Published
Weekend Reading — Reasonable Hours Week
This week nothing gets done and all meetings are cancelled, so Twitter debates 80 hour work weeks, hackers do some hacking, and cats do some jumping.
Chaz Hutton “Welcome to the nothing time.”
Design Objective
The Navy Installed Touch-screen Steering Systems To Save Money. Ten Sailors Paid With Their Lives. Yes, good design does save lives!
Amy “Ruins Social Media” Hoy 👇 This thread is good read, worth your time. A couple of highlights that resonated with me:
\17. design has a passion problem
it attracts people who want to Do Cool Shit which is, as the obnoxiously overbearing nerds like to say, “orthogonal” to doing a good job of the thing design ACTUALLY IS, which is caretaking &; stewardship
I've seen too many designers fall for these trappings. Which often results in working on the wrong thing:
\9. there is much that is objective about Design Quality - and it’s not stickiness, but successful task completions, time per task, fudging and going back and trying again,
but you can’t get those out of google analytics and that’s why you virtually never hear about it
Tools of the Trade
RICE Scoring Model for Prioritisation - Lazaro Ibanez A simple forumla to prioritize different features/projects/tasks. Like all formula, the weak link are the numbers you plug in, which are not entirely objective. But if you stick to one context (same PM, team, etc), then you can compare apples to apples.
Chad Loder 👇 Epic rant about technical debt and over-engineering:
One day we’ll all wake up and realize Kubernetes was a huge scam.
Doing this for 25 years, I’ve learned something:
Whatever the Thing is that you can’t get people to shut up about?
It’s invariably the Thing that creates a giant turd-polishing ecosystem.
There is utility initially, and then it turns into urban decay.
1970’s Detroit. Or EJB.
Pranay Pathole “Secrets computer developers don’t want you to know”
Teamwork
Tobi Lutke 👇 It's the holidays, so of course Twitter is debating whether people should be working 40 or 80 hours a week. Here's a good perspective, from one of the better success stories in tech:
I realize everyone's twitter feed looks different. But I'll go ahead and subtweet two conversations that I see going by right now: a) How the heck did Shopify get so big this decade and b) You have to work 80 hours a week to be successful.
Thread/
The most important success factor in your work is who you choose to work with.
This has been more important to my success than having the right idea, the right resources, or anything else. Having the right people around you is the difference between success and failure.
Jennifer Kim Also known as DRI, or directly responsible individual:
StartupHiringTips: For each new opening, be sure to designate a clear Hiring Manager, aka Decision Maker.
Good hiring is done not by a committee, but a single individual who owns the decision.
There are 2 main reasons for this, which I’ll explain in this short thread 👇
cgosimon 😂
Apparently assigning work to other people via an electronic tool is “collaboration”
Startup Life
Founders — Get Your Own Personal Board The personal board that will help you through challenging times: the professional mentor, the mental health coach, the bigger picture person, and the pressure release valve.
Tren Griffin 👇 Thread:
1/ People often get confused how the existence of a moat translates into a better investment return. The moat increases the probability that the business will continue to earn returns on capital that substantially exceed the opportunity cost of capital. http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/pdfiles/eqnotes/cap.pdf
Locked Doors
Bully For the people in the back …
Blockchain isn’t some magic silver bullet that will protect user privacy.
So far, it’s very much been the opposite.
An immutable public ledger doesn’t really scream “privacy!”
There’s a reason China is embracing blockchain. And it sure as hell isn’t protecting user privacy.
Adam Liaw 🌲🎅
Home security reminder. A lot of people are going away for Christmas which makes their homes easy pickings for burglars. For security reasons I strongly recommend leaving one of your children behind to construct a series of elaborate booby traps and defend your interests.
Yousef “When someone tries attacking your site but fails”
None of the Above
Owen Williams 🏴 “all the feels”
Susie Dent So there's a word for it:
It’s surely time for this again.
scurryfunge (verb; US dialect, 1800s): to dash around the house in a frenzied attempt to tidy up before visitors arrive.
that's not funny elle “cat's a master of physical comedy”
不変哲 “犬をもだます人形使い…” And the poor doggy is so confused …
Channa Prakash “Pedestrian crossing during the marathon race”
The 84 biggest flops, fails, and dead dreams of the decade in tech Some unexpected contenders in there, and some products I forgot even existed in the first place.
Downtown Josh Brown “Advanced Dad Skills”
Andrew Reid “This is what I think of every time someone smugly posts about all the plot holes they spotted in a popular film/TV show/book.” (The original post is here)
Cute Emergency “This video will make your day 😊😊”