Weekend Reading — 😷 Wash your hands, avoid crowds, and stay safe!

Sibber Influencer “I don't care if I loose followers over this. The truth hurts... Get over it.”

😷 So we have to talk about COVID-19. I picked up two links for perspective and practical advise.

Preparing for Coronavirus to Strike the U.S.

A mix of scientific and humanitarian, because remember this is not just personal risk to you, but your family and your community.

All of this means that the only path to flattening the curve for COVID-19 is community-wide isolation: the more people stay home, the fewer people will catch the disease. The fewer people who catch the disease, the better hospitals can help those who do. Crowding at hospitals doesn’t just threaten those with COVID-19; if emergency rooms are overwhelmed, more flu patients, too, will die because of lack of treatment, for example.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) PSA for Startups

This article starts with important health information — eg infection and mortality rates — and follows with practical advice for employers and office workers:

• Encourage hand-washing
• Wipe down work areas regularly
• Encourage flu vaccination
• Zero tolerance sick policy
• Curtail travel and conferences and move to video calls
• Curtail visitors from other countries
• Plan for the remote work contingency

Don't panic. Together we'll get through this.

Design Objective

Alex Griendling Thanks, this is super helpful:

I've often had clients who have a difficult time envisioning how a sketch might translate to a finished piece (which is fine and completely understandable), so I began including a slide like this in front of sketch presentations. It helped me, maybe it'll help you.

Allison Grayce Choose your career track wisely:

to design at a startup you have to love the problem

to design in-house you need to love the product

to design at a consultancy you should love the process

pancake princess 👇 This thread made me hungry:

hi i’m going to rate all the pancake emojis starting with

1. delicious, perfectly brown, five in total, how luxurious i approve, good sized butter, could have more syrup though 8/10”

Tools of the Trade

Hopin What if you could move your event online? We're looking at a future that has less travel, smaller gatherings, and video is the norm. This service replicates the entire event experience — sessions, networking, booths, even reception — online.

Andrés Cuervo “A few weeks ago I played around with drawing on my iPad & just mirroring to a projector. Fascinated how even just this simple technique produced really fun results!!”

Lines of Code

Jules Glegg 😭

Hi, I’m a senior engineer. You might know me from my greatest hits “but why is it null?” “There is greater honor in deleting code than in writing more” And the chart-topping “let’s just walk over to them and ask”

Peopleware

Andrew Wilkinson 👇 If you're hiring, then you better be looking out for these red flags. More in the thread. Trust, but verify, a quick reference check can make all the difference. If you're not sure, check their LinkedIn profile and ping 1st/2nd connections.

Great red flags for sketchy people:

• A series of important titles at companies that don’t seem to exist anymore

• Says former business partners are bad people/mistreated them

• Lifestyle that doesn’t match level of purported success

• Moves cities/groups often

Spike Brehm One of the best ways to level up as an individual contributor, is to spend some time as a manager. You gain perspective, and avoid a career development plateau (aka Peter principle). Kodus to companies that make it possible.

I learned a ton as a manager: the importance of generating clarity, of clear goals, of creating a good team environment; navigating budgeting & headcount, navigating bureaucracy. Many lessons I can still use as a senior IC to get shit done in the company.

Teamwork

Rúnar 👇 I hired several developers that way. 5 stars. If you can, this is the best way to go about it:

Here's a crazy idea for technical interviews. Instead of whiteboard coding, 45-minute algorithms challenges, and brain-teasers, ask the candidate to bring some code they wrote. It can be anything. The interview is then just a code review.

How to manage a highly sensitive person Chances are there's one on your team:

As an executive coach and HSP myself, people often ask me how to manage highly sensitive people in the workplace. It first and foremost requires correcting the belief that sensitivity is a defect. Perceiving the world more deeply is a gift—one that can be leveraged to spark creativity, innovation, and professional growth. In fact, sensitive people are consistently rated as top performers in their organizations. HSPs tend to be well-liked by managers and appreciated for their thoughtfulness, even if they get overwhelmed from time to time. Nevertheless, being highly sensitive can present challenges for managing stress, pressure, and relationships in the workplace.

Mekka Okereke 👇 Yep. Think twice what you incentivize with metrics and performance review:

A quick thread on the dangers of OKRs, performance reviews, and pedantry that can happen if we lose sight of what a performance review is supposed to be doing.

Story time!

Corey Leigh Latislaw “Ever wonder about the differences between management, mentorship, coaching, and sponsoring? Loving this slide I made for the management training I'm running at @kinandcarta_cr that hopefully makes it a bit clearer.”

Startup Life

BlitzFail: How Not to Go Off the Rails High growth often relies on tech, business, and culture debt, so figure out what will eventually snap, and fix it before it's too late:

In this post, I identify the top reasons why fast-growing startups go off the rails (or “BlitzFail”). The issues have three things in common: first, they are existential; they are capable of derailing a startup. Second, they are surprising; they tend to go undetected for awhile, then manifest suddenly. Third, they are common enough to occur across many startups.

How a Hot $100 Million Design Startup Collapsed Overnight Case in point, the story of Homepolish — an Instagrammable startup — run like a house of cards:

By the beginning of 2017, there were already signs Homepolish was not performing as expected. On Valentine’s Day, around 15 people (about 15% of the company) were summoned to meetings at restaurants and coffee shops near the office and fired. Some were specifically told it was because they “weren’t contributing to the profits of the company.” Among those culled were four of the most senior, longest-term employees — ones who sometimes disagreed with Santos. Soon, not a single staffer from the early days remained.

Austin Petersmith 🤔 I believe so.

Possibly unpopular opinion?

In the early days of a startup, your ability to make good data-ignorant decisions is more important than your ability to make good data-driven decisions.

Leo Polovets 👇 Thread with some great links:

1/ The amount of great content coming out these days for founders, managers, and employees is incredible. Tons of 10+ and even 100+ page detailed tactical manuals, interactive guides, curated content databases, you name it. A few notable examples:

Locked Doors

Interview: Nick Woods – Increment: Software Architecture While some companies are anti-privacy by design, the reality is that privacy is not the easy default. It takes effort, and few companies have the will to invest in privacy. Nick Woods, the former lead architect of Apple’s iCloud Photo Library talks infrastructure, privacy, and system design.

Clearview AI’s entire client list stolen in data breach Well, of course the company that's spying on you just had a massive data leak, what else is new? Their client list includes Macy's, Walmart, Eventbrite, Coinbase and the NBA … Coinbase and the NBA? What?

Techtopia

The juiciest bits from Steven Levy’s “Facebook: The Inside Story” Yikes!

Much of the reckoning of the past three-plus years can be traced to delegating policy operations to Sandberg, while the company’s all-powerful growth team — which reported to Zuckerberg – ran roughshod over everything else. Policy has always lagged behind the messes created by the growth team, and this was by organizational design.

Stephen Kendrick “I forwarded a #COVID2019 story from the @washingtonpost app to my mom, and an auto generated text went through first saying “I have the coronavirus. So far, it isn’t that bad.” It did not go over well.”

Gillian Smith “Baby tracking app design is really... something.” 😱 nikki stevens reversed engineered the code, and as you'd expect, the code base makes some curious design decisions.

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. If you'd like to get included next week, email me at assaf@labnotes.org

James McCabe 20+ years of software craftsmanship. I help companies write highly scalable applications using Scala and JavaScript. Contract/remote. https://oranda.github.io

Thorne CTO, decade of professional experience. React, Node, and more. Remote. https://thornemelcher.com/

rachel Senior software engineer, 10 years experience, international public speaker. Looking for devrel role, but open to all opportunities.

Kim Arnett 7 years iOS/Swift experience. Customer experience, a11y, diversity, dev leadership. Ann Arbor to Detroit, or Remote. https://kimarnett.com/

Romain Piel Interested in joining a midsize product-focused company. Android and/or backend dev (Rails, Go). Remote.

Emmanuel Adesile Over 2 years of software engineering experience. JavaScript, React, React Native, Node/Express and GraphQL. Remote.

Christina Gorton Looking for remote roles as UI/UX developer, devrel, or community management. Experience with teaching, mentoring, React, CSS, Animations and other frameworks. https://www.christinagorton.com/

Jeremy Wagner Looking for devrel or webperf engineering. 15 years as a front end developer. International speaker. http://jeremy.codes

Ivan Malovanyi Looking for job as a Golang Developer. AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Mongo.

David Goodwin JavaScript dev, full stack (MERN), dev ops, techno-enthusiast, and all-around swell guy.

None of the Above

Joshua Raclaw “I need a theory of semantics that accounts for this”

ashi 😭

It finally happened! The flight attendant asked "is there a doctor on this flight?" and I leapt up and said yes!

Did a tracheotomy at 30,000ft with a razor blade and ballpoint pen.

He didn't make it, but the thrill was undeniable. Thinking of going to doctor school now.

Will Taylor Drama Dots! That's just so …

Coworker of mine couldn't remember the name for ellipsis and called them DRAMA DOTS and now I will too forever thanks

Rex Chapman ““Ok, who did it?”😂🤣😭💀💀”

The Library Owl 🍷

things to ask yourself at a party:

• where are the bookshelves
• where are the exits
• who poisoned the wine
• who wanted the hostess dead and why
• does the killer think they can outwit you, the greatest detective in the world

Viveka When we talk about racist laws, this is what we mean. Laws are not neutral by default, they can be designed to produce a very specific outcome:

Gosh, a surprising number of black defendants in the US chose to carry precisely the amount of crack cocaine that would get them a mandatory sentence.

Thanks to @cody_tuttle who is doing some killer research on race, poverty and crime.

http://econweb.umd.edu/~tuttle/files/tuttle_mandatory_minimums.pdf”

kim. “this dog literally failed every single test thrown at him to become a service dog and i am scream laughing. but imho he’s still a very very good boy.”