Published
Weekend Reading — No code November
This week you'll learn about the core narrative, how to find a UX design job, make a better Escape key, stop buying ads, and watch the best Tiktok ever.
This week you'll learn about the core narrative, how to find a UX design job, make a better Escape key, stop buying ads, and watch the best Tiktok ever.
You Had One Job “Squirrels look like superheroes when they land.”
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Design Objective
Why some designs look messy, and others don’t Incredibly simple rule:
Then just visualize all of the boxes and apply the Extendabox-rule: extend their lines and see a grid appear. This way you’ll be able to really understand what the designer went through getting to that specific end result.
Sell Something Bigger Than Your Otherwise Boring Business Find your core narrative:
Your core narrative is what you sell beyond your product. It’s the broad idea behind your otherwise selfish brand.
6 SaaS Retention Strategies to Maximize Growth Incentives, onboarding, engaging with customers, and pricing.
Outcome Based Roadmaps : Unleash the Power of a Shared Vision and Purpose What is product strategy, how it differs from release roadmaps, and how to avoid the trapping of feature factory.
iOS vs. Android App UI Design: The Complete Guide Same but different.
UX Design for Boring Companies Tip for finding a job where you'll be appreciated:
Because their brand isn’t “cool,” it can be harder for these companies to attract top talent. So if you are top talent, they are really happy to have you there, and they will do more to keep you around, respect your expertise, and listen to what you have to say.
RaquelDesigns 👇 Thread for designers looking for a job:
I'll be reviewing a LOT of design / illustration job applications today, as I have been for the past few weeks, and I'd like to start a thread about things I see and notice, and recommendations to improve your applications across the board.
Sebastian Markbåge “When non-tech savy people try to use Facebook features.”
Tools of the Trade
Visual Regression Testing in Design Systems An intro to visual regression testing, and a few tools you can use to automate that.
restlesshead Software development be like:
I think non-technical professionals would be surprised at how much of my work consists of typing a line, hitting return and then watching text scroll by very, very fast
nodebestpractices The largest Node.js best practices list (November 2019). There's also a Twitter timeline.
Serverless computing with Pascal? Everything old is new again:
Want to see what 1974 (the year the program I’m using was published) looks like in Roman numerals? Just call the RESTful service via https://roman.engelke.dev/1974 to find out.
Space-grade CPUs: How do you send more computing power into space? Why do space crafts have such slow CPUs?
Curiosity, everyone’s favorite Mars rover, works with two BAE RAD750 processors clocked at up to 200MHz. It has 256MB of RAM and 2GB of SSD. As we near 2020, the RAD750 stands as the current state-of-the-art, single-core space-grade processor. It’s the best we can send on deep space missions today.
@tinymakesthings This is a better Escape key than even the new MacBook.
Web-end
Ire Aderinokun 😭 “Trying to remember the correct syntax to vertically center in flexbox”
Lines of Code
Build your own React What a great way to present code/algorithm!
Check it out, even if you don't care about React, I promise this is worth a few minutes of your time.
Ben Nadel This is how you learn about clean code and over-engineering:
Nothing makes you more humble than having to maintain a single codebase for years. Only then do you really get see the full extent of your poor choices and ill-informed thinking. I feel lucky to have this learning opportunity.
stephanie “please join me in my new tech awareness initiative, no code november”
Ben Halpern “2 unit tests. 0 integration tests.”
Teamwork
Navigating Software Engineering Career Paths Understand the different engineering career paths, and choose the one that's right for you.
Jennifer Kim 👇 Hiring is hard to get right:
Skilled hiring is not about perfection, but the ability to continually learn & improve your process—to surface relevant data, interpret it, & make decisions w/ reasonable risk.
Getting good at hiring starts with accepting you'll never be "done" and allowing room for mistakes. /3
Narcissistic CEOs Weaken Collaboration and Integrity “Some may be bold leaders, but they create a dangerous corporate culture.” From personal experience, I can attest this is true.
Emily Kager Be the Slack conversation you want to see in the world:
There are two types of people on @SlackHQ
People who type long, cohesive, edited messages for you to consume at one time and reply at your leisure.
People who
msg u
👋🏻
like this
and ask a question (edited)
add more info 🤔
then thank you 🤗 (edited)
bump
“When can you do it?”
Two weeks
“We need it next week”
Then I suggest you ask again last week.
michael vazquez “whoever made this deserves a medal of honor”
Startup Life
The 4 Big Ways That “Founder” and “CEO” Are Different Jobs It's no surprise only a quarter of founders manage to hold on to the title of CEO by the time the IPO comes around. These are different skillsets.
The skill set required to imagine a product and move a small devoted team to build it is very different than the skill to successfully manage a company as a freestanding entity — comprised of hundreds (or even thousands) of brains.
Andy Johns 👇 Choose the strategy that works for your business scale:
Most startups should not have a growth team. It leads to incremental thinking at a time when you’re expected to grow 3x+ every 12-18 months. In most cases, a bunch of a/b tests won’t give you that velocity of traction. Your best bet is big bets on new feature innovation.
How raising a $2+M Seed Round really, actually went Persistence.
It took me about 10 more weeks, but I closed the round. There’s actually still money trickling in for the next week or so, and we’re “oversubscribed.” I closed three biz dev deals last week. We’ll have enough money for a while — certainly to get to our next major milestones. I’m not quitting.
Locked Doors
Five months after returning rental car, man still has remote control Sigh. One more thing to worry about when renting a car:
That's because, five months after he returned the vehicle on May 31, his app continues to have control over the vehicle. Despite multiple other people renting the SUV in the intervening months, FordPass still allows Sinclair to track the location of the vehicle, lock and unlock it, and start or stop its engine.
Catalin Cimpanu This advise doesn't come out of nowhere. Something happened. Pay attention.
LA officials publish warning about the dangers of using public USB charging stations -- as they can hide malware
Their advice:
- use the AC charging socket, not the USB one
- bring your own USB charger from home
Techtopia
Sarah Mei 👇 The classic gig economy playbook:
We’ve all heard this story before.
Gig workers start off make reasonable money doing something useful on their own schedule.
Then after workers get invested in the platform & the tools, the company drastically cuts pay rates.
TheWrongNoel 👇 AI hiring systems that are no better than a coin toss:
A friend of mine has been trying to hire a new employee for her department in a medium-sized org. After advertising several times with few applicants, and a couple of rounds of interviews, the new employee is less than great. Then she discovered there were other applicants ...
Viral Tweet About Apple Card Leads to Goldman Sachs Probe Speaking of algorithms that make the wrong decision, and companies hiding behind “but … the algorithm”:
“Goldman and Apple are delegating credit assessment to a black box,” Hansson said. “It’s not a gender-discrimination intent but it is a gender-discrimination outcome.”
How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results Related, Google's algorithm is backed up by a lot of black-box human curation.
The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising According to this article, online advertising is only effective in that it creates money for adtech companies:
The experiment continued for another eight weeks. What was the effect of pulling the ads? Almost none. For every dollar eBay spent on search advertising, they lost roughly 63 cents, according to Tadelis’s calculations.
The experiment ended up showing that, for years, eBay had been spending millions of dollars on fruitless online advertising excess, and that the joke had been entirely on the company.
None of the Above
Jon Christian “They've seized the means of production”
Celeste Labedz 👇 Make it work, or purr trying:
Hello friends, today I will be using my expertise as a seismologist to tell you how to make an earthquake early warning system out of cats.
Kontra “Volkspod”
MaryKMcKenzie That is so me:
apple watch buzzes: meeting in 10
phone calendar pop up: meeting in 10
desktop calendar pop up: meeting in 10
slack reminder: meeting in 10YEAH OK I GOT IT, MEETING IN 10
11 minutes later:
OH FUCK MY MEETING
Tekkers So this is how you train to be a goalkeeper!
E-zrael Ani “🤣 Today’s episode of crazy things dads do 😅”
Moto Razr hands-on: the flip phone, reinvented as a folding Android phone! I didn't believe they could, but looks like Motorola managed to deliver a flip phone with folding screen. Your move … everyone else.
Big Business Is Overcharging You $5,000 a Year The argument in favor of breaking up monopolies (big tech and otherwise).
cara “it’s official this is the best tiktok to exist”