Published
Weekend Reading — Furious mongoose
alex "A brief summary of me trying to follow any type of tutorial on the internet."
Design Objective
Des Traynor 🤔 There's something to it, at least this example proves the point:
The opposite of a good product principle is itself a good product principle.
Everything else just is a truism.
Designing for Cognitive Differences Often people think of accessibility as “design for blind people”, but what about users with cognitive differences like inattention, anxiety, and depression?
If most users are making mistakes on a form, users with inattention will struggle even more. When this happens, figure out exactly where the errors are occurring, and fix the design of the form to target that error. For instance, if you’re receiving the wrong data for a field, it’s a sign that form labels are unclear; if you have inline-only labels, adding regular labels outside of the fields will do more than adding an explanatory note.
The Art of Feature Naming — Four Survival Tips Naming is hard, here are some shortcuts:
- Keep names simple.
- Anchor as much as possible to existing knowledge among your customers.
- Say what your product or feature does or is.
- Try to use the name.
Sans Forgetica A font designed to help you remember your study notes, by being more difficult to read than most typefaces. The 'desirable difficulty' you experience prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing (or so they claim).
Tools of the Trade
Suggested Changes Github's Suggested Changes is just the feature I didn't know I needed, and now can't live without!
Zach Holman I … I … I actually like the new JIRA:
This gif of the new @Jira redesign is probably some of the smartest "show don't tell" marketing I've seen in quite some time. Makes it wildly obvious what's happening in the new version.
Web-end
Smart Bundling: How To Serve Legacy Code Only To Legacy Browsers As you can imagine, it takes a lot of effort to have the ES6/CSS5 cake and eat it too.
OH: “Just because there’s no objective truth, it doesn’t mean you just use divs and spans everywhere.”
Lingua Scripta
I think I solved javascript.
undefined = function(){};
Lines of Code
J.T. Grimes This doesn't mean ship shitty code, it means don't spend too much time on code that provides little value to users:
Maintainability is less important than shippability - nobody submits feature requests on software that hasn't been released.
If you have a choice between getting it *right* and getting it *done*, pick *done*.
Best advise I every received on software development: You don’t have to (and will not succeed at) fixing everything, just leave things better than you found them.
Kevlin Henney I think data structures were treated more seriously when computers had limited memory:
I'm intrigued by how often I see the wrong choice of data structure in code.
Data structure choice is considered by many to be less of a priority than it once was, but in the last few weeks the usual suspects have popped up in different contexts, and the choice was significant.
Loch Nessa Monster "this is absolute genius"
Architectural
Sprints, marathons and root canals How to prioritise technical debt, and convince the business side that refactoring is important?
To keep the pace constant, we need the process to be sustainable, of course, but the product needs to be sustainable as well. That second part of the sustainability is often neglected. That is where all that work wanted by the delivery team comes in, even if it’s not necessarily wanted or understood by the stakeholders. Brady, the cleaning supplies company, sells warning labels that perfectly explain this problem: “If You Don’t Schedule Time for Maintenance, Your Equipment Will Schedule It for You”.
Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing - aka RFCs I like this idea, we do pretty much this (except we share, not send, documents), but labelling them as RFC sounds better:
- Do planning before building something new.
- Capture this plan in a short, written document.
- Have a few, select people approve this plan before starting work.
- Send this planning document out to all engineers in the company and let anyone and everyone comment on it.
- Have everyone follow the above steps
Mathias Verraes The illusion of structure:
I think historically we've approached software design too much as an attempt to impose structure. Interesting problems are usually interconnected, so our goal should be to manage interconnectedness instead of squeezing it into the illusion of structure.
Devoops
Belgian Air Force F-16 destroyed by fire during maintenance – Collateral damage on second F-16 Next time you accidentally rm -rf * in production, remember it could be worse:
a technician was working on an F-16 when he accidentally activated the six-barrels 20mm Vulcan M61A-1 cannon of that F-16. The cannon was loaded and some bullets hit another F-16AM (FA-128). That aircraft had just been refuelled and was – together with another F-16 – being prepared for a (training) mission. Due to the bullets, the F-16AM exploded and damaged the other F-16.
Peopleware
How to Get Things Done When You Don't Feel Like It It happens to all of us, and there are few easy tricks you can use to cheat procrastination:
Next time you are stuck on a project you don't want to start, try doing something that you know will be satisfying. You just might have a bright idea while you're rinsing off your dishes, and that will make you excited to run over to your computer and get to work.
Locked Doors
Kenn White Know your threat model:
I opened my Linux Chromebook and found my (grounded) daughter was logged in. I guess props for bypassing my "hardened" profile. But it made no sense. Screen-lock-on-close was enabled and guest logins were blocked, and… /1
Don A. Bailey Well played!
As some of you know @InfoSecMouse is closing its doors.
I'm proud to announce that as my Goodbye to infosec consulting, I am dropping an uncoordinated RCE 0day for OpenSSH (all recent versions affected) that is exploitable due to compiler optimization:
None of the Above
Andy Hunt Nailed it!
No, I don’t want to hop on a damn “quick 30 minute call”. WTF is wrong with you. Third time today I had that offer.
I want your terms, conditions, examples, references, in writing. On record. For future reference.
Ah, now I see the problem...
Peacharu_ "Good morning everyone have an absolutely furious mongoose"
Tess Rinearson Got a point!
hot take: the new yorkers who are upset about the bagel emoji are actually upset about the steady and inexorable shift of economic and cultural power from NY to California
Apple Fixes Bagel Emoji Fortunately, on such critical matters, Apple does listen to its customers.
ShAHHH!nnon Miller Twitter does have its shining moments:
Here is a beautiful hill.
Quote tweet this with the pettiest argument that would make you gladly die on this hill.
Trevor McKendrick True:
The weirdest part of being the 1st finance person @ a startup is going back & forth between doing high value strategic stuff (e.g. hiring, raising money, etc.) and then tediously paying some random $70 invoice
Mauly Fright
me: "I think I'll work from home today so I can be productive and relax!"
foster kitten: 😂
