Published
Weekend Reading — The wrong outage
How could I not buy a beer called main frame that also looks like a CSS Grid tutorial?
Design Objective
How Uber uses psychology to perfect their customer experience Don't like the company, but the app is pretty good:
There’s no doubt that a large part of Uber’s revenue comes from optimizing their experience using science. When an experiment was run with Uber Pool that applied Idleness Aversion, Operational Transparency, and the Goal Gradient Effect, the results were impressive.
How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit This indirect question is my favorite trick:
With this in mind, I sought to pinpoint Superhuman’s HXC. We took only users who would be very disappointed without our product and analyzed their responses to the second question in our survey: “What type of people do you think would most benefit from Superhuman?”
Jonathan Shariat When the “creative process” gets in the way of progress:
Something I've been mulling over recently, would love to discuss.
Design is slowly learning lessons that engineering teams have already solved. Why don't we embrace them more?
Versioning✅, components✅, documentation🤷♂️, ticketing🚫, agile planning🚫, architecture reviews🚫etc
Tools of the Trade
Amanda Silver Want!
Massive progress in IntelliCode, powering your AI-pair-programmer. Our unsupervised model makes Python feel like a typed programming language. Uses GPT first developed by OpenAI.
Philip Salter Free advice that's worth more than gold:
Taavi Kotka , former CIO of Estonia, on the low £100m price tag for being the most tech-savvy government in the world: “If you don’t use Accenture or McKinsey, you’d be amazed at what you can get done.”
Shane Parrish Why I practice README Driven Development:
Writing is often the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about.
Henri Virtanen Someone needs to make a coffee table book with all the good Vim jokes:
When i get stuck in vim i just buy a new server from another vendor (easier).
Web-end
ui is when you make the links blue and ux is when you underline them and development is when you do nothing because browsers do that already
Diana Smith Magical!
Did another CSS-only art.
Flemish/baroque inspired.
Two weekends. Made for Chrome.
Cassidy Williams Point:
Fun fact! Baby elephants are born weighing ~250 pounds, making them the world’s biggest babies, right next to the people who complain that CSS isn’t really coding 🧠✨
Jack Daniel I tried this. Works every time.
If you ever find you have too many friends in tech, try this line to resolve the problem:
"Well actually, that's a URI not a URL."
Lines of Code
Bryan Helmkamp No lie.
Programmers are the only group who gain an hour from daylight savings time then immediately lose six to debugging
Hsing-Hui Hsu “Code comments”
Devoops
wen (Chen) Shapira System reliabilty is a “guess and pray” game:
In my experience, every system has about 500 things that could be done better. You have time to fix 5 per Q. So you pick the ones most likely to grow into big problems. And sometimes you pick wrong and get outages.
A ton of people received text messages overnight that were originally sent on Valentine’s Day Distributed systems is hard. And also, this one company you never heard of is handling your text messages:
A company named Syniverse, which provides networking services, later took blame for the messages being delayed. Syniverse said a single server was at fault: that server failed on February 14th, trapping messages waiting to be sent out; the server was only brought back online on November 7th. When that happened, all of the messages were finally delivered.
Peopleware
Avoid Burnout Before You’re Already Burned Out This:
You don’t need a dream job. But in your overall life, you do need to find time to take care of your health, do things you find refreshing and have a sense of purpose. The closer you are to living your truth, the less likely you are to burnout.
mykola 🧵 For people on the spectrum who don't know it:
Hey, how's this for autism 'awareness' month: some percentage of you who are reading this tweet are #actuallyAutistic and aren't aware of it.
I'm going to post a bunch of questions I wish I had been asked in this context, years ago. This is not diagnosis! But it's instructive.
Gabriel Szatan A lesson in stereotyping.
Teamworks
Cameron Moll Stories are powerful 🎙
Tell a story. Always.
When writing, tell a story.
When presenting, tell a story.
When resolving conflict, tell a story.
When leading a meeting, tell a story.
Whenever in doubt, tell a story.
Ha Phan Related, make story telling memorable:
One of the tricks we used to use when we present synthesis & strategy was, we’d plan organic interruptions where one person would share an anecdote, bc this makes the preso memorable. We also repeat certain words, so that when people describe the product they’d use the same words
Dare Obasanjo “Almost fell over when I saw this candle on a coworker's desk ”
Locked Doors
WIP: Support Engineer Job family country-of-residence block The reality of global politics in 2019:
In e-group on Monday October 15, 2019 we took the decision to enable a "job family country-of-residence block" for team members who have access to customer data. This is at the expressed concern of several enterprise customers, and also what is becoming a common practice in our industry in the current geopolitical climate.
The countries involved are:
- China
- Russia
FakeUnicode 🧵 Was not aware. These are some serious considerations for keeping your passwords to lower code points:
Because it keeps coming up, how about a thread on Emoji in passwords. So we (and you) can link to it in the future.
Should they be allowed? For all practical purposes they can't not be. So, yes.
Should they be heavily warned against? Yes.
But why? Well...
Vulnerability In Ring Doorbells Left the Door Open for Hackers to Open the Door TL;DR They used HTTP instead of HTTPS because of course.
matt blaze The three laws …
The three most important things experts understand about software security:
Software is unbelievably unreliable and insecure.
No, really, you have no idea.
It’s actually even worse than that.
Techtopia
Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours Computer files are going extinct:
Files feel like a good bellwether for what’s happening. We’re in this funny in-between time right now where our phones are fully in the future: apps are services kind of by definition, and it’s really hard to access the file system. But our computers are still kind of in the past: to me, at least, the two most important navigational anchors on my computer are the desktop and the downloads folder.
“Without antitrust regulation we would all be using Windows Mobile” is an A+ argument in favor of antitrust regulation
How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash This is all fine.
Talia Shadwell 👇 Creepy:
Because I had forgotten to log a cycle, the app likely concluded I was pregnant and began communicating the information to third party apps and algorithms
Kelly Eng “can’t wait 2 get hunted down by one of these”
None of the Above
Steve Stewart-Williams “No big deal; just a guy playing fetch with a beluga whale... 😮”
OhNoSheTwitnt (if you don't know the meme, “OK, boomer”)
Just so we’re all clear since there’s a lot of disagreement about birth years:
Boomer = Anyone older than you that you don’t like
Millennial = Anyone younger than you that you don’t like
and quicksand. I was extremely worried about quicksand
JB as a child i thought i'd have to deal with the bermuda triangle a lot more than i have in my adult life
Pulp Librarian “Soviet. Nuclear. Zeppelins. Three words that always inspire confidence...”
richee ⛽️
gas pumps be like:
credit or debit?
do you want a car wash?
do you want a receipt?
is it stupid that i love you?
was it all just a big mistake?
do i wanna let it happen?
do you wanna just walk away?
been getting a lot of new followers lately! just wanted to welcome you all and remind you of my script that detects unfollowers and launches killdrones.
Horse Girl Autumn 🧵 The equestrian code point:
A thread of rating every horse emoji:
Apple, iOS 13.2
Total lack of withers explains lack of saddle. Back flatter than my coffee table explains lack of rider. Horse is ewe-necked, with a tiny head. Best suited for liberty training, would not recommend for performance work. 6/10
Blair Amadeus Imani 🧵 Word game Twitter is the funniest:
That’s a hierophant. A hymen is an award that the NCAA gives to outstanding college football players.
Pinboard 🧵 This thread:
Usually this happens because the EU citizen on one side of the conversation thinks they are communicating with a compliance officer in a tasteful 10-story Pinboard office complex, while the other party to the conversation is wearing pajamas and eating an off-brand hot pocket
stephanie The SoftBank 30 year vision is just …
every morning i meditate on this deck for 28 minutes to achieve a state of higher consciousness with which to start my day
I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb Something to consider before you book your next AirBnB.
Kevin Robillard All metrics will be gamed:
This is super messed up: Elite colleges are buying SAT scores, then recruiting students they know have no chance of getting in, all so they can decrease their admittance rate and look more exclusive.
elatticus “They are playing tetherball and this is peak level wholesomeness”