Published
Weekend Reading — Known issue, closed as duplicate
Ellie Murray “Remember, just because we can get a number, doesn’t mean we have a meaningful answer.”
Design Objective
Stop designing products for random people An alternative for demographics and personas:
The High-Expectation Customer (HXC) is a 3-in-1 customer who is a benefiter (Someone who is going to benefit the most from your product), a hacker (Someone who is using multiple hacks to solve the problem), and an expert (People aspire to emulate her).
If you every think to yourself "Well, a general survey isn't the right way to go about informing this decision, but the CEO really wants to run one. What's the worst that can happen?"
Brexit.
Changelog “We've found it! The only developer in the world who made their website too accessible 😆”
Tools of the Trade
GitHub Actions Github rolling out CI/CD, free for open source.
Linux, macOS, Windows, and containers
Hosted runners for every major OS make it easy to build and test all your projects. Run directly on a VM or inside a container.
lynn cyrin On building better command line tools:
- error messages are a part of your interface, perhaps the largest part. Writing good ones is hard
- clearly demarking when an error is with you, or with something else, is phenomenally important
- executing multiple commands on one line will always betray you
Sarah Drasner Casual shade:
My coding speeds:
- Fast: I already know how to do this
- Slow: I’m learning something new
- Stopped: damnit why can’t I ever remember if it’s splice or slice
Erin “ancient legend states he turned to stone waiting for his 'npm install' to complete”
Web-end
Introducing Duotone Font Awesome adds depth with two-tone fonts.
Architectural
Mike Veerman In summary:
There are no recipes for building quality software. No framework. No step-by-step-plan. No guarantees.
A good chef continuously tastes her soup. Good devs work on feedback, not prediction.
Sebastian Markbåge 👇 Stateless programming enables time travel, and time travel enables cool UI tricks:
Using computer science magic to make the user experience magic trick work.
Devoops
Jessica Rose 👇 You know the responses to this thread are gold:
Tech Twitter: Folks often focus on posting our wins on social media.
What's the most bafflingly stupid tech mistake you've made that you're willing to share?
RT for more sympathy-cringe responses?
Here are a couple oops that definitely absolutely did not happen to me:
Nicholas Corgan:
I spent days diagnosing an issue that ended up being caused by me attempting to store 256 in an 8-bit number.
Ash Wilson:
I once nuked some data in a production database because I thought I was logged into staging. Then we discovered that instead of backing up staging and production, we’d actually just been backing up staging twice
Peopleware
tychon That's a good way to think about it:
Planning is important to me, but not in a micromanagement sense. It's important not to delude myself into believing I have control, but also important to not lose sight of the fact that hope without action is dreaming. Planning is believing there could be a future, if I act.
John Cortexiphan People not asking questions is an early sign of trouble to come:
some more hot takes, for those starting out with being a developer lead or similar... or a project manager... or even just a regular developer...
If someone isn't asking questions about a project or task, they've like not understood what is being done or what is expected of them
Teamwork
All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people Stop what you're doing and read this article. Here is one interesting takeaway:
But trust also degrades naturally over time. Italian researchers Cristiano Castelfranchi and Rino Falcone have a model of trust in which it’s observability not success that is the key factor. Under their theory an entity that is silently successful can end up seen as less trustworthy than an entity that visibly fails. If we recover from failure quickly and efficiently, trust increases. Whereas when we succeed and no one notices we become more and more unknown and uncertain. This explains what is known as the service recovery paradox, when consumers trust a service provider more after a failure than they did before the failure.
Adrian Sanabria This general principle also applies to “a better UI”, ”more reliable architecture”, etc:
If you know how to make things more secure but you can't convince people to implement it, you won't make anything more secure.
In other words, execution and feasibility are more important than ideas.
Given that tech people know what happens when CPU is 100% and RAM is full and you're hitting the swap file, it's pretty weird how many places focus on keeping everyone busy and working on more things than they have teams for.
Locked Doors
A Technical Analysis of the Capital One Hack Horrible press release aside, this is absolutely right. There's a common factor behind many data leaks, and it's one particular vendor:
While it may be easy to blame Capital One’s developers for the loss of data, the truth is that IAM role misconfigurations are likely present in nearly every single AWS account.
Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data Raise your hand if you did not see this coming:
The security expert contacted dozens of UK and US-based firms to test how they would handle a "right of access" request made in someone else's name.
In each case, he asked for all the data that they held on his fiancee.
In one case, the response included the results of a criminal activity check.
Other replies included credit card information, travel details, account logins and passwords, and the target's full US social security number.
Andy Greenberg “Things that get airdropped to you by strangers at #DEFCON27”
Techtopia
The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News Why Hacker News feels the way it does (and probably by design):
Hacker News readers who visit the site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of Yuval Noah Harari.
Section 230 Was Supposed to Make the Internet a Better Place. It Failed Section 230 of the CDA shields internet companies from liability for what their users publish. One sentence in particular, and how it shaped the internet of today, the good side and the horrors:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
freia lobo “this new Telegram groups feature is so interesting” (Slow Mode for group discussions 👍)
None of the Above
Lewis Vaughan Jones “When your drone runs out of battery over a lake, timing is everything...”
Carrick 🤣
Someone else: You’re kind of quiet and boring.
Me: Known issue, closed as duplicate.
Alex Fisch This is how we spend money in the US:
About every 7 months, Uber loses the equivalent of the cost of building a subway from UCLA to the San Fernando Valley!
relationships.txt “My (25m) bf had angered crows and magpies and now they're defecating on my car” (original post removed)
Or as Cullen says:
Murder a crow and deal with the consequences from a murder of crows. Nature is poetic.
Martin “The migration of birds in Europe traced by GPS. 😮😮😮”
A Crashed Israeli Lunar Lander Spilled Tardigrades on the Moon TIL there are no fines for littering the moon:
Fortunately for Spivack and the Arch Mission Foundation, spewing DNA and water bears across the moon is totally legal. NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection classifies missions based on the likelihood that their targets are of interest to our understanding of life. As such, missions destined for places like Mars are subject to more stringent sterilization processes than missions to the Moon, which has few of the necessary conditions for life and isn’t at risk of contamination.
Justin E. Ray Must … resist … urge … to … pet …
Hey, you.
This is important.
Cheetahs don't roar, they meow like housecats.