Published
Weekend Reading — Straws Is a Distraction
“The greatest management tool in history is a focused, leisurely walk and conversation.”
Jeff Steck “Patented today: A heated decoy keyboard to keep your cat off your laptop. Patent No. 10398125.”
Design Objective
Design critiques at Figma Six different ways to do design critique.
Exploring the reasons for Design Thinking criticism TL;DR Design thinking brings business and design together, good framework, misleading name:
If used properly, design thinking is here to stay. It helps solve problems, brings divergent voices to the table, and carries a low risk. On the other hand, the classic design process is distinct from the design thinking process-it should remain so and continue to stand on its own.
Ha Phan That's a powerful way to say that:
Team mate: I especially like your disdain for “vomiting your database onto the page.”
Sometimes I say these things randomly and you never know what stays with people.
Tools of the Trade
Mozilla WebCompat Super useful: “Another gem from @FirefoxDevTools contextual information in the inspector.”
It’s actually only JavaScript if it’s created in the EMCA region of France. Otherwise, it’s a sparkling Java
My favorite CSS hack “Different depth of nodes will use different colour allowing you to see the size of each element on the page, their margin and their padding.”
Robb Owen I second that!
HTML Email requires such specific subset of unsemantic layout methods and workarounds that I propose we redefine it as an independent markup language - I'll float the acronym FML to the committee
Regex Crossword Test your regular expression skills.
Web-end
CSRF is (really) dead Chrome 78 is getting stricter on cross-domain cookies:
TL;DR:
SameSite=Laxby default. Folks who require cross-site access can opt-into the status quo viaSameSite=None, but doing so will require assertingSecureas well.
Lines of Code
Olivia Liddell If you do this one thing well, everything else seems falls into place:
With documentation, I like to take the approach of backwards design, and start with the end goals in mind first.
Ex: By the end of this section, what should someone be able to do?
This helps me to stay focused on just that single topic and not go off on tangents. #DevDiscuss
Against Method Every code I ever wrote:
A codebase is more like a wardrobe. Full of things you thought were good ideas at the time, and that you know you're going to hate in the future.
Vlad Magdalin “I'm just going to fix this lil' bug in the legacy codebase real quick...”
Architectural
nateish 🎯
Fun things to have to communicate: software isn't like making canned goods you can put on a shelf and come back to 5 years later, it's like making dairy products. If you want to be able to use it, you have to keep the farm in operation, or it goes bad quick.
Every sci-fi movie is like a sprint estimating meeting. Nobody follows orders and nobody has a clue what’s going on and nobody agrees about anything.
Today in "IP Over Avian Carriers" news TIL
I think every day about how cable internet is IP over MPEG. this is a literal fact. DOCSIS sends downstream data in MPEG frames because that's what the cable networks are optimized for and what all the switching equipment understood when cable broadband took off.
So Netflix on Comcast is MPEG over IP over MPEG.
Peopleware
Self Portraits over the Years This graph applies to every creative professional.
Think about it next time you're going through that inevitable period of frustration. (h/t batshaped)
17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager Wondering if being a manager is the right career move? Read this first. I don't agree with all the cons listed in that article, but worth knowing what you're getting into. If nothing else, it will help you prepare for the road ahead.
Jaana B. Dogan Related:
Progression of tech careers:
- code, code, code
- code, review code, code
- review code, code, design
- design, review code, code
- design, review design, review code
- design, review design
- delegate the review work effectively
Norgard Worked every time I tried it:
The greatest management tool in history is a focused, leisurely walk and conversation.
Teamwork
Janna Bastow 👇 I learned the hard way timelines don't work, and switched instead to time horizons. Hope this thread saves you the self-learning:
Most roadmaps are setting up their product teams to fail.
That's because, even today, most roadmaps still follow the dreaded timeline roadmap format 😱
And here's why that sucks. THREAD 👇
What we get wrong about meetings – and how to make them worth attending Short, powerful essay on meetings, and how to use them effectively:
But nothing undermines a meeting more than a lack of agreement as to why it’s happening. I know a school that invites parents in for curriculum meetings. The teachers think they’re explaining their approach to the parents; the parents are under the misapprehension they’re being asked for their input. Nobody goes away happy.
Kienna 👇 How to communicate with more impact:
If there's one piece of advice I can give based on what I've learned and use in school/work/game dev/life...
Learn how to communicate your ideas in a way that is:
🌟 Clear
🌟 Concise
🌟 Compelling(a thread by a tired knowledge development/communications trained person)
Selling data science If your job is to help drive decisions from data, then consultancy is part of your job:
How do you know you’re a bad data scientist? You never get to present to executives. Your analyses go unused. People don’t send you emails with questions about your numbers. A good in-house data scientist does a good job by putting together good data, and, just as importantly, commanding attention to that data.
See also, I love data science, but I hate consulting.
Surround yourself with people who will tell you how it is.
Subtlety is a waste of time.
Locked Doors
A very deep dive into iOS Exploit chains found in the wild Couple of things going on here.
First, a reminder that iOS is not the most secure operating system in the world. In fact, it has so many security holes, that attackers are willing to pay more for Android 0-day hacks than iOS. But these expensive exploits are used for targeted attacks, so not targeting you, relax.
Second, since Apple went big with "privacy first" (throwing shade at Google), Google's Project Zero has dedicated itself to exploring iOS security issues. Corporate drama at its finest.
None of the Above
Jody Avirgan “Very accurate forecast today.”
I really love the way that headphones have evolved from a mildly inconvenient, but 100% reliable, 100% available cable, to a never-charged-when-it-matters, buggy as all get out Bluetooth interface where the only UI is an undocumented pattern of flashing red and white lights.
Phyllis Fagell Next time you run a Q&A session (kids or adults, all the same):
Kindergarten teacher to class: “Does anyone have any questions?”
24 kids raise their hands.
Kindergarten teacher: “A question is when you need more information. If you want to tell me something about yourself, there will be time for that later.”
Lucas Zanotto “Mood-swings” (Lucas's other eyenimations are just as cool)
Leigh Honeywell Sorry, Akron …
Overheard a friend describing being a straight woman on dating apps: “It’s like Linkedin: the inbounds r always worse on average than outbounds. The guys you message are your dream job and the guys messaging you have an exciting 6-mo java contracting opportunity in Akron, Ohio.”
Celeste Brash Good business model, you'll never run out of mansplainers:
A friend wrote a well-performing tech article on Medium. It's a good article with one small error - its click success has come from dudes clicking and sharing and explaining how she's wrong. So she keeps the error in and makes roughly $100/month off of mansplaining.
Mine CetinkayaRundel Can one thing be scary and reassuring?
As a statistician I like this “I can’t report the estimate because the standard error is too large to be meaningful” attitude, as a passenger I’m thinking “oh boy, what are we in for?”
David Powell ✈️
If you told someone 15 years ago that in the future their computer would have something called “airplane mode,” they would be incredibly disappointed by what that actually did.
Best of Nextdoor “NOT FROM THE JOINT ACCOUNT 😩”
Brian Armstrong Impact takes resilience:
It's easy to bounce from one new idea to the next, exploring your intellectual curiosity. But having an impact requires a decade of moving the ball forward one yard every day, sometimes in a very mundane way, through multi-year ups and downs.
A Rare Universal Pattern in Human Languages Small sample size, but suggests the speed of information exchange is universal:
Both Pellegrino and Futrell predict that the average information rate for casual speech would be lower than 39 bits per second, but it would still be roughly the same across languages. At least in this select group of 17, exchanging one language for another shouldn’t significantly change the amount of time it takes to get across any given idea.
Billy Freeland “It’s the third anniversary of the shortest, and most correct, article in the history of the New York Times.”
Elizabeth Warren Says Talk of Light Bulbs and Straws Is a Distraction Funny story. Today in Santa Monica, I was served iced coffee in a single-use plastic cup with a lid. Had to ask for a straw, told “we only give straws on request”, and got the stinky eye for asking.
“This is exactly what the fossil fuel industry hopes we’re all talking about,” Ms. Warren said. “They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your light bulbs, around your straws and around your cheeseburgers. When 70 percent of the pollution, of the carbon that we’re throwing into the air, comes from three industries.”
Column: Hi, I’m David. I’m a drug addict No, you're not. You're taking antidepressants.
But who was I? Was I me or was I the product of chemical enhancement? If I came off the drug, what would happen?
Listen. I need to wear glasses to use the computer, shave without cutting myself, go places without bumping into things. Not to mention, I get headaches if I use the wrong prescription lens.
Am I not my true self because I wear glasses? Is it really me, or the product of ocular enhancement produced in a lab?
Bob Malak “A millennial when they get a phone call instead of text”
