Published
Weekend Reading — Large boulder the size of a small boulder
This week we go on a conference call with occasional shooting, play with toggles, don’t get fired for buying IBM Cloud, plan a wedding, take care of our sourdough starter , and hop around the race track.
City Beer in SF knows its audience.
Design Objective
Why 36% is the magic number: Finding the right amount of text in mobile apps This article looks at how much text is used in different apps. First screen text usage ranges from 3.5% (Snapchat) to 50.5% (Uber), so there's no one size that fits all. But if you're unsure, looks like 36% is a good place to start, and iterate to the right balance.
How to conduct UX research if you’re an introvert - UX Collective A lot of developers and designers I worked with are introverts. Guess what, you don't have to be an extrovert to engage in UX research. In fact, some of your users are going to be introverts, so it helps if you can speak their language!
Some participants, especially young people, will prefer to talk to you via an instant messaging app. Interviewing via, for example, Messenger will help them (and, honestly, you) feel more comfortable. It might also get you more insights, and a transcript that you can always go back to.
all these roboadvisor things are like ”wowza you just spent a ton of money at WELLS FARGO CREDIT CARD PAYMENT slow down the spending there pal!!!”
Gangster's Paradigm "the ideal candidate thrives in ambiguity"
Brett Goldstein: A designer I know told me his PM writes jira tickets that just say "make onboarding easier" or even "increase retention" 😂
Tools of the Trade
Samperson “I made a goose that destroys your computer Download it free here: http://samperson.itch.io/desktop-goose”
How to survive a remote working position How to separate home and work, when you're working from home:
By planning tomorrow's work at the end of today, you can help avoid that nagging feeling of something being unfinished and the temptation to 'just have 15 more minutes' working on a problem. Occasionally it can be a simple as just updating the task board with progress, but it can also be writing some notes for your future self on tricky points that you need to tackle tomorrow.
andi zeisler Conference call with shooting! 😭
My kid is always playing Fortnite with his friends on my phone, and I cannot see the appeal, it's literally just a conference call with occasional shooting
Matty Mariansky “why our office is switching to Fortnite”
(wannabe) breaker of (the bad) loops Me too!
Every time I accidentally open a big pdf on my phone (hotspot) I momentarily think, “gah such a bandwidth waste!” before realizing it’s like, three webpage visits with ads.
moonstrucktimberwolf “Dying”
Web-end
Chris Heilmann “https://mybrowser.fyi/ is a really good looking way to create a report on what browser you're currently running.”
Meowlivia_ “Toggle Ideas 💡 https://codepen.io/oliviale/full/xxboXzo”
Also, Steve Gardner: “I've made another https://codepen.io/ste-vg/details/oNgrYOb, Day & Night toggle ☀️🌙”
Devoops
(A few) Ops Lessons We All Learn The Hard Way Epic list. Everything rings true, and some hurts in the feels:
- Email is the worst monitoring and alerting mechanism except for all the others.
- Absence of a signal is itself a signal.
- The severity of an incident is measured by the number of rules broken in resolving it.
- The mobile hotspot you're paying for so you can leave your house while you're oncall only works at home and in the office.
- The only other person who knows how this works is also on vacation.
…
Corey Quinn 👇 This thread tearing into IBM Cloud is hilarious! Unless you have to use IBM Cloud as part of your work, in which case, my heartfelt condolences – send me your resume and I'll link to it in next week's email.
Whoever designed this needs to be put on a PIP. Services are sorted alphabetically. There's no guided onboarding. "Want to spin up a VM / storage bucket / toilet in which to drown yourself? Start here!" is always useful. "Lite" and "free" are apparently two different things.
Peopleware
Carrie Melissa Jones I love remote work for a whole lot of reasons, but loneliness is something we need to start talking about, and let's figure out how to solve it before it gets worse:
The famous Cigna study that is used to back up almost every proclamation of the loneliness epidemic has been updated. And it's gotten worse: [https://www.cigna.com/newsroom/news-releases/2020/cigna-takes-action-to-combat-the-rise-of-loneliness-and-improve-mental-wellness-in-america]
If you build community, you can help to turn things around.
Una Kravets This one simple trick that is guaranteed to make a career difference:
I've started blocking off the first 30 mins back at work every Monday to migrate my TODO list and review what I did last week.
➡️ HIGHLY recommend doing this to help you stay focused and on-task throughout the week (esp. if you do a lot of varied tasks/projects at work)
Scott Barry Kaufman (SBK) When you look at life from a different perspective!
Teamwork
delia paunescu 👇 “Per my last email” and other favorite corporate passive aggressive phrases:
i've recently become obsessed with all the insane corporate ways we say normal things to each other.
"I’m a little confused" is by far my favorite - it's absolute rage masked as a professional pleasantry.
what are some of your best/most insufferable work gibberish phrases?
EricaJoy “an em and a pm plan a wedding”
Startup Life
The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2019 | First Round Review Summary of the best First Round articles from 2019.
How To Know If You've Got Product/Market Fit This is a really good breakdown. And remember, markets shift, so may end up iterating in and out of product/market fit several times.
If your product is broken and people are still using it, if you have high retention with a broken product, that’s a clear sign you have PMF. When Twitter was constantly going down in the fail whale days, and no one moved off of Twitter. That was a sign of raw market adoption.
True product-market fit is a minimum viable company More on finding that elusive product/market fit:
Many entrepreneurs conceptualize product-market fit as the point where some subset of customers love their product’s features. This conceptualization is dangerous. Many failing companies have features that customers loved. Some even have multiple beloved features! Great features constitute only one-half of one-third of the whole puzzle. To have created a minimum viable company, a company needs all three of these elements — value propositions, business model and ecosystem — working in concert.
Brie Wolfson “Startup Curve reimagined as Big Net-New Project Curve”
Locked Doors
Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data “An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells ‘Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.’” I've said it before and will say it again, using some anti-virus software can be worse that not using any at all. Not all anti-virus is bad, but must research before installing a piece of software that has access to all your files and browser history.
Brian Anderson That's the simplest most concise and correct explanation:
Pro tip: Security means you’re concerned about bad things happening to your data. Compliance means you’re concerned about auditors happening to your data.
bruise almighty 👇 This is distopian, rediculous, and 100% ineffective:
I had to get a background check for my job, and it turns out the report is a 300+ page pdf of every single tweet I’ve ever liked with the work “fuck” in it.
Enjoy your dystopian bs! waves
Available To Hire
Signal boosting people looking for a job. If your company is hiring, or you know someone who is, reach out to them. If you'd like to get included next week, email me at assaf@labnotes.org
kirsty Experience in React Native/Rails/Angular/HTML5/CSS. https://github.com/dereknahman
Paige Williams Looking for a role where I can continue to grow as an engineer with a collaborative team. I have experience with React, Redux, GraphQL, TypeScript, Node, and mapping/ data visualization libraries. https://www.paigewilliams.dev
None of the Above
Alysia Judge “WAS SHOOTING HIS MOTHER NOT ENOUGH”
Simon Holland Oh. Snap.
A rival dad is mad because on his Facebook post about his Super Bowl party I asked if he was going to have store brand ketchup again this year.
LA is beyond parody - just watched a woman get thrown out of a Target for harassing employees while screaming “DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY FOLLOWERS I HAVE?”
Greg Афиногенов Yes:
sourdough starter is the closest thing to divine grace an atheist can experience: it's inexhaustible, self-replenishing, and infinitely divisible
But also, Louise O'Connor:
A sourdough starter is a tamagotchi for people in their 30s
San Miguel Sheriff The thing is, we know what he's talking about and it makes sense.
Large boulder the size of a small boulder is completely blocking east-bound lane Highway 145 mm78 at Silverpick Rd. Please use caution and watch for emergency vehicles in the area.
Saron Seriously. Just reach out. What's the worst that could happen?
Cold emailed a bunch of startup CEOs. One of those emails turned into a coffee. The coffee turned into an internship. Internship turned into a job. Been in the game for the past 8 years 🙌🏾
Sahil Lavingia And also, the people receiving these emails will thank you for being thoughtful and not wasting their time!
Sending 100 copy-pasted cold emails in one hour: 1% conversion rate.
Sending 10 unique cold emails in one hour: 80% conversion rate.
Plus you’ll have practiced your writing skills, and done more research on the people you’re trying to help.
Ron Amadeo Excellent suggestion!
I propose we rename Google messaging services with the year of release, just like a copy of Madden or FIFA.
The provides for easier tracking and better communicates the ~yearly lifecycle of these apps.
If you're going to call every new person of color or white woman a "diversity hire" then you also have to call every new white man a "privilege hire". Don't blame me, those are just the rules.
Aram Zucker-Scharff “Anytime a rich person donates money, this is how you should report it.”
Gizmodo: Billionaire Jack Ma has donated $14 million to develop a coronavirus vaccine, roughly the equivalent of an average U.S. family donating $33 http://gizmo.do/CpiJgJ6
mckenzie 🔥
the united states is $22 trillion dollars in debt and they have the audacity to try and give ME a credit score? worry about yourself first babygirl
Amanda China is mobilizing to tackle Coronavirus. I'm more worried about countries that don't have a high functioning government (*cough*US*cough*):
In response to the coronavirus epidemic, China has:
-begun construction on two 1,000 bed hospitals, to be completed w/in two weeks
-isolated & sequenced the virus genome & made that info public
-begun developing a vaccineCould the US have mobilized its resources in such a way?
Bathurst 12 Hour “G'day Skip 🦘”