Published
Weekend Reading — Talking to their computer and drinking coffee
Jimi Fletcher “It's Halloween, 2019. This is the very last day we can refer to Blade Runner as a film that's set in the future.”
Design Objective
Perfectly Cropped Pixel perfect UX mistake.
Jonathan Waddingham “NOvember” 💡
Product people - for the next month, try to push back on those ad hoc requests, respect the work in progress limits, don't let one customer's demands ruin your carefully planned roadmap.
Let's make it a campaign. We could call it...
NOvember
A Framework for Making Better Product Decisions Starting with step 1:
If everybody just did this first step, their products would improve significantly. This is without question the most important thing you can do to make better decisions. Write down your goals and expectations before you start building.
Allison Grayce “it’s fine, lets just make a guided tour to explain it to first time users“ - 🤩 pm
Peter Lewis I want to see these levels used in job ads:
entry level designer
junior designer
designer
senior designer
principal designer
final designer
final final designer
final final final designer_v2
designer v3 FINAL
designer_v4_finalfinal_thisone_2
HELLvetica “Like helvetica, but with like, much shittier kerning for Halloween”
Tools of the Trade
What nobody tells you about documentation The four types of documentation, why you need them, and how to make them work.
cartwrightian The one tool that can do everything:
There is one feature I consistently hear that users value about big vendor IT solutions: export to spreadsheet. Whenever I see that "company X runs solution Y" type of advert I just think: "they run the whole place off of excel"
Logic gates using fluid Simply explained:
Steeeve 😭
The plural of regex is regrets
atomicthumbs “chaotic evil website”
Web-end
Alex Russell 🧵 No surprise, Apple has strong financial incentive to hold the mobile web back:
There seems to be confusion about how, exactly, Apple keeps the web second-class on iOS. Understandable! It's the interplay of several interlocking effects. Let's examine them (thread).
Lynn Fisher One! Div!
Started with a repeating bookshelf pattern and kept going with a little animation.
#divtober 26: 🔦 Dark https://a.singlediv.com
Inspect This Snake Brilliant. Open web inspector to play Snake.
Lines of Code
My most embarrassing mistakes as a programmer:
- I didn't ask for help
- I was afraid of what others would think
- I didn't follow through on a promise
- I didn't step up and take responsibility
- I avoided conflict
My biggest mistakes had nothing to do with programming.
@nekorug 😂
"so, your resume is empty here between 2014-2016. what were you doing during this time?
"bug fixes and performance improvements."
Sahil Lavingia It's kind of exactly like this:
Learn to code so you can get paid six figures to rearrange z-indexes until the problem goes away.
@ScribblingOn “Burnout visualised”
Architectural
@ErrataRob 🧵 Great thread on technical debt, and what it's not:
Building a business case for something doesn't mean using business buzzwords you don't understand. It means actually understanding the business case. "Debt", "ROI", and so on are widely misunderstood by techies.
…
Your concept of "debt" comes largely from consumer debt. Instead of studying it, you've reverse-engineered it. You observe it, and then come up with your own principles that explain to yourself what you see. These aren't the principles business types use.
Alan Dayley TIL “intensive support period” is a thing people say unironically:
“We delivered all the scope on time. We are now fixing all the escaped defects during this 3-month intensive support period.”
If you always plan intensive support periods, you didn’t actually deliver the scope, nor was it on time (whatever that means). #agile #dealwithreality
Charity Majors This is absolutely true. Infrastructure is a product with end-users and stakeholders:
if i could go back and do one thing different in my career as db/infra engineer, it would be this: build some fucking product. not only in the darkest hour of our need, but like during the day. with a PM and that culty scrum shit.
it is harrrrrrrd leveling up on this shit now.
Devoops
I'm consistently disappointed by how often "scaling in the cloud" involves emailing support and waiting a few days to get an artificial threshold raised.
I understand the reasons for it, but it goes hard against the kind of a lot of the cloud marketing we see.
Jake Williams “When management "helps" remediate the incident...”
Peopleware
While in a listening session with a person, listen closely if you sense frustration. This is a marker that something is interfering with the person's purpose, keeping them from achieving what they want to get done.
Dani Donovan “Your words matter.”
Teamwork
@dxna 💯
The more senior you are on a career ladder the more the optics of small behaviors matter, eg ending a meeting on time if others are waiting. Because as inconsequential as it seems it sets optics around organizational standards around consideration and privilege
Teacher: what do your parents do?
Kid: they work remotely.
Teacher: what does that mean?
Kid: they hang around the house, talking to their computer and drinking coffee.
Christopher Jones “Academics complaining that departmental service obligations interfere with their research and teaching. Assyria, mid 7th century BC:”
Locked Doors
City of Johannesburg held for ransom by hacker gang Ransomware with a new twist:
A hacker group going by the name of Shadow Kill Hackers is holding South Africa's largest city for ransom, demanding 4 bitcoins from Johannesburg authorities, or they'll upload stolen city data on the internet.
SIM-Jackers Can Empty Your Bank Account with a Single Phone Call The weakest link is customer support at scale:
"One of the reasons SIM-swap attacks are so effective is that many mobile phone carrier representatives are easy to socially engineer," explained a former black hat hacker, who dabbled in SIM swaps before going straight and becoming a white hat hacker. "An attacker can call your phone provider, pretend to be you and spin some story to get the support agent to transfer your number to a SIM. If he runs into any friction, he can hang up and try again with another agent."
Stephanie 🧵 Thread:
Doing a quick deep dive on reCAPTCHA for the @webwewantfyi session this weekend and HOLY SMOKES folks. I had no idea what was being collected from your browser when you mark that little "I'm not a robot" checkbox.
None of the Above
WeRateDogs “This is Benjamin. He is Froot Loops. 14/10”
"the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog":
-overdone
-juvenile
-has no impact or weight to it"sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow"
-holy shit
-literally the most metal way to test out your font
-raw as hell
@higgzorz “this is so fucking funny the internet really was better 10 years ago”
@ArfMeasures Every. Single. Time.
Netflix: Should I play this movie?
Me: No no I'm just looking at it for a second
Netflix: I'll put it on
Me: I'm just literally reading what it is
Netflix: It's playing :)
Best of Nextdoor "Serious inquiries only, DALE"
stephanie 👨💻
light bondage but with the 10 different charging cables i need to maintain for my 3 apple products
Command Line Magic “Whoever labeled this USB-A port is having a good laugh right now.”
Anthony Ha “This is a perfect email”
Bradford Pearson 📣 “Shoutout to whoever scheduled these Deadspin tweets, changed the password, and walked out the door.”
Time to remember the best voting advice I ever heard: voting isn't marriage, it's public transport. You're not waiting for "the one" who's absolutely perfect: you're getting the bus, and if there isn't one to your destination, you don't not travel- you take the one going closest.
Dave Roberts “Anyone want to buy a cat? Still in its packaging, perfect condition.”
Dare Obasanjo Sadly true:
The idea that historians will write the equivalent of mean tweets about you in the future is probably the least effective threat in the world yet turns out to have been the primary accountability mechanism for politicians in the 2nd largest democracy on Earth. 🤦🏾♂️
The five types of fossil fuel tweets:
- Are you wasting too much water when you wash your hands? Use our calculator to find out!
Quinn Nelson “Best wireless in-ear charging case lid sound competition!” Watch this to the end.
White men did not produce great art and literature, white men produced art and literature that spoke to other white men, so they all just collectively agreed amongst themselves that it was great.
A lot of it ain't that great.
@HerDreadsRock “And whoever added the background music is going to hell” 😭