Published
Weekend Reading — 🏠 Our house is an open office plan
This week we look into WFH workspaces, the unglamorous edition, find out which meeting could have been an email, and pass on that cauliflower pizza.
Clare.O “I promised I wouldn't #panicbuying but I couldn't stop myself. 🤗”
😷 How's your week going?
My week was reading about pandemics and social isolation. Not the smartest thing to do. Impossible to focus and I barely got any work done.
I'm optimistic, but even the optimistic scenarios talk about people dying, losing their job, etc. Nobody knows for sure what would happen.
We do know that our lives are about to change. In a big way. And in short order.
Change and uncertainty make for an emotional rollercoaster.
Weekend Reading, always information, and this week I'm adding a new section for all you work-from-home readers.
And I hope there's enough humor and cute animal pictures because it's important to take care of our emotions. And the people close to us. 💪
WFH
For those new to remote work, here are some of the best places to get started:
GitLab’s Guide To Remote Work — One of the largest remote-first companies. Aside from that guide, they also maintain a comprehensive list of remote work resources. You can spend all week there, reading and learning.
Zapier’s The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work — Another remote-first company that have found a magic formula for culture/product/market fit. You can download this guide and read on your device.
Remote: Office Not Required — Basecamp literally wrote the book on remote work. Their books are fun to read.
Jules Forrest 👇 Thread of people sharing their WFH workspace, the unglamorous edition.
Several grumpy opinions about remote work at Tailscale TL;DR “iPad + Airpods + Whereby is a really great combination in 2020. And it also works well with Zoom, which is good because you're stuck with it.”
WFH was great but now my partner’s employer is making them WFH too and our house is a goddamn open office plan all of a sudden.
Martin Kleppmann🇺 Yes …
In 1665, the University of Cambridge temporarily closed due to the bubonic plague. Isaac Newton had to work from home, and he used this time to develop calculus and the theory of gravity. http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04004
… but he also turned off Slack notifications, declined all Zoom meetings, and uninstalled the Twitter app from his phone!
Thoughts of Dog® Woof.
the human has been working from home the last couple days. and every so often. they let me participate in the video calls. all the other humans cheer when they see me. i am the only thing holding their company together
Just got an email from a prof: “As a reminder, you are required to wear clothes during Zoom meetings.”
Rules are made when they become necessary, not before.
Eugene Wei “May be time to revisit our views of this brave man in his N95 mask who ordered a quarantine of Manhattan over the objections of the public and whose primary foe was a man infected by a bat”
Tools of the Trade
David Bailey “There are no perfect VS Code extensio-”
Architectural
The many reasons replatforming FreshBooks should have failed (and why it succeeded) This is one way to replatform (read: the Big Rewrite) a SaaS application. Minimize risk and pressure from the executive team, so you can do what's necessary to succeed:
What happens if we create a company that has nothing to do with us? No one could track the two companies together. And we could use that new company as a petri dish to build the new FreshBooks.
What we would get out of that is we could build something out of our competitors’ eyes, or even our customers’ eyes, frankly, which is helpful in a lot of ways. We could scale it up to know if it was actually business-performant and better.
Masterclass: How to sell to 20M software developers with an amazing onboarding experience If you're building software solution for developers, this is a great article on how to do onboarding right. From VP of Engineering at Algolia.
Teamwork
Leadership role expectations:
- 24/7 thought leadership
- Conference speaking
- Podcasts interviews
Leadership role reality:
- Saying the same things over again consistently at scale
- Asking two teams if they’ve talked to each other
- Finding where that Google doc is
Do CEOs act like jerks because they are jerks, or because the language of management will create a jerk of anyone eventually? Let me noodle on this and we can deep dive in the next heads meeting.
I guess we’re about to find out which meetings could’ve been emails after all...
None of the Above
devastations “oh to be a squirrel smelling a flower”
I made a graph of old relationships.
It has an ex axis and a why axis.
Shaun “This is a picture of an asteroid crater in Arizona...
Look how close it came to hitting the visitors centre...”
Your 401k right now is like your face: Don't touch it
Madi Kay “National Park posters created based off their worst Yelp Review, I’m dead”
Jeff Siegel Everything you need to know about cauliflower pizza:
The coronavirus was a hoax created by #TraderJoes so the company could conduct market research on what products are worth keeping in stock. Stuff people won't buy, even during the end of times, is probably a good indication of what to get rid of.
Kory Stamper 👇TIL
"Quarantine" has a pretty complicated etymology. WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR ALL ABOUT IT, YES YOU WOULD, SETTLE IN, MY NERDS
1/13
Dylan “Two types of people in this world”
James Hamblin Yes, it's called prevention paradox:
The thing is if shutdowns and social distancing work perfectly and are extremely effective it will seem in retrospect like they were totally unnecessary overreactions.
Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real? - talking about major effort to avert a crisis Related. Y2K was a major effort to avert a disaster, and all that effort paid off, and so people doubted that it ever was a real problem to begin with.
Toilet Paper Hoarding Boosts Bidet Sales At least in the US, personal hygiene is trending. Just checked Amazon, and they're out of stock on the more affordable models,
Taylor Lorenz “This guy’s fake reality show TikToks with his friend are so good”