Published
Weekend Reading — Page 2 is the Dark Web
This week we find the smallest thing in the universe, learn to sit still, thank Casper for all the podcasts, exit the Royal Family, and find the worst product name.
Karie Westermann “Good night to Indiana Bones.”
✈️ So I'm travelling next weekend to catch some sun. There will be a Weekend Reading but maybe not until late Sunday or Monday.
But this week is full of awesome stuff and I hope you enjoy it. If there's anything in particular you want to see/read, let me know.
Design Objective
Choosing the right UI component for communication with your users When should you send an email to your users? When is it better to show a popover? Use modal or push notification? This article has you covered with a handy reference of all the UI components, and the context to use them in.
Ha Phan 👇 If you're hiring a product manager or product designer:
1/10: Some interview questions I would ask Product Managers
we talk about our tools to death because yes, they're important. They are what helps us build these services. But I want 2020 to be the year that conversation expands (more than now) to "but does this tool actually make an impact on the quality of our end-user experiences?"
Ben Schwarz Related. It would make a huge difference if accessibilty was a ranking factor, and everyone would benefit:
Given one in five people have vision impairment, do you think it’d be reasonable for Google to use a perceived accessibility score as an SEO ranking factor?
If 20% of people have trouble reading or interacting with content, why recommend it?
Steve Schoger Of course you can learn design. Design schools existed long before computers:
A lot of developers will tell me that you can learn to code but you can’t learn design.
Learning design requires the same skill as learning to code: the ability to sit down and focus on learning it for many hours at a time.
Jeff Morris Jr. Yes!
Product idea:
“Grammerly for product design”
A Figma & Sketch plug-in that uses AI/ML to predict performance & offer suggestions for copy, images, button placement.
We have amazing tools to help writers communicate better.
We should have the same tools for product design.
Kyle Hill True.
Tools of the Trade
Look Busy $0.99 to 10x your productivity? Sounds like a bargain to me.
Look Busy fills your work calendar with realistic-looking (but secretly fake) work events. Your co-workers won’t schedule conference calls and meetings, so you can get actual work done.
Replace Your To-Do List With Interstitial Journaling To Increase Productivity I'm digging this idea. The premise is very simple and it doesn't take much effort. Once you're done with a given task/project, you write the conclusion in the journal — dump it from mind to make room for the next task. Then you write down the first action of the next task/project — easier to jump into when you know where to start. An entry would look like this:
9:37am.
Finished email to Nik about writing another article for us. I probably don’t need to follow up. Also, part of my mind is still wondering if I should have suggested a topic to him.
Now, switching over to writing an article. What’s my next action? Oh. Just open Medium. The article is going to flow easily once I get the intro down. I should steel myself for having to rewrite that intro a few dozen times.
connor4312/cockatiel Resilience and transient fault-handling library with backoff, retry, circuit breaker, timeout, bulkhead isolation, and fallback policies. Looks great, going to give this a try.
hakluke/how-to-exit-vim A comprehensive guide to all the different ways you can exit Vim. Simpler and more complicated versions of:
The reboot way
:sudo reboot
Roy van Rijn “You've got to be shitting me...
One of our office chairs turns off monitors... we couldn't believe it, but we have it on tape.
Surprisingly, there even is a known issue for it:
https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/738618-display-intermittently-blanking-flickering-or-los”
Lines of Code
Angelina Fabbro I do look for these things in a technical interview. Delivering working software — includes design, tests, docs, etc — should be ingrained practice:
I don’t know who needs to hear this but if you’re interviewing for a position and the pipeline has a code exercise - even if it doesn’t explicitly ask for tests and a README, include tests and a README
Devhumor “Programming in a nutshell”
Peopleware
M. Shemayev Hyperfocus is good until you get stuck and need to find another path. Then hyperfocus keeps you on the treadmill. Want to get unstuck? Any distraction will do. And who doesn't like cat videos?
I'll never forget the time that while intensely frustrated debugging I asked a coworker for help who came over & starting loudly playing cat videos.
I was livid. Then got distracted by the cat videos & was awwing.
10min later, looked up -- "Oh, I see the error!" #DevDiscuss
Ben Nicholas 👇 Burn out is not the result of long hours, but lack of wins. Long hours are a co-factor, another symptom to the same underlying problem that will lead to burn out:
When we talk about burnout, we often attribute it to working long hours. But that's not the only cause. Constantly shifting directions or expectations on a project wears people down. It ensures that they have no goals to work toward and sets them up to fail often. So rather than
Laziness Does Not Exist What we attribute to laziness is the result of different factors — anxiety, missing skills, lack of coping mechanism, etc:
For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it’s typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being “good enough” or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well.
So help people overcome procrastination, instead of trying to make a bad situation worse:
Students with barriers were not always treated with such kindness by my fellow psychology professors. One colleague, in particular, was infamous for providing no make-up exams and allowing no late arrivals. No matter a student’s situation, she was unflinchingly rigid in her requirements. No barrier was insurmountable, in her mind; no limitation was acceptable. People floundered in her class. They felt shame about their sexual assault histories, their anxiety symptoms, their depressive episodes. When a student who did poorly in her classes performed well in mine, she was suspicious.
Peter Brannen “You: This one untested supplement will restore balance to my body
Your body:”
For reference, here's a map of the marketing tech landscape.
Today In Business Models
Kevin Roose “Casper is a very inefficient wealth transfer from venture capitalists to prestige podcast makers and I’m here for it.“ I never bought a Casper mattress, but I appreciate that they gave us so many podcast choices to listen to:
Derek Thompson: This appears to be Casper's business:
Buy mattress at $400.
Sell at $1,000.
Refund/return 20% of them.
--> Keep $400, on avg.... then spend $290 of that on ads/marketing.
... and $270 on admin (finance, HR, IT).
--> Lose $160.Repeat.
Kay K. 😭
Math problems I wish I had gotten as a kid:
Sally has 30 🍎. She gives one 🍎 to Joe for free. Joe buys 5 more 🍎 as a result for $1/🍎. She sells the rest for $0.50/🍎.
What was Sally’s blended CPA, ROAS, CLV, and does she have product/market fit? If so, why? Show your work.
Startup Life
Garry() “Working on a startup feels like”
Paul Ford Alec Baldwin posting animated GIFs in Slack:
If you remade Glengarry Glen Ross today it would just be a screencast of Salesforce.
David 👇 If you want to get an introduction, make it as easy as possible. This thread expains how to do it well, and without too much effort:
1/ I love to connect people when it's a mutually beneficial intro, but I always request that the asker send me a "Clean Email" so that I can clear the intro with the prospective connection.
What is a Clean Email ™
- Forwardable subject (i.e. not "Great to hang, DK!")
- Focused, customized blurb explaining the purpose of this potential intro -- no mention of other topics/ideas we may have discussed
- No strange formatting
- Has a single email signature from the asker
Assume I am using a Gmail mobile client.
Tanay Jaipuria “People who call themselves value-add investors”
Locked Doors
my mom asked me if I use a password manager.
me, pleased she's asking: "yeah, I use 1password."
mom: "really? I thought you're not supposed to do that."
me: "really? where did you read that?"[5 minutes later]
me: "wait, one password is the NAME OF THE PASSWORD MANAGER"
nick “Ladies take notes!
Met this girl online YESTERDAY, and she’s already trying to learn more about me, not just hook up. It’s called conversation. Learn it.”
Techtopia
Vicki Boykis “Streaming Ad Insertion sounds like a medical procedure you never want to be offered”
https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/08/spotify-brings-streaming-ad-insertion-technology-to-podcasts/
Antonio García Martínez “GDPR is working exactly as everyone who knew the first thing about ads thought it would.”
Jonathan Mendez: This is a hell of a chart. Facebook and Google each grow $80B over the next 4 years. "Rest of Online Ad Marketplace" shrinks over same period.
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
Aditya Rao Front-end developer: ReactJS, Redux, GatsbyJS, NodeJS. Mumbai or remote. https://www.adityarao.dev
James Harris Designer and web developer looking for remote work. I love tackling complex stuff and making it easy to understand and work with.
Kevin Garcia Looking for lead/staff product design, UX, or design systems opportunities. Early stage startup in the big data/ML/enterprise space. San Jose/South Bay area. https://www.kevingarcia.me
Jesse Heady Web performance engineering, Site Reliability Engineering; DevOps with a focus on UI/UX and front-end development. https://jesseheady.com
Dom SysAdmin with experience in SQL, O365, Active Directory, HelpDesk, with a Network+ certificate and a knack for sales.
Sam Sneddon Decade+ experience with contributing to web standards and working cross-vendor to meet goals, testing complex software, and associated large test automation systems. Contract work. London/remote.
None of the Above
Figen.. “This is better than both Jurassic World movies. 😁😁”
Merrill Markoe I remember those brave times!
When I want to remind myself how much courage I actually have, I remember that when I was growing up, the phone would ring and I would just pick it right up with NO way at all of knowing who was making the call. None.
Giles Paley-Phillips “Maybe the greatest airport reunion ever”
Erinalope needs SPAAAAACE🚀 “Decipher this, I spent a good 5 mins aimlessly walking a con floor figuring this shit out.”
Sarah Skinner It's like you know me or something …
Stages of form filling:
- Avoid
- Avoid more
- This isn't so bad
- Oh no! I don't know the answers to these
- THESE QUESTIONS ARE NOT SPECIFIC
- I hate this
- Write essay explaining each answer
- Nearly done! I hope they don't ask me for tons of eviden-
- NOOOOO!
- Cry
Jill Biden's right index finger “this is fucking METAL"
Kakslauttanen: Herders spraying reflective paint on their reindeer's antlers to avoid road accidents leads to absolute surreal and scary pictures #Lapland #Finland
Eric Nelson “First time I’ve ever seen someone quit their family, saying it’s to spend more time with their jobs.”
NBC News: JUST IN: Harry and Meghan say they plan to step back as senior members of the British Royal family, and "carve out a progressive new role within this institution" while working "to become financially independent."
Meredith Haggerty Best use of meme to describe this week's very British drama (context):
I [38F] don't feel welcome in my husband [35M]'s home country. His family [93F, 98M, 71M, 72F, 37M, 37F] and subjects [all ages] are very demanding. How can I convince him to set boundaries?
With ingestible pill, you can track fart development in real time on your phone Ars Technica busted the thesaurus to bring you this article. That we have this miniature technology is pretty remarkable, and as close as we'll ever get to the Fantastic Voyage.
Kent Roth It's a scary place that nobody dares venture …
I consider page 2 of google results the dark web.
Sally Lait Maybe you want to think that “device-free zone“ policy:
Insulin pump apps? Autistic or extremely anxious people who use their devices to recentre? Alcoholics who want to glance at an affirmation? Those needing help with English? There are myriad reasons why a device may be incredibly important to someone.
Dr. Jacquelyn Gill 🔥 There's a huge PR machine running behind the scene, trying to deflect responsibilty for climate change away from major corporations, and often they get away with it:
I have a theory that these terrible (and often wrong) hot takes are actually designed to get people to stop caring about combatting climate change altogether. I promise climate scientists don’t actually care that you just binged The Expanse. Half of us did, too.
Big Think: Your Netflix binge-watching makes climate change worse, say experts. The emissions generated by watching 30 minutes of Netflix is the same as driving almost 4 miles: http://bit.ly/2SSrPxg
America just needs a mom to be like, “A new war? You got new war money? You never even finished the last two. We have plenty of war at home.”
Amy 😱 oh my …
looking for an app that stabilizes time-lapse videos and i uh
i would have maybe gone with a different name. and logo. and just everything
