be fixed by formatting Excel columns as text and remaining vigilant—or switching to Google Sheets, where gene names are stored exactly as they’re entered.
Harrison Weinerman “The SwiftUI ‘Disable Autocorrection’ modifier icon is ‘no duck’ 😂🚫🦆🚫”
Tim Pope “when people ask me to recommend a text editor”
Lines of Code
Senior Oops Engineer Whiteboard interviews test the opposite skills you need to be successful at the job:
One of the problems with whiteboard coding in interviews (there are many) is that the whiteboard gives zero feedback -- not even syntax errors! I go to great lengths to get my computer to give me feedback on the programs I write (TDD, dependent types, etc.). This is a good thing!
Kelly Vaughn 😀 You caught me:
How I code:
- Make it work
- Make it pretty
- Make it work again because I probably broke it while trying to make it pretty
Andrew Clark Truth:
"Readable" is programmer for "written by me"
Architectural
Monoliths vs Microservices is Missing the Point—Start with Team Cognitive Load h/t mikehadlow
Software architecture is largely about addressing the human constraints of developers, not the technical constraints of computers.
Norgard Yes:
One of the most powerful signals of overbuilding or poor product strategy is working on things that don’t touch the core.
Jaana B. Dogan This needs to be a t-shirt:
“But it worked on my cloud.”
Peopleware
Ben 👇 How to build a better relationship with your manager: make your goals clear, help them help you (h/t cattsmall):
1/18 I've been working as a professional programmer for ~9 years, worked at 5 companies, and had 19 managers (14 in ~4 years at Twitter). As a result, I've had a lot of experience establishing new relationships w/ a manager, and here's a thread about it.
Detritivore Biome 👇 If you're early in your career, read this thread for important perspective:
To sum up: as an entry-level dev applying for your first job you probably believe that you are entering a shining utopia of smart people doing Hard Things.
You are not.
You are applying for a better-paying job in a field that is just as fucked up as the field you are leaving.
Teamwork
There are 3 qualities that distinguish great PMs from merely good ones
• Empathy: Ability to balance stakeholder perspectives
• Product sense: Has intuitive framework for making product decisions
• Credibility: Exudes subject matter expertise and integrity in communication
Carmel DeAmicis 👇 Thread on the constant cycle of death and rebirth that is growing a company:
1/ Twetestorm time: As Figma hits that crazy growth point, I’ve been reflecting on the role grief plays in startups. The company is shedding its skin on a daily basis, a constant cycle of death and rebirth. If you stick along for the ride, you’re always saying goodbye...
Tanya Reilly Why change is difficult:
If you're improving something, you're a threat to it. You're a new risk. And if you forge ahead without involving the people who care, they'll happily tell everyone "I said this was a bad idea🤷♀️" the first time something small goes wrong. It's an uphill struggle after that.
Locked Doors
NY Payroll Company Vanishes With $35 Million Wow:
MyPayrollHR, a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted in countless people having money drained from their bank accounts and has left nearly $35 million worth of payroll and tax payments in legal limbo.
Equifax is going to make you work for that 125 bucks it owes each of you Update on the Equifax settlement scam:
Yep, you are really going to have to work for that $125. And the truth is that even if you do jump through all the hoops Equifax has put in the way, you are still unlikely to get the $125 promised.
What is going on? Put simply, Equifax and the FTC are embarrassed that their smoke-and-mirrors approach to settling a massive data breach has been exposed as such.
None of the Above
JohnBelski “In Wyoming a tornado warning has been issued for a population of 1 person and we are not sure if that person is even at home.”
ruby 😭
Tea:
- calming
- many flavours
- the answer to all problems
Coffee:
- Anxiety Juice™
- 3 heartbeats for the price of 1
- more than 4 cups and you can talk to electricity
Why do “morning routines of successful people” never include 15 minutes saying, “Can you get dressed now?” to a small child and involve coming back into the house to take off and put back on an entire school uniform that is somehow all in the wrong way round?
Nicola Meighan “I have read this, and read this, and read this. I’m not sure that I ever need to read anything else.”
Paraic O'Donnell 👇 Thread:
I’ve been reading some historical fiction for review, and it’s inspired me to create some writing tips for the genre.
Follow these simple guidelines, and you too can produce immersive and convincing period fiction – all without ever setting foot in the actual past.
Eve Forster “Single slit experiment”
Laurie It's easier to self-select, than to get rejected by others, still:
Don't self select out of things you want to do.
Apply to the job, submit to the CFP, submit that PR.
Let them tell you it's not a good fit. You never know, they might say yes!
MalwareTech PSA for Twitter users engaging with trolls:
The new twitter recommendation algorithm means that just replying to an account boosts their profile. When someone is being an ass, ask yourself if telling them they're an ass is worth being their PR agent for free.
jordan “Shot. Chaser.”
Remove Richard Stallman Why do we tolerate this?
Scott Galloway Definitely nothing weird going on here:
More news from WeWTF today.
i) Adam’s shares reduced from 20x to 10x voting power; ii) The board can now remove him; and iii) @Softbank to purchase $750mm in shares at IPO.
Aussies Doing Things “There are two types of dogs...”