Weekend Reading — 🛢️ Data is the new oil

PAPA_5K “Bodega cat working from home”

🏠 WFH

Jackie Singh 😷 “most of the zoom personality types” — I only got to do 1/4th of these so far …

Jon Lovett 🤔 Why do video meetings feel more “exhausting”? You can't tell when people are looking away, so you have to be “on” all the time. You're acting for the camera and also directing yourself:

Usually you don't have to screw your face into an “I’m on” position always. In person, you still have moments to yourself. Maybe that's why it's uncomfortable to glance over at someone and find that person already looking at you and why they glance away quickly.

6 Feet Office If open office plans are going to survive through 2020, they may end up looking like this. There's a chance — slower economy, more people working from home, retailers moving online — that office space prices will go the way of oil, and tech companies will “innovate” by adding walls and doors. I'm not holding my breath, are you?

Tristan Harward 🤣

So, lemme just share my screen... one second.

OK can everyone see my screen?

Sailor Moon Livetweet @ home “Ending zoom calls with your friends like”

🪑 Design Objective

Streem Need help but don't want a service person in your house? Video Chat and Augmented Reality can solve that. I expect we'll be seeing a lot more Shared AR Experience apps in the future.

🧰 Tools of the Trade

BlurHash Simple service that turns any image into a blurred placeholder. The placeholder is only 20~30 characters, so you can inline into HTML/CSS, or serve it inside the JSON response data.

How to find cause of high kernel_task cpu usage? TIL If your MacBook Pro runs hot or shows a high % CPU for the kernel task, try charging on the right and not on the left!

Node.js version 14 available now We're getting optional chaining, nullish coalescing, I18N, ES Modules (no longer experimental feature), and Async Local Storage API (basically, ThreadLocal).

Stream Super cool. Let's you create a live online event, streaming over Zoom, and you can charge a fee or accept donations. Great for music events, fitness instructors, online classes, etc.

Forecasting s-curves is hard S-curves (or sigmoid functions) are very powerful, using only three parameters, they're able to model a variety of social and biological systems over time. Yet, it's impossible to forecast the curve from a few (early) data points. This article explains why forecasting is so tricky.

Manish “DYING”

🕸️ Web-end

Profiling React.js Performance Is your React app slower than expected? Check out this guide to mesauring React component render performance, using the React Profiler API, React's new experimental Interaction Tracing API, and the User Timing API.

Flexible layouts without media queries Using CSS grid, with minmax, and a little bit of math to create responsive UIs without media queries. I just ran into this problem last week, with a component that has to use inline CSS (so no media queries).

Mathias Bynens TIL Stop using the old comma-separated CSS color syntax. Not only is the new syntax easier to read, it will support new color features.

Spacing in CSS Everything you wanted to know about spacing in CSS. Also, this is a 30 minute read about the single topic of spacing … to anyone who thinks CSS is “easy“, I rest my case.

98.css A design system that brings back Windows 98.

🗒️ Lines of Code

steveklabnik “i love, love, love this exchange”

Saron 👍

If you're holding back on writing that blog post because it's "too basic" or "too simple", stop holding back. I've been googling "basic" python questions for hours and it's your blog posts that have been saving me. Your knowledge is valuable. Write.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Teamwork

What does a Director of Engineering do? Sha shares his career experience, the responsibilities and the challenges of being a director of engineering.

My accountabilities when scaling a team go in both direction. Downwards, there's a responsibility to my team to find them the right people and ensure i'm putting them all in the right seats. Upwards, it's about costs and optimizations. I have to fall within budget so that I contribute to the companies profitability. It's easy to throw money at a problem, it's much harder to solve it in a financially responsible way that helps the company grow leaner.

Spotify’s Failed #SquadGoals This is a fantastic read on what Spotify got wrong, and I recommend every engineering/product manager read through this document. It's also beautifully illustrated, given that it talks about one of the worst practices in Silicon Valley: over-hyping engineering practices in Medium posts, in order to attract candidates, but never following through.

Spotify introduced the vocabulary of missions, tribes, squads, guilds, and chapter leads for describing its way of working. It gave the illusion it had created something worthy of needing to learn unusual word choices. However, if we remove the unnecessary synonyms from the ideas, the Spotify model is revealed as a collection of cross-functional teams with too much autonomy and a poor management structure.

🛴 Startup Life

Impact of COVID-19 Crisis: Insights from Global Startup Survey with the Voice of the Entrepreneurs The outlook: not good. Not good at all.

• 41% of startups globally are in the “red zone”: they have three months or less of cash runway left
• Of startups that had a term sheet before the crisis, nearly 20% have had the term sheet pulled investors
• 74% of startups saw their revenues decline, and 16% of startups saw their revenue drop by more than 80%
• 12% of startups have seen their revenue increase by 10 percent or more

David Frankel Makes an excellent point. If you're selling software to other software companies, you need to understand second-order effect. It's not enough to know your customers, you need to know your customer's customers.

Toyota famously uses the "Five Whys" to eliminate the root causes of defects in manufacturing.

In this scenario, startups need to ask “who?” instead of “why?” in an effort to understand the underlying stability of their revenue.

Parsa Saljoughian “Get ready...”

🔒 Locked Doors

CaptureTheFlag If you're wondering why your iOS apps are crashing today, it's this bug: Italian flag emoji and Sindhi text combo that translate into “Unsupported characters”, causing some apps to crash. You’re most likely to see it on apps like Twitter, where people are prank posting this character combo.

Mat Velloso 🔥🛢️

"Data is the new oil"

You mean it costs money to store it and nobody wants it?

🤷 None of the Above

Banksy “My wife hates it when I work from home.”

You Have a TikTok Hit! Now, Quick -- Change the Title SEO for the stay-at-home generation: snippets of songs are becoming popular, so labels start changing song titles to match up with what users are searching for.

“We found that because of the way it was titled, ‘ily,’ the search terms ‘Surf Mesa I Love You’ weren’t finding the song,” explains Toby Andrews, general manager of the label Astralwerks. “So we went in and changed the title to add ‘I Love You Baby’ to make it easier for people to find. Now that’s a practice we’re looking into for other records of ours — things that have good traction behind them, but maybe the title doesn’t necessarily match the theme of the song that people are looking for.”

Flightradar24 “A Boeing 767 from Icelandair has drawn a big heart over Reykjavik in Iceland, on arrival from China with medical supplies”

Coronavirus News: Power Market Shows We Sleep Later in Lockdown - Bloomberg It only took a pandemic to figure out that most people would rather wake up an hour later. What are the chances we'll start adopting a healthier sleep/work schedule?

graham starr “[kneels down. places hand against ground] something terrible happened here”

WTI Crude for May goes negative My car is only half full, and I wouldn't mind getting paid to fill it up. Sadly, that's not how it works.

And if you're thinking of buying a barrel of oil for negative $30, where would you store it? Tracy Alloway tried that, and he has quite the story, in That Time I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil

Jon Sneyers “The Year 2020 bug: software isn't ready to deal with negative oil prices.“

Seanan McGuire 👇 Thread. You want to know when this is all over? Check the re-opening date for Disneyland:

If COVID-19 were a liberal hoax or if the lockdowns were overreach, Disney would be baying for an end to social distancing. The fact that they're not proves that this is real. Follow the money, and the money says the optics of Animal Kingdom killing Grandma are really bad.

lucy “what is their soundcloud”

Why COVID-19 Makes Some People Sicker Than Others Bad news for the US. Turns out our lifestyle — over-worked and over-stressed — is a contributing factor to mortality.

Sleepyface “😂😂😂😂😂”

Thousands of Americans backed by rightwing donors gear up for protests The majority in the US support the lockdown, a necessary measure to keep us alive. The “movement” to end stay-at-home “springing” up across the US, is really an astroturfing campaign funded by deep conservative pockets. The Guardian follows the money trail behind this campaign.

KARAinFLA “Dogs all across America are revolting against the Corona virus by refusing to go out for YET ANOTHER walk.”