Published
Weekend Reading — 👋 git -m “Disagree and commit”
This week we wield the sword of legacy code maintenance, discuss quiet firing, draw with 4.2 GB, and play disco fever.
Louis Ralph creates the wonderful art, Bring Your Own Meme
Tech Stuff
"Disagree and commit" is perhaps not the best code review strategy.
Eraser Whiteboard app designed specifically for engineering teams.
Sketch architecture diagrams, collab on wireframes, drop code snippets on the canvas, visualize entity/sequence diagrams, markdown all the things, keyboard shortcuts …
Stately Visual Editor A low-code visual editor for building state machines. Also available as VS Code extension, so you can visually edit your XState code.
html-to-text/node-html-to-text Work backwards from HTML to plain text. You can use this to create texts excerpt from a blog post that's stored as HTML, send a plain-text email along with formatted HTML, etc. Gives you a lot of control over which HTML elements to convert, and how to convert them (Markdown, plaintext, etc).
Your Code Doesn’t Have to Be a Mess
keep in mind that simplicity is not a value by itself. It is a means to an end: produce better software, and be able to maintain and evolve it over time.
Upstash Message queuing as a service. For when you need run serverless functions from a queue or schedule, and don't want to mess with SQS/et al.
Upstash also provides Redis and Kakfa at serverless pricing, meaning you pay per request, and cost can scale down to zero.
Devon Govett (see adobe/react-spectrum)
Anecdotally, Firefox has the fewest bugs of any browser. WebKit has by far the most.
The React Spectrum team tracks all of the browser bugs we file (a lot), and almost 60% are WebKit. ~25% Chrome, ~16% Firefox.
Good job, Mozilla! Firefox is underrated.
Failure is an important part of the learning process.
I'm sure you'll be learning a lot this week.
Peoples
Adam Grant Once again, for the people in the back:
When groups meet to brainstorm, good ideas are lost. People bite their tongues due to conformity pressure, noise, and ego threat.
A better approach is brainwriting: generate ideas separately, then meet to assess and refine.
Group wisdom begins with individual creativity.
Bonnie Dilber Oh, snap …
The "Quiet Quitting" thing is funny to me. I think the real conversation should be around "Quiet Firing" as it's rampant.
You don't receive feedback or praise.
You get raises of 3% or less while others are getting much more.
Your 1:1s are frequently cancelled or shuffled around.
You don't get invited to work on cool projects or stretch opportunities …
At the end of a job interview they ask:
"Do you have any questions for us?"
What do you say?
If I'm being interrogated for an hour and only allowed to ask questions at the very end, that tells me all I need to know about the power dynamics of working there.
I have no further questions
Business Side
Wilson Wilson Good night's rest is important.
Build fast ≠ Ship bugs
As important as quickly iterating is, make sure you're confident in what you build for your users.
You'll sleep better that way 😅
What I Learned at Clubhouse An opinionated piece about building, scaling, and working at a startup:
Complexity creep is a human problem. When we make things, we get attached. We don’t want to seemingly discard people’s work. We may not rely enough on data to make decisions. Or, we just aren’t clear on the one or two core**** interactions that users need and value, so it’s hard to choose what stays and what goes.
What is it about the term "Data-driven" that is so divisive? Trying to explain this to someone, but coming up short.
What data you collect and how you choose to present it will determine what the data "shows". It's subjective decision-making pretending to be objective truth.
When you know that intuitively, but it doesn't get acknowledge, that eerie feeling that something's amiss.
Nick Bloom The one permanent change COVID accelerated:
The shift to WFH is the largest shock to labor markets in decades. Pre-pandemic WFH was trending towards 5% of days by 2022. Now WFH is now stabilizing at 30%, a 6-fold jump.
In America alone this is saving about 200 million hours and 6 billion miles of commuting a week.
Machine Thinking
4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything
How many images, both real photos and fictional art, were crammed through the auto-encoder, that narrower and narrower funnel of information, until some sort of meaning was distilled from them? How many times must a model be taught to de-noise an image until it understands what makes a tiger different from a leopard? I guess now we know.”
Show r/StableDiffusion Amazing! Photoshop integration with StableDiffusion.
Rob Sheridan 👇 A thread about art in the age of AI (in relation to this art competition)
Anything can be art, and in terms of value (not just monetary - art has a great deal of value that has nothing to do with money), there are no rules for how much suffering has to go into something to make it valuable to someone. 12/
Art will always find a way. It will adapt to both make use of the new technology, and at the same time work around it's very existence:
The development of Impressionism can be considered partly as a reaction by artists to the challenge presented by photography, which seemed to devalue the artist's skill in reproducing reality.
Everything Else
Miniature Mayhem "I have been laughing for 5 minutes and I have tears streaming down my face" (context)
Rings of Power the first television show where if it sucks, the price of your detergent will probably go up.
Dance like nobody's watching.
Email like it will one day be read aloud at a deposition.
Don’t really understand the HBO controversy. Then again I don’t subscribe to streaming services. I’ve been following the same bug after work for the past week. I place a cup over it when I need to “pause”
Len Markidan This guy wins as LinkedIn.
Can people stop telling me I need to learn to separate the art from the artist, I can do that incredibly well, I am good friends with some incredibly bad artists. Just, absolute dog shit at art. Lovely people.
WFH.FM For teams that want to share the vibe: create a playlist, add some video clips, drop a background.
hello it's me your CEO texting from a number you've never seen, I need 46 gas station hot dogs for an important business deal no time to explain why
Pete Stegemeyer “Hear me out. A parent trap remake where one twin grew up in the USA and one grew up in the UK.”
Not to brag but I knew this was all a scam when I was told I needed to cut up the plastic pop can rings so I don't choke a sea turtle to death instead of the soda companies figuring out like any single other of the endless possible ways to hold them together
Homura Ham 10x better with the sound on