Published
Weekend Reading — Tip the server
This week we're reminiscing on Up, sorting like a crab, minimizing tickers, helping in a medical emergency, skating while blind, and stepping on a truck.
ding bat “Don't forget to tip your server”
Design Objective
Matthew Kobach “This is the greatest 5 minutes of storytelling of all time. 10 years later and I still get inspired by it.”
Land-book A cool website for landing page inspirations. (h/t Kuda Paradzayi)
Michelle Oh my …
“Our site is responsive. No problems.”
Me: that looks cheap for that hotel.
Turns phone landscape.
Oh. #testingmatters
Tools of the Trade
Fibery Interesting tool for building your own collaboration workflows. It's like if you could mix and match features from Asana, Trello, Notion, etc based on how your team likes to work.
One more thing to like. It has four different landing pages, and one of them is an “anxiety” landing page: it lists all the reasons not to use this product. And I'll admit, the reverse psychology worked on me.
Alan Wolfe 👇 Lots of different — some interesting and thought–provoking — replies to this thread, and in the quoted tweets:
Quote this tweet with an opinion about programming that will get you unjustly dunked on.
(I'm going first)
Now, most of these are opinions informed from personal anecdotes, no research cited. But there's something to learn from other people's experiences. Especially when it's different (language, tech, field, etc) than yours.
HTTP status codes give us all the vocab to talk about dating
300 multiple choices
303 see other
400 bad request
404 not found
408 request timeout
409 conflict
410 gone
412 precondition failed
413 request entity too large 😳
417 expectation failed
500 internal server error
Mar Hicks “holy fucking shit its a crab bubble sort”
Lines of Code
5 Things I’ve Learned in 20 Years of Programming Learning from other people's experience.
mountain_ghosts Every team needs a senior developer in this role:
hire me, a senior dev, to your team, where my main contribution will be going "I don't know" "I don't get this" "can you explain that in more detail" "why"
Developers during hackathon: We built an entire application in just 3 days.
Developers after hackathon: Adding that icon is going to take 3 weeks.
Contribution Throw Blanket “Snuggle up with a blanket that puts your GitHub contribution history to shame”
Architectural
Jean-Michel Lemieux 👇 What it takes to run Shopify on Black Friday:
How about some nerd stats for #BlackFriday2019 with @ShopifyEng?
128,000 Unicorn workers served 90m unique sessions at a steady 17M RPM (requests/min) throughout the day. Over 1b webhooks sent, transformed 280m webp images at the edge and 34b requests to CDNs. 74m Flows ran.
Code less, engineer more Less code > no code > bespoke:
Bespoke software development should be a last, rather than first, resort. We must set up our teams and companies to reward impact from reusing code rather resume-driven whole-cloth development. Write less code. Do more engineering.
Peopleware
Andrew Wilkinson The holiday season is good time to consider slowing down and taking it easy:
I’ve come to believe that minimizing tickers and the rate at which you have to make decisions is key to happiness.
Ticker = any indication of the current status of your goals/problems. Graphs. Charts. Red lines. Green lines. KPIs. Especially up to the minute, hour, or day.
Sandra Newman Not wrong:
THE SEVEN SECRETS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE
- Private school
- Legacy Ivy admission
- Nepotism hire
- Seed capital from family
- Club memberships
- Personal assistant, nanny, ghost writer
- Journalists who ask, "What's your secret?" and uncritically publish the answer
Teamwork
increment: Teams Increment is a fantastic “magazine about how teams build and operate software systems at scale.” The latest issue is all about building, managing, and supporting teams. Highly recommended.
John Cutler How do we solve this?
observation
- vague is easy
- prescriptive is easy
- being crystal clear w/o being prescriptive is hard
Leaders often equate being vague w/empowerment, but IME ppl crave powerful, coherent context. And they want to have autonomy to solve the problem. Hard!#leadership
Laura Gao 😭 This tweet blew up like crazy:
Flight attendant: Is there a doctor onboard?
Dad: nudging me that should've been you
Me: Not now Dad
Dad: Not asking for a Product Manager to help, are they?
Me: Dad, there's a medical emergency happening right now
Dad: Go and see if “let’s have a follow-up meeting" helps
Here's to software developers, graphic designers, and many more.
Locked Doors
California DMV makes $50M a year off selling drivers’ data: Report Because, of course.
… sell personal data to the likes of the data broker LexisNexis, consumer credit reporting bureau Experian and many private investigators who advertise services trailing spouses suspected of cheating.
Techtopia
The ‘Silicon Six’ spread propaganda. It’s time to regulate social media sites. Goodwin's law and all, this has to be said:
Under this twisted logic, if Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Adolf Hitler to post 30-second ads on his “solution” to the “Jewish problem.”
That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It Just a reminder that online trolls and disinformation campaigns don't have a political view. Sowing discord is bipartisan. They play everyone. Be careful what you share:
Rather, Melanie’s audience was made up of educated, urban, left-wing Americans harboring a touch of self-righteousness. She wasn’t selling her audience a candidate or a position — she was selling an emotion. Melanie was selling disgust. The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.
WeWork Founder Adam Neumann 'Helped Kushner Craft Mideast Peace Plan' Man got a lot of con·fidence:
In this vein, the executive said, Neumann ended up “discussing the Syrian refugee crisis with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and urban planning with London Mayor Sadiq Khan.”
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.
Kumail Hunaid Looking for a full-time product engineering role. Skilled in building entire products - from visual integration testing tools, form builders, online marketplaces, and more. Remote/relocate. http://kumailht.com
Nikolay Talanov Front-end dev with 6 years of experience: React, Apollo GraphQL, CSS magic and animations. Located in Singapore, willing to relocate. https://codepen.io/suez
Swapnil Ogale If your product or system needs a Tech/API Writer, user advocate, or just someone passionate about docs. Freelancing, remote or contract.
Matt Dupree Primarily Android, but experience with React Native, React, Node, and iOS. Interested in building tech that helps people learn and/or make better decisions. https://philosophicalhacker.com
None of the Above
Rex Chapman “My man is blind. THIS is the Twitter content I’m here for...”
Hi, I'm Bill gates and today I will teach you how to count to ten:
1
2
3
95
98
NT
2000
XP
VISTA
7
8
10
Good doggos Oops.
Kristofer Helgen 👇 Some good answers in this thread:
What is the wisest thing anyone has ever said to you
Like knock your socks off wise
Nic Sampson “Jesus it’s enormous”
David Spinks I do believe so. The future of brick & mortar is to zig when online retail zags. Online increases social isolation, so solve for that:
Retailers will survive Amazon by focusing on in-person community.
GameStop is converting their stores into gaming hubs.
Barnes and Nobel opened cafes.
REI is offering classes.
People are craving real connection and experience. Physical spaces offer a massive opportunity.
LEGO “The evolution of the truck is here. Guaranteed shatterproof”
