Published
Weekend Reading — Long enough to implement Jira
nathanwpylestrangeplanet Love this Instagram account and merch!
Design Objective
Jared Spool 👇 Design is more than shapes and colors:
“The product’s design was excellent, but the product was buggy, so I couldn’t recommend it.”
This is used as an excuse for why design-led orgs don’t work.
Yet, that’s the heart of issue. A truly design-led org would focus on the user’s experience. Bugs are part of that.
Paul Ford 😭 "This just happened on my home screen and quarters started spraying out of my USB jack."
Tools of the Trade
THANOS JS "Reduce the file size of your project down to 50%, by randomly deleting half of the files."
Using the iPad Pro as my development machine Using Mosh, Tmux, Docker, and other cool tricks that work around the limits of iOS, and can turn an iPad into an almost MacBook replacement. But the inevitable conclusion (also my experience):
I have decided that the iPad is the perfect mobile device for most of my work, but it can’t replace my main work devices (MacBook or iMac). I know it sounds cool to use the iPad as the main development machine, however, the constant limitations you’re hitting is just frustrating. I agree with most of the people out there that iOS is still limiting in several ways.
Axel Rauschmayer "Awesome! Chrome 73 lets you install Progressive Web Apps natively on macOS."
Jen Gentleman "Cannot unsee"
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PSA: a lot of Ruby web apps have been hacked by the Russians. To find out if your site is infected, look for a config.ru file in the root directory of your app.
Can't believe they named the file that. Dead giveaway.
Kenn White "I meant merkle tree not merkel tree but thanks the chuckle, google"
Web-end
Chet 🎂
30 years later... This morning a dusty but frisky Steve Jobs NeXTstation just started again and WorldWideWeb 1.0 Alpha build succeeded!!! Happy #Web30 Birthday @timberners_lee @CERN @webfoundation @jmhullot @bserlet
Brad Frost Reminder that things like account numbers and social security numbers aren't really numbers — use HTML appropriately:
Story time! Just got a call from my bank about a wire transfer. Everything seemed right except the last 3 digits of the account number.
Turns out they're using
<input type="number">for their account field, which means one up/down mouse swipe or keyboard changes the account # !
CVS Receipt Finally, a legitimate use for infinite scroll!
Lines of Code
Emma Wedekind "Just a simple fix!"
💿 Sh*t Devs Say: Greatest Hits 💿
“We can get it done this sprint”
“Just pushed please approve: No need to review my newest changes”
“It’s not that hard”
“Sure, it’s accessible”
“I forgot to push”
“Who broke the tests?”
Joop Lammerts "I love this one! I'm going to print it and put on the wall as a reminder #DDDEU @maaretp"
Hakan Yuksel "developer test vs tester test"
Architectural
Denise Yu 👇 Thread:
Just learned a real-world example of the cost of “meh, we can refactor this later”:
Japan is the only modernized country in the world to run on two independent electricity grids, by historical accident. When the 2011 tsunami happened, half the country was knocked off-grid...
Ben Burton 🍻 Beer scale!
A devops engineer walks into a bar, puts the bartender in a docker container, put kubernetes behind the bar, spins up 1000 bartenders, orders 1 beer.
Peopleware
Eugenia Zuroski 💡 Brilliant!
I’ve decided, from now on, to field hostile questions at conferences by first asking, as a point of clarification: “What is it you hope to get from my answer to this question?”
At the very least, it may make these interactions more interesting.
Sarah Federman The goal of the interview process is to hire future employees, so do whatever to help the candidate succeed:
Unpopular tech opinion. There is always going to be a better interview experience depending on who the candidate is and the only real solution is to just ask them which they prefer (and yes, I do believe this can scale).
Rika 💡 Plus you don't have to tidy up before an important meeting:
Work From Home is overrated.
Instead, I propose Work From IKEA. Go to IKEA when it’s absolutely dead during the week and join a video conference from a different mock room every hour until your team notices.
Robyn Frost "The creative process"
Techtopia
Li Jin 👇 Future marketplaces are more than aggregators of demand and supply (but likely still contributing to the erosion of income):
In the future, marketplaces may not even feel like marketplaces to the end user. Because they connect all the dots behind the scenes--and provide such a high level of standardization and quality--people feel like they’re interacting with a high-quality, concierge-level service.
Startup Life
Suhail 👍 x 1000
◾️Dark mode for founders: disappearing & getting shit done.
OH: "startup mantra: may we survive long enough to be forced to implement Jira"
Locked Doors
Beto O’Rourke’s secret membership in America’s oldest hacking group Remember Cult of the Dead Cow? There's a book about it coming soon, and it features a presidential candidate:
The hugely influential Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, is notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows. It’s also known for inventing the word “hacktivism” to describe human-rights-driven security work.
A major international bank accidentally published a private package of their own to the public npm Registry, took 3 years to notice, and then sent DMCA takedown notices to Amazon and Cloudflare for hosting "stolen code". Now I have to pay a lawyer to explain this to them.
...
Our lawyer is also going to need to explain to a bank why a React package does not constitute "Stolen Financial Credentials" oh lord
Save the date: GPS Week Number Rollover Event – April 6th 2019 GPS experiences the Y2K problem every 19.7 years:
The week number is encoded into the data stream by a 10-bit field. A binary 10-bit word can represent a maximum of 1,024 weeks, which is approximately 19.7 years. Each 19.7 year period is known in GPS terms as an “epoch”.
At the end of each epoch the receiver resets the week number to zero and starts counting again – a new epoch begins.
None of the Above
Jason Spraitz "Hands down the best wedding invitation that I’ve ever received. Hopefully, #reviewer2 doesn’t get invited."
Ashley Mayer Where is the lie?
I've run the numbers twice and can confirm that a 60 degree day during a New York winter is 15 degrees warmer than a 60 degree day during a San Francisco summer.
Jane Manchun Wong "Null Island is definitely on my bucket list now! 😍"
LRB Bookshop 🐝 What the …???
if you were or are the friendly gent (blue coat) who was in the shop half an hour ago and left a big jar of bees on the table in the poetry section, please come back and reclaim your jar of bees. if you aren't, please rt until we find him #FindTheBeeGent
…
charlie says they're too large to be bees but i've started the hashtag now so it's too late to change it
WILD NATURE "This baby horse is so damn happy, imma have to rt for good luck"
Death of the calorie Explores the junk science behind counting calories:
Officials at the WHO also acknowledge the problems of the current system, but say it is so entrenched in consumer behaviour, public policy and industry standards that it would be too expensive and disruptive to make big changes. The experiments that Atwater conducted a century ago, without calculators or computers, have never been repeated even though our understanding of how our bodies work is vastly improved. There is little funding or enthusiasm for such work. As Susan Roberts at Tufts University says, collecting and analysing faeces “is the worst research job in the world”.
Why Machines That Bend Are Better Mighty interesting: "compliant mechanisms"!
Seattle traffic deaths and injuries down slightly last year; most of the fatalities were pedestrians Your city can do this too!
In addition, SDOT is implementing signals that give pedestrians at crosswalks a three- to seven-second head start before drivers get a green light to make turns. The system, called leading pedestrian intervals, makes pedestrians in the crosswalk more visible to drivers making turns.
...
In New York City, the transportation department has installed the technology at more than 2,000 intersections since 2014. A 2016 study found that deaths and serious injuries among pedestrians and bicyclists dropped nearly 40 percent at crossings with the systems.
Reconsidering Cinema "Mad Max Fury Road without CGI is straight insane"
Steadman USA …
This quote is actually illuminating. "Why didnt the rich people just exert their influence the socially acceptable way?"
Yashar Ali US Attorney re the Huffman/Loughlin (among others) college scam: "We're not talking about donating a building...we're talking about fraud."
Agosto o lo otro "Es viernes y tu cuerpo lo sabe"
Why Does the U.S. Tolerate So Much Risk? Rhetorical question. US values corporate profits over human lives:
Britain, which acted separately, and slightly before the Pan-European regulator, offered an even more explicit account of its reasoning, explaining that it was grounding the Boeing planes because authorities did not know the cause of the most recent crash, of an Ethiopian Airlines plane on Sunday.
The Federal Aviation Administration, by contrast, said until Wednesday that the absence of information was the reason it was letting domestic airlines keep the planes in the air.
After a Lion Air 737 Max Crashed in October, Questions About the Plane Arose This article from February has more details about the financial calculus that lead to the death of 346 people in two avoidable plance crashes. And don't blame the software for this tragedy.
Good doggos "What a professional!"