Published
Weekend Reading — Normalize relational databases
This week we lead by introversion, anticipate a blog comeback, count sandwiches, and if you're over 30 you're most likely to injure yourself when you sleep.
Neil Sardesai “I spent way too much time on this”
🪑 Design Objective
Rene Ritchie WOW. “AssistiveTouch on Apple Watch using clench ✊ and pinch 🤌 movements as triggers is particularly mind-blowing…” Other assistive technologies coming to iOS.
Scott Berkun asks “What is the greatest design lesson you've ever learned?”
Scott Berkun replies to self, and I happen to agree (can you guess the emoji?)
Surprised no one so far has mentioned the Eliel Saarinen quote:
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in... a city plan.”
Snap Inc. “Historically, cameras haven’t captured darker complexions well, which is why we’re building a more inclusive Camera that works for every Snapchatter regardless of their skin tone.”
Martin Jordan A local café using Figma to show its up-to-date menu.
🧰 Tools of the Trade
Sarah Drasner I'm a big fan of preview deploys, and Netlify is taking it next level:
When you submit a PR w @Netlify they create a deploy preview.
Today Deploy Preview Commenting was released!
- integration with BrowserStack to check all devices
- Communicate on the directly on the preview
- Integration with Trello, etc!
Flat Data Download any kind of data (JSON, CSV, images, zip, etc.) into your repositories at a repeatable schedule:
With codespaces, you can author Flat data workflows and develop applications that use that data without ever leaving your browser, and without that data ever reaching your machine. If you have a static webapp, you can power it with data that is kept evergreen by Flat (we built a simple example using GitHub pages).
Introducing WebContainers: Run Node.js natively in your browser Building web apps in the browser is the future we were promised, and part of that is running CLI tools and servers in the browser:
Goodbye,
rm -rf node_modules! WebContainer's built in npm client is so fast that it runs a fresh install on every page load ensuring you get a clean environment every single time. If something does goes wrong with your environment, you can get back to a clean state the same way you do any other web app: hit the refresh button.
Parcel 2 beta 3 “This release includes a ground up rewrite of our JavaScript compiler in Rust, which improves overall build performance by up to 10x”
Announcing PlanetScale: The database for developers. MySQL compatible, serverless database platform, powered by Vitess, and designed for developers. One word. Branching.
Branching is a core PlanetScale feature that makes non-blocking schema changes possible. In PlanetScale, a database branch is a separate database that is deployed with a copy of the main database's schema. All database schema changes must occur on a development database branch before being deployed to production.
$ pscale branch create <database> <branch>
$ pscale deploy-request create <database> <branch>
$ pscale branch diff <database> <branch>
Mailook Check your email deliverability. Simple UI, just send an email and it will produce a detailed report.
How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS “One very effective way of giving a good impression of speed is to segregate macOS and user software to use different cores in the way that the M1 does.”
normalize relational databases
🕸️ Web-end
Ultimate List of Blogging Statistics and Facts (Updated for 2021) According to OptinMonster master (which sells things to put on your website), blogs are not dead. Not yet. Some random stats:
- The average blog post takes 3.5 hours to write.(*)
- 43% of people admit to skimming blog posts.
- Having a hyphen or colon in the headline increased click-through rates by 9%.
- 59% of people will share an article without reading it first, or ever.
- LinkedIn is the most effective social media platform for delivering content and securing audience engagement.
* Interesting, I spend 3~4 hours on Weekend Reading
An experiment in helping users and web publishers create deeper connections on Chrome Related, Google wants to bring blogs back (but not Reader):
In the coming weeks, some Android users in the US on Chrome Canary may see an experimental Follow feature designed to help people get the latest content from sites they follow.
📓 Lines of Code
Figma “This is a story of a Figma bug that wasn’t a bug at all. In November of 2019, one of our users reported this: ⁝ MW”
🧑🤝🧑 Teamwork
Why introverts make great leaders We need to break up with the charismatic leader idolatry:
At some point, society’s perception of a “good” leader shifted from someone who encourages collective success to a singular, charismatic titan — an outward spokesman more interested in public perception than team building.
…
Recently, researchers analyzed a database of 17k executives and found that, while a charismatic person was more than 2x as likely to be hired as a CEO, this didn’t correlate with a better performance once they were hired. In the same study, introverted leaders far outperformed expectations.
Efficiency is the Enemy Does your work allow you to be 0% busy? If not, you need to add more slack. (h/t Damien Joyce)
Slack also allows us to handle the inevitable shocks and surprises of life. If every hour in our schedules is accounted for, we can’t slow down to recover from a minor cold, shift a bit of focus to learning a new skill for a while, or absorb a couple of hours of technical difficulties.
…
The expectation of “constant busyness means efficiency” creates pressure to always look occupied and keep a buffer of work on hand. If we see our buffer shrinking and we want to keep busy, the only possible solution is to work slower.
Trying to eliminate slack causes work to expand. There’s never any free time because we always fill it.
📈 Business Side
Pret Sandwich Sales Show Airports Still Deserted Ahead of Flights Resuming TIL the Pret Index is how we measure return to office:
The Pret Index, based on exclusive data from U.K. sandwich chain Pret A Manger Ltd., shows that bankers, corporate lawyers and asset managers are slowly repopulating central London, with last week seeing a notable increase in business.
What I Learned About Startups by Collecting 30,000 Data Points Debunking some myths and confirming some truisms.
- Billion-dollar startups were more likely to save their customers time or money
- Going after a large market does matter
- Painkillers are more likely to succeed (but vitamin pills work too!)
🔒 Locked Doors
The Full Story of the Stunning RSA Hack Can Finally Be Told Do all cybersecurity stories start the same way?
Todd Leetham finished a smoke break and was walking back into RSA’s headquarters in Bedford, Massachusetts—a pair of connected buildings on the edge of a forest in the Boston suburbs—when a systems administrator pulled him aside and asked him to take a look at something strange.
Colonial Pipeline did pay ransom to hackers, sources now say CNN is reassuring us that there was never a risk to the pipeline. Just that Colonial couldn’t bill their customers, so they stopped supplying the Northeast:
The company halted operations because its billing system was compromised, three people briefed on the matter told CNN, and they were concerned they wouldn't be able to figure out how much to bill customers for fuel they received.
⭐ None of the Above
DrewCoffman “thinking about early-2000 phone designs”
Steve Ragan I feel …
Are you having a good day? Awesome. Just so you know, some kids refer to the 90s as the late 1900's. You're welcome.
Andrew Huang “The creative process!”
Felipe 😷
Normalize wearing masks when you have any sort of cold/flu symptoms. Forever. It's been nice to not have even a cold in over a year.
Science Diagrams that Look Like Shitposts <- this Tweeter account
Hannah Rose 👇 Reading the responses, looks like sleep is the most common hazard.
To the over-30 crowd: What's the saddest way you've injured yourself?
I leaned my head back to wet my hair in the shower and pulled a muscle in my neck.
Ohio’s 53% vaccination surge tied to $1M lottery; NY and MD announce lotteries Incentives work, part one:
Since the announcement, the rate of vaccination in Ohio has increased 28 percent, the state’s department of health announced Thursday. The department also noted that week-to-week vaccination counts jumped 53 percent.
Biden admin wants to bring sexy back with dating app vaccination statuses Incentives work, part two:
OkCupid reports that users who say they are vaccinated or are planning to get vaccinated are getting 15 percent more likes and 14 percent more matches while having 4.5 percent more conversations.
Brie Wolfson “Had too much fun and too much gin making this. Do your thing, Twitter. Who’s missing? Who’d I get wrong?”
