Christof Damian

Friday Links 26-18

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Again a few good podcasts, I especially liked the one about The Pre-Training Wall and the Mythical Man Month.

Quote of the Week

Rule of thumb: When the debate is no longer productive, it’s time to make a decision.

Managing Humans

Michael Lopp

Leadership

The Ask - what is this meeting actually about?

Friday Links 26-17

Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Two weeks of links again! Three podcast recommendations from me, if you got the time: Dadaism, Cow Resistance, and Desert Island with Si King. The post by Rands about being overwhelmed as a leader is also great.

Quote of the Week

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

Mostly Harmless

Douglas Adams

Leadership

Barely Treading Water - I can relate very much. “Say No” is a good start.

Friday Links 26-16

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Some good podcasts this week, I liked the ones about aging programmers, bees, and GLP-1s. Also some scientific insights into super blocks.

Quote of the Week

You bring skills, your experience and your presence to a conversation with someone else who is far more experienced in their life and work than you are, even if they are not yet noticing it.

Simplifying Coaching

Claire Pedrick

Engineering

How it feels to be a software engineer when AI is changing our relationship with code [Podcast] - very insightful views from Nate.

Friday Links 26-15

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Quite a few articles about AI costs getting out of control. For something different I recommend the podcast about the origins of Rose Bikes.

Quote of the Week

What they found instead was that “who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions” (Google 2015). In other words, it all comes down to team dynamics.

Accelerate

Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, Gene Kim

Engineering

Do I belong in tech anymore? - I can relate to some of this.

Friday Links 26-14

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200

A bit of a mixed bag today. Good reads are the Agents and the Era of Overproduction and AI reshaping values at Enode blog posts. Podcast-wise, give Driverless World and the Pedro Sánchez episode a listen.

Quote of the Week

“It’s like the free puppy,” I continue. “It’s not the upfront capital that kills you, it’s the operations and maintenance on the back end.”

The Phoenix Project

Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

Leadership

TBM 418: Campfires, Trails, and Quests - collection of how AI affects teams.

Friday Links 26-13

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200

I caught up with my YouTube, two good videos from NotJustBikes about cars and oil being bad.

I really liked all the links in leadership this week, all highly recommended.

Quote of the Week

Safe to fail — Organisations need to make it safe to execute a rollback without penalty to the developer. We’ve seen some organisations introduce failure KPIs that demand that all employees (from the CEO down) demonstrate failure at least once per year in order to receive their bonus. The argument is that if they do not demonstrate failure, they are either hiding or not taking enough risks.

#Noprojects

Evan Leybourn and Shane Hastie

Leadership

The Vasa - “Understanding why the Vasa sank also gets to something important about how organisations fail.”

Friday Links 26-12

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Two weeks of links. A lot of AI related articles again. I liked the paper about using chatbots in leadership, and the one about the YAML of the mind. If you want a podcast, check out the one about night trains.

Quote of the Week

The technologies we use to try to “get on top of everything” always fail us, in the end, because they increase the size of the “everything” of which we’re trying to get on top.

Four Thousand Weeks

Oliver Burkeman

Leadership

We-ness: The secret cause of Psychological Safety [Podcast] - very interesting deep dive into how feeling like a team can increase psychological safety.

Building and pushing container images on Codeberg CI

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200

Logo: Codeberg e.V. — CC BY-SA 4.0

As part of moving my services to EU-based infrastructure, I’ve been migrating away from GitHub to Codeberg, a non-profit code hosting platform based in Germany. One of the things I needed was a CI pipeline to build a container image and push it to the Codeberg container registry for my wildfires project (which also posts to @catfires@rls.social). It took a few tries to get right, so here’s what works for me.

Friday Links 26-11

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Two great podcasts this week, with the creator of Claude Code, and another one with Werner Herzog.

And check out the links from other people, they are much better than mine.

Sorry about destroying your productivity with the 100 jumps game.

New addition to these posts:

Quote of the Week

A profusion of ideas spewed forth from his mind. There was no such thing as a bad idea, apparently. But, perhaps more important, there was no such thing as a good idea either, until it had been tried and coolly evaluated.

Reamde

Neal Stephenson

Friday Links 26-10

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The podcast about culture is great, so is the one with the creator of Kotlin.

Tanith’s techno set is pretty great too.

Leadership

The more you talk about culture, the less people believe you [Podcast] - I have seen some of the stuff they mention.

My preferred product management techniques and frameworks - “Talk to everyone”

Friday Links 26-09

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The interview with Eugen Rochko, the creator of Mastodon by The Europeans is great, so are their other topics. Both videos in urbanism are a nice watch for today.

Engineering

Internal Platform Technical Product Manager (TPM) patterns: pros and cons - some scenarios, mostly useful for bigger teams.

Friday Links 26-08

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

A bit quieter this week. The podcast about the golden ages of computing is interesting, the GitHub issue exploit is also worth a read.

Leadership

The Complicators, The Drama Aggregators, and The Avoiders - I definitely recognise some of these.

Engineering

Socialize the Plan - Does reviewing plans really make sense? They are basically throwaway.

A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4,000 Developer Machines - oops.

Friday Links 26-07

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Today is a weird one, so much in engineering is about AI.

Check out the live coding trance video and pretty Stockholm metro videos.

Engineering

Extremely Lazy and Immensely Curious - I still think it makes you dumb.

Mediations #35: Learning. Again. And Again. - learning how AI fits in and how we fit in.

Implementing a clean room Z80 / ZX Spectrum emulator with Claude Code - is it clean code if Claude probably had access to a Z80 emulator at some point?

Friday Links 26-06

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

I enjoyed the interview with the OpenClaw creator, even if I hate about half of his opinions. The interview with the baker is also great.

Leadership

Three Bad Managers - three of many.

Engineering

Michael Stapelberg: PSA: Did you know that it’s unsafe to put code diffs into your commit messages? - this is only for patches, not merging PRs

Evolving Git for the next decade [LWN] security & large files are interesting.

Friday Links 26-05

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

If you watch one thing this weekend, watch the video about being misled about renewable energy. Spoiler: It’s not just about renewable energy.

I still haven’t decided what I think about coding with AI. It has been a great help and I see all the drawbacks. My links reflect this.

Leadership

Culture is built on ‘moments of truth’ [Podcast] - not a technology company, but still very applicable to all organisations.

Blog Roll and Podcast Roll

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

I have been meaning to do this for a while. Finally, @kpl made me do it.

I added a blog roll and a podcast roll to this site.

RSS is not dead. I still use it daily to keep up with blogs and podcasts. These pages are generated from my actual subscription lists, so they reflect what I genuinely read and listen to.

The blog roll covers engineering, leadership, cycling, urbanism, and various other topics. The podcast roll is similar, with a focus on cycling, technology, and storytelling.

Friday Links 26-04

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100

It is a bit sad that he is leaving In Our Time, but I enjoyed the interview with Melvyn Bragg.

The blog post about curiosity as a leader is short and great.

Leadership

Should you include engineers in your leadership meetings? - interesting idea, not really in my area at the moment.

Curiosity is the first-step in problem solving - I think curiosity is always a good place to start from.

Friday Links 26-03

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

This week I enjoyed the podcast about Venezuela, the blog post about asking, and the one from Lara Hogan about employees getting stuck.

Leadership

How can we make asking easier? - if you want public question, you have to make it safe, otherwise accept private ones.

Creating momentum when an employee is stuck - this was more helpful than I expected :-)

I’m Going to Dig a Hole - sometimes you have to let people do stupid things.

Moving services to the EU

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 12:14:55 +0100

Like a lot of Europeans, I realise that the US isn't a reliable partner anymore.

I am just talking about myself here, and not my employer, or my family.

I do use a lot of services that are based in the US, and some I will probably not migrate in the near future.

But when I receive a bill, it is a good moment to consider if it is a candidate for migration.

Friday Links 26-02

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

This week I enjoyed the podcast about Godbolt’s Rule and the one with Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

You might notice more podcasts this week. Something went wrong with my link collection system recently.

I am also moving the blog … more things will go wrong.

Leadership

Stop Picking Sides: Manage the Tension Between Adaptation and Optimization - nicely put. It’s similar to the creation vs maintenance tension.

Friday Links 26-01

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 12:25:00 +0000

First round of links for 2026. Everything is bad, so have some links to cheer you up.

I really liked the article about visibility, the one about Friday deploys, and sitting alone in a café … which I can relate to.

I am a big fan of Bill Nighy’s podcast, that certainly will improve your mood.

For some reason, the random section is full of cassette tape related links.

2025 in books

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 17:21:00 +0000

Another year, another bunch of books.

I spend most of the year binging through thriller series that I had already had started in 2024.

The books I really liked were the newest book from the Slough House series, the spy novel The Persian, and Fundamentals of Software Architecture (even if I didn’t finish it).

I am still using Goodreads to track these, so you can find the pretty Year in Books there.

Friday Links 25-29

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 12:33:00 +0000

Clearly, I have been slacking for the last weeks.

Just look at all the links from other people at the bottom!

This might also be the last post for the year, as I will be enjoying the festive season.

Nonetheless, a lot of great content this week. I discovered a few new blogs that will keep me busy for the future.

Our Zoo

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 10:23:00 +0000

OK, Zoo might slightly be overstating it.

Let’s start at the beginning.

In March 2019, we moved from Barcelona into the countryside. While I grew up in a village and studied in a small town, my recent life I spend in London and Barcelona. It was also my first house, farmhouse even, having lived in flats most of my life.

So clearly, I thought about how I could complete my cosplaying of country life.

Friday Links 25-27

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 12:38:00 +0000

Screenshot from TI99 Pirate Adventure game

This week, I enjoyed the blog about chat programming, and coding at work, which is probably related.

Leadership

Hybrid workers are putting in 90 fewer minutes of work on Fridays – and an overall shift toward custom schedules could be undercutting collaboration - Friday is always different in Spain.

Thermostats - Tuning team temperature - first rule of leadership: don’t panic

Feedback doesn’t scale - this is mostly about bigger teams

My Framework for Technical Debt

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:48:00 +0000

I’ve mentioned my approach to technical debt often, but I’ve never actually written it down. Here’s the framework I use.

Technical debt is most typically brought up from individual engineers or the engineering department. If not attended to, technical debt can slow down future product development and reduce the developer experience.

To me, technical debt is simply technical work we choose to postpone, focusing on something that currently has higher priority.

Friday Links 25-26

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 10:04:00 +0000

Skateboarder jumping off a building in NYC

Short, but with lots of good stuff. The fad of engineering management, drug policy in Spain, and Mr. TIFF are my favourites.

Have a lovely weekend!

Leadership

“Good engineering management” is a fad - you will have to adapt and core skills are reusable

Seven Decisions - “Inspired” – right.

Engineering

Mr TIFF - the story of the TIFF format. As an Amiga fanboy, I like to follow anything related to IFF.

Friday Links 25-25

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 10:07:00 +0000

Short one today.

Listen to the last episode of Science in Action, or check out the archive.

For a fun, scary game, have a look at The Scope Creep. One for the product managers.

Leadership

Become the Consequence - I’ll have to digest this a bit more.

The Scope Creep - scary product game

Friday Links 25-24

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 10:23:00 +0000

I was busy last week, which means more links for today.

I really like the podcast with Charity Majors about teams, and it made me rediscover her blog.

Some interesting posts about security and LLMs and LLMs in general this week.

Leadership

Thoughts from LeadDev NYC 2025 - good high-level summary. I should have a look at the videos.

Vibe Engineering: A Field Manual for AI Coding in Teams - this got updated.

Friday Links 25-23

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 13:33:00 +0000

A few interesting articles about AI this week. A good interview with Jane Goodall from 2020, and a weird assembler tutorial game.

Also check out the link from Jason at the bottom, I could have copied them all.

Leadership

The illegible nature of software development talent - boring work is important work, and invisible.

Friday Links 25-22

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 09:52:00 +0000

Gorilla in Barcelona Zoo

This week, I remembered Jane Goodall. I love the interview with her in The Live Scientific.

Some reasonable predictions for the future of AI, too.

And the progress of public transport in Medellín should be an example for everywhere.

Leadership

25 proven tactics to accelerate AI adoption at your company - Some good and some awful ideas.

People not Resources - there is even a domain for it!

Friday Links 25-21

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 14:57:00 +0000

Don’t Need Money by Poorly Drawn Lines

Some “AI” related stuff today, with the idea of prompt engineering being requirements engineering and how these new tools can enable non-programmers to get closer to the code.

I also liked how much Wil Wheaton likes a new metro line.

Leadership

RTO mandates lead to us questioning leaders - it was never about RTO.

Engineering

Prompt Engineering Is Requirements Engineering - I don’t think we were ever good at requirements, how are we going to be good with prompts?

Friday Links 25-20

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 13:20:00 +0000

If you have a weird fascination with trams, you should probably check out the full World Tramdriver Championship video.

Otherwise, the podcast with the author of Code Complete is great, so is the one about a train ride through Canada.

Engineering

Hashed sorting is typically faster than hash tables - in case it comes up in the next interview :-)

“Shai-Hulud” NPM attack runs malicious GitHub Action - more NPM fun

Friday Links 25-19

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 11:26:00 +0000

Small selection today. Some good reads, about the job market, corporate job, and a good podcasts about teams & AI.

Leadership

Organizational design and Team Topologies after AI [Podcast] - a much more balanced view on the changes AI brings to teams

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing - a bit older article

AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies - this is more interesting, maybe theory is hitting reality now

Friday Links 25-18

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 14:17:00 +0000

Quick selection.

This week I liked the podcast with the whaler, and the Chinese cycling industry.

Leadership

Rate My Manager - Oh, no! It’s pretty new. (Side note: This looks vibe coded)

Engineering

Bringing BASIC back: Microsoft’s 6502 BASIC is now Open Source - very nice. It is one, 7000 line file.

Browsh - new text-based browser.

BYTE - visual history - I still have my favourite issues, like the one with the Amiga 3000 on the cover. I also remember one about Desqview/X, that I probably have somewhere.

Friday Links 25-17

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 13:51:00 +0000

TI 99/4A home computer original box for European market

This week I enjoyed the post about dealing with abandoned EV charger hardware and of course, the video about the TI 99/4A.

Leadership

Nobody Wins at Calendar Tetris - busy doesn’t mean productive

Tech debt isn’t an ‘IT issue.’ It’s a business strategy - yep.

The Management Skill Nobody Talks About - how to fail good.

Engineering

Building your own CLI Coding Agent with Pydantic-AI - lots of them are popping up now. It is a good intro to the tools and libraries.

Friday Links 25-16

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 14:42:00 +0000

The band Kraftwerk on stage

Lots of good stuff again this week.

I recommend listening to the history of TrainingPeaks and coding in the red-queen area.

Leadership

Using postmortems to break out of infinite loops | Adnan Karač | LDX3 London 2025 [YouTube] - a quick talking about how to make them useful.

Team OKRs in Action - they have to be co-created, not top down.

Why Do Interviewers Ask Linked List Questions? - tradition. I last worked with linked lists in C on the Amiga.

Friday Links 25-15

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 13:46:00 +0000

I liked the work bringing Doom to the Amiga, without actually using Amiga code.

And I learned some new things about the history of Civility in the BBC podcast.

Leadership

How We Encourage Self-Improvement at Buffer - $1000 is nice, it is more than in many organisations. I don’t think it is enough.

TBM 370: Dependencies Aren’t Your Problem - “Shift the goal from managing dependencies, to focusing on the throughput of potentially value-creating activities”

Friday Links 25-14

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 11:07:00 +0000

These are too many links. I was on holiday … twice.

I could stagger these, but there will be more next week.

There are still many good things here.

Too many.

I am sorry.

Leadership

How We Plan Retreats, After Hosting 14 over 12+ Years (+ Get Our Retreat Planning Playbook!) - important for fully remote companies, and I didn’t often see this done right

Friday Links 25-13

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 14:18:00 +0000

Photo: Oto Godfrey and Justin Morton Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0

Too many random links this week.

The interview with the creator of Praise You (sampled by Fatboy Slim) is pretty good, what a strong woman.

If you need some inspiration to get on a bike, watch the video about riding 2500 km in London.

Leadership

Expert Generalists - “But we’ve found that our most effective colleagues have a skill in spanning many specialties.”

Friday Links 25-12

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 13:22:00 +0000

Today is apparently the Urbanism YouTube edition.

I also really liked the podcast about Hindenburg, and the video about the bikepacking trip (in Germany, sadly).

Engineering

Annotation Mono v0.2 - a pretty new mono font

Libxml2’s “no security embargoes” policy [LWN] - It is a pretty drastic move, and I wonder if anything will change after this.

Setting Up MCP Servers in Claude Code: A Tech Ritual for the Quietly Desperate - I have to give some of these a go.

Friday Links 25-11

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 14:07:00 +0000

My YouTube links got lost because of my new workflow. It is working now.

This week I enjoyed the Podcast about copyright and the video about cycling couriers in Seoul.

Leadership

The Heart of Innovation: Why Most Startups Fail - long read about demand.

Your Manager Is Not Your Best Friend - your manager should be thinking about the company and the team, then the individuals.

Friday Links 25-10

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 11:10:00 +0000

This week I enjoyed the podcasts about Lise Meitner and Korea.

OpenRailwayMap is also nice to play around with, if you are interested in railways all over the world.

Engineering

The Work of Building for Other Engineers: Platform & SRE Mindset

Anatomy of a Recruitment Phish - the things jobseekers have to deal with nowadays.

Environment

Climate action literacy interventions increase commitments to more effective mitigation behaviors [Paper] - people don’t know which individual actions are useful. I should get rid of my pets.

Friday Links 25-09

Fri, 30 May 2025 09:43:00 +0000

First post curated via Readwise Reader. I am creating some scripts to help replicate what I did with Pocket.

I enjoyed the Komoot goodbye video this week. It is lovely and a bit sad.

Leadership

Stuff I learned at Carta. - lots of good stuff, maybe not applicable in all organisations.

Early Days of Agile Development & Is Design Dead? • Martin Fowler & James Lewis • GOTO 2024 [YouTube] - nice chat.

Friday Links 25-08

Fri, 23 May 2025 08:39:00 +0000

Amiga 1000 by Blake Patterson

Pocket is a big part of how I collect the links for the Friday Links. Sadly, Mozilla has decided to shut Pocket down. My plan is to migrate to Readwise Reader, which seems to be a reasonable replacement. I am now migrating some of my helper scripts to make the change easier. You will see next week if I will be successful. :-)

Friday Links 25-07

Fri, 09 May 2025 09:40:00 +0000

A very random collection this week, with some prepping research.

The Life-Sized City report from Berlin is pretty cool, so is the one about building a simple game in different engines, I also liked the post about microservices.

Engineering

Microservices Are a Tax Your Startup Probably Can’t Afford - very long read about the pitfalls and some advantages of microservices.

Formally verified cloud-scale authorization [Paper] - fascinating. Maybe only do that if you have a billion calls a second.

Friday Links 25-06

Fri, 02 May 2025 09:02:00 +0000

A few uplifting stories about urbanism and science this week.

I also really liked the video about the empty virtual world and browsing through Moby’s gratis track collection.

Leadership

The best culture book of 2025: The Power of Mattering [Podcast] - I am not 100% convinced, but it is on my to-read stack now.

TBM 351: The 4 Prioritization Jobs (And Why It Matters) - I would say they are very much related.

Collecting Cassette Decks

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 10:17:00 +0000

This probably falls into the category of weird hobbies. Friends have asked me about it, so I figured it was time to write it down.

Some history

I grew up in the 80s and cassettes were a big part of how I experienced music. I remember recording bits of radio shows to create my own mixtapes. Furthermore, I also recorded records of friends and relatives to play on my Walkman.

Friday Links 25-05

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 10:04:00 +0000

Many podcasts this week. I really loved the one with Cyndi Lauper.

I did enjoy the one with Kent Beck and basically all the engineering and leadership ones.

Leadership

Kent Beck on why software development is an exercise in human relationships [Podcast] - great interview with Kent, he is so humble and down to earth.

Meaning: why showing work matters has such an impact [Podcast] - interesting discussion round.

Mindful podcast listening

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 09:01:00 +0000

[Poorly Drawn Lines: Podcasts](https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/podcasts/)

I have been listening to podcast for a long time. I have blogged about this previously.

During that time, I have changed devices and players. I might have started with a classic iPod, then went to a Symbian phone, now on Android, first with BeyondPod and currently Pocket Casts.

The one constant was the increasing number of podcasts and episodes I had to deal with every week. I do love the variety and coming across weird episodes on “In Our Time”, where I learn about topics I would never have known about.

Friday Links 25-04

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 10:08:00 +0000

Modern building with glass front

Have a listen to Greg Korah-Hartman about the kernel development process. Some good and uplifting topics in urbanism this week too.

Leadership

The Product Engineer - I agree with some of it. Every engineer should be a product engineer, but I still think there is a place for product managers.

Who gets to do strategy? - everybody.

Ok. So, You’re Failing - how to receive performance feedback, and probably also how to give it.

Game of Toiletpaper 2025

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 18:47:00 +0000

Heute habe ich zum ersten Mal beim Game of Toiletpaper teilgenommen. Es ist ein virtueller Alleycat der von Regine während der Pandemie gestartet wurde. Im Prinzip ist es eine Art Schnipseljagd auf dem Fahrrad, aber ohne einen bestimmten Ort gebunden zu sein. Ich konnte das also praktischerweise von mir zu Hause aus machen.

Der Tag begann nicht wirklich einladend, mit 4C und angekündigtem Regen. Ich habe die wärmsten Stunden abgepasst und am Ende nur ein paar Tropfen abbekommen. Ich bin eine Strecke gefahren, die ich gut kenne, und habe auch darauf geachtet, dass ich nicht so lange unterwegs bin, weil die Hunde alleine zu Hause waren.

Friday Links 25-03

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:16:00 +0000

I have been slacking recently, today you are getting a bigger dose of links.

If you want to listen to something nice, have a look at the episode about developer productivity and about keeping our food fresh.

Leadership

Is engineering strategy useful? - there is always one, best to make it clear

Developer productivity with Dr. Nicole Forsgren (creator of DORA, co-creator of SPACE) [Podcast] - I loved this episode. Many good bits.

Friday Links 25-02

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:55:00 +0000

This week, I recommend the blog posts in engineering. Some nice toys to play with.

Engineering

Building Bauble - language to create shaded graphics and animations. You can modify the code in the blog post to play with it.

The Visible Zorker - looking at the inner workings of Zork.

Building a tiny Linux from scratch - pretty cool, I haven’t even built my own kernel for a long time.

Friday Links 25-01

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0000

A glass of Marmite

Very random collection of links today.

The podcast about how cars change us is pretty good, so is the one about how drugs can influence the brain.

Leadership

Managing Up - I agree that it is mostly about buttering up your boss, while it should be a collaboration.

Engineering

Fish 4.0: The Fish Of Theseus - I am not a fan of rewrites, but this is a good read and apparently a successful rewrite. Moving bits by bit is also a practical approach.

2024 in Books

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 10:17:00 +0000

Covers of the books mentioned

I kept my reading in pretty light. I mostly read crime series, I am following and binged a new one.

There were some books I have been pretty disappointed with. At least this will reduce my future reading list.

You can also check out My Year in Books on Goodreads.

Non-fiction

Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business - I was joining a company focused on Kanban, which I never used fully before. I wanted to catch up with the ideas and concepts. This is a great book for that. Overall, it turned out the company actually used a long to-do list for their planning and not the more advanced ideas.

Friday Links 24-31

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 09:25:00 +0000

I have been lazy and travelling over the last few Fridays. Today is a catch-up post, with quite a few links.

I recommend the podcast about the Reiser story today and the video about the first BMX park in Nigeria.

Engineering

The Legacy of Unix - Unix: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan [Podcast] - The problem with Bookoverflow is the effect on my to-read list.

Story: ReiserFS [Podcast] - Great summary of the whole Reiser saga, with some things I didn’t know already. Tim Bray also has a related post: Remembering Bonnie

Friday Links 24-30

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 12:15:00 +0000

The open mouth of a hippo sticking out of the water

Two podcast recommendations today: the one about culture fit and the one about Escobar’s hippos.

Leadership

The wrong way to think about culture fit [Podcast] - It is very hard to get this wrong. Similar as values. It is just to easy to abuse.

How Infrequent Retrospectives Reduce Learning Cycle Time and Make Everything Worse - retrospectives are still my favourite part of everything agile.

Friday Links 24-29

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 10:22:00 +0000

This week’s recommendations: the podcast about lawns and why cars are so scary at Halloween.

Leadership

Why Your Meetings Suck (And How to Fix Them): Insights from Dr. Steven Rogelberg 6 | 37 [Podcast] - focusing on 1:1 meetings

Measuring Developer Productivity with Diff Authoring Time [Podcast] - the use case is improving developer experience tools and not measuring developers.

TBM 318: Why Orgs Become Too Tall - again a good overview from John about the causes, some of them are difficult to work around.

Friday Links 24-28

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 09:59:00 +0000

Four dogs looking into the camera

Mostly urbanism links today.

This week I recommend the talk by Cabel Sasser, it’s weird and fun.

Engineering

gptel - Emacs client for all kinds of LLMs

SMURF: Beyond the Test Pyramid - everything is a tradeoff.

Environment

Tax on Europe’s frequent flyers could raise €64bn a year – study - unlikely to happen.

Fuel duty expected to rise by up to 7p a litre after the budget - it has been reduced before and had been frozen for a long time.

Friday Links 24-27

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 10:10:00 +0000

Many links today, as I skipped some Fridays due to business and problems with my local workflow for links, which should finally be fixed.

This week I especially enjoyed the video about donated bikes for Ukraine and the podcast Shell Game about scary AI stuff.

Leadership

TBM 313: Chat, Breathe, and Reflect - how to deal with uncertainty, don’t pretend you don’t have to change your approach.

Friday Links 24-26

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 08:48:00 +0000

If you want to go into a niche topic, watch the one about fire departments in the US, and now they affect cities.

I also enjoyed the blog from Google about Rust adoption.

Leadership

The Founder Mode Tradeoff - “Wielding power comes at a cost. Ignoring that cost serves no one in the long run. We all love a good hero story, but it’s not the whole story.”

Engineering

Radio Survivor: Podcast #342 – The Famous Computer Cafe [Podcast] - meta episode about the radio show, with one of the creators.

Friday Links 24-25

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 09:42:00 +0000

Graffiti labeled

The experience of the creator of “One Million Checkboxes” is a fun read. You never know what you will find in your logs.

I also liked the interview with Michael Feathers.

Leadership

When to write strategy, and how much? - one is probably enough, and don’t start before you understand the context.

Engineering

Michael Feathers Reflects on “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” [Podcast] - his views on TDD are interesting.

Friday Links 24-24

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 10:15:00 +0000

I am still enjoying the Book Overflow podcast, this time with John Ousterhout.

The podcast about the UK environmental agency is also great, and depressing.

Leadership

Wisdom for Work #25 - The Art of Generative Listening [Podcast] - the five levels are an interesting approach. As a leader, you have to master listening, that’s how you know where to go.

The Surprising Long Term Impact of Layoffs on Company Performance & Employee Experience. [Podcast] - that is understandable, at times you can’t really avoid it, though.

Friday Links 24-23

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 16:59:00 +0000

Teapot and cup on table

I was a bit distracted last Friday, so it is another double week today.

I truly enjoy the Bookoverflow podcast. Some of the books I know already, and find the different perspectives interesting. Some of the other books I do plan to read now.

For something entirely different: The Orkneyinga Saga and Fed podcasts.

Leadership

No More: It’s The People - at least not all the time.

Friday Links 24-22

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 11:22:00 +0000

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This week, I can recommend the long read about the Stream Deck, the one about books, and the discovery about a 55 year old bug in a game.

Last week, my automation for these failed, so you have to endure twice as many links today.

I also said that I wouldn’t post depressing news any more. I am sorry, but the climate crisis and pollution made me do it, so it is your fault really.

Friday Links 24-21

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 11:07:00 +0000

Good news for the environment.

I enjoyed reading the PySkyWiFi hack! This happens when engineers are bored.

Engineering

Just Use Postgres for Everything - I have opinions …

PySkyWiFi: completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights - how many programmers have thought about hacking the Wi-Fi in planes? All of them!

Microservices [YouTube] - funny, also use better names for your stuff!

PagerDuty Incident Response - looking at this at the moment..

Friday Links 24-20

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 09:51:00 +0000

Vintage Atari ad: One word for these prices: Rip-off

This week I have been enjoying the audio archive of The Famous Computer Cafe, a radio show from the eighties with many famous guests of the home computer area. There are definitely some parallels to the present.

The X Windows history is also great.

Today’s post does contain plenty of throwbacks.

Leadership

TBM 297: Staying In Touch - keeping track of things helps, people forget, and we can’t see trends

Friday Links 24-19

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 11:40:00 +0000

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Clearing up my backlog again!

A lot of fun stuff in the random section. I did enjoy the podcast about getting or not getting into Berghain, and the one about the Stereophonic play. The ongoing research into the XZ backdoor also continues to be interesting.

Leadership

Seven Conversation Hacks - some of this is harder, when working remote.

The route to better culture? Better managers - mostly quoting research.

Friday Links 24-18

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 13:01:00 +0000

I really love the photograph series in the random section, it is a great concept.

The videos about the busiest train station and buying a train are also great … if you like trains.

Leadership

Beyond ‘Sorry’: How to Apologize and Mean It 6 | 22 [Podcast] - most apologies are just deflections.

TBM 293: Where More Effective Product Teams Spend More (and Less) Time - “Navigating proxies” - good collection!

Friday Links 24-17

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 11:13:00 +0000

Book cover: Commodore Amiga a visual Commpendium

The leadership antipatterns are quite good, so is the video about a new development in Amsterdam.

Leadership

Product Coaching with Petra Wille [Podcast] - coaching not agile coaches.

Briefly: Anonymous Questions - how to set up Q&As as a leader

Unexpected Anti-Patterns for Engineering Leaders — Lessons From Stripe, Uber & Carta - #3 being a shit-umbrella

Engineering

What to Know Before You Implement Public-Facing APIs - I still think versioning APIs is overrated.

Friday Links 24-16

Fri, 31 May 2024 08:17:00 +0000

This week, the “City in A Bottle” JavaScript demo blew me away.

The podcasts in the leadership section are also pretty good.

Leadership

Albert Strasheim, CTO at Rippling, on Embracing Rapid Iteration and Setting Goals for Accountability [Podcast] - interesting ideas about project management and also insights into our competition.

A company is not a family with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky [Podcast] - I didn’t know the origin of the name! I also think that overcommunication is a good thing. I am working on that.

Friday Links 24-15

Fri, 24 May 2024 09:16:00 +0000

This week I enjoyed the podcast with Vitaly Pecherskiy, and the one about improv and presence.

If you like alcohol-free cocktails, the article from The Guardian has a good list, with some weird tricks, like clarifying coconut milk.

Leadership

Vitaly Pecherskiy, Co-Founder at StackAdapt, on the Role of the CEO, Mental Models, and Employee Onboarding [Podcast] - I liked the insights about leadership composition and constantly improving yourself.

Friday Links 24-14

Fri, 17 May 2024 12:30:00 +0000

A collection of vinyl single records

This week’s recommendation is everything in Urbanism. It’s all about improving cities. Two podcasts and one YouTube video.

Leadership

Wisdom for Work #23 - Cultivating Conditions of Courage [Podcast] - how to lead with honesty and foster psychological safety

Sociotechnical Maestros with Gene Kim [Podcast] - I am not a big fan of most of Gene Kim’s books, but this interview is pretty good.

Friday Links 24-13

Fri, 03 May 2024 07:50:00 +0000

This week I enjoyed the interviews with Hazel Weakley and Melinda French Gates.

For some reason, I also have a few clubbing related links. If you like electronic music and play around with it yourself, I recommend the podcast with Alex McLean about live coding.

Leadership

Software Development As Collective Learning With Hazel Weakly [Podcast] - Very thoughtful interview about Hazels journey and her views on leadership.

Friday Links 24-12

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 08:13:00 +0000

Both leadership podcasts about managers and coaching are excellent.

The post about remote work is also interesting. People are different, so are organisations.

Leadership

The future of work? “The manager as a therapist” [Podcast] - I think I used that line before. I am not sure if this is a good thing.

Extras #24 - Building High-Performing Teams Through Coaching - with Steph Yiu [Podcast] - interesting stuff from Automatic. I would love to see that kind of support in all companies.

Friday Links 24-11

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 09:36:00 +0000

Some cheerful urbanism news this week. It is especially great to see how Paris is progressing.

For a fun nerdy read, have a look at the tic-tac-toe implemented in printf, or the floppy history.

Engineering

How to measure your cloud carbon footprint [Podcast] - nice open-source tool.

Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened - Schneier weighs in too.

The Turing Police say “X Wins” - tic-tac-toe implemented in a single printf.

Friday Links 24-10

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 08:45:00 +0000

Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle formula.

Two weeks of links, which includes a collection from the xz debacle. I loved reading these, as this is a good combination of spy story and technology postmortem. If you want to read an overview, read the timeline post.

Good podcasts this week: about the Heisenberg principle, and the silencing of climate protesters in the UK.

Leadership

Getting real with Employee Experience [Podcast] - two good interviews with people active in the area.

Sharing a monitor between Linux & Mac

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 16:54:00 +0000

For my new job, I (annoyingly) have to use a silly MacBook. For everything else, I have a nice, beautiful desktop running Fedora.

I looked into KVMs to share my monitor and keyboard between the two computers, but couldn’t really find something reasonably priced and functional.

I have used Synergy before to share keyboard and mouse between Linux computers, and this was already a good step. There is a fork for Synergy on Linux called Barrier, which now has been forked again to InputLeap. Now the maintained version is Deskflow. It also allows copy & paste between systems.

Friday Links 24-09

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 08:43:00 +0000

Painting with two radio masts in the country side

I loved the essay about 40 years of programming by Lars Wirzenius.

The coaching session about career goals is also great, independent of the topic.

Leadership

How Do I Balance My Career Goals with My Company’s Needs? [Podcast] - great coaching session.

Breaking Down Barriers: How Field Trips to Different Team Offsites Spark Cross-Team Collaboration - I love this idea.

Leadership requires taking some risk. - “sometimes bottom-up leadership requires obfuscating the work being done”

Friday Links 24-08

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 10:08:00 +0000

Tablet with teapot, mug, biscuits, and milk

Quite a mix of topics. I recommend the podcast with Cal Newport and the article about learning to ride a bike (“Stumbling can be lovely”)

Leadership

Joe Militello, Chief People Officer at Pagerduty: Why You Need to Rethink Your People Strategy [Podcast] - people strategy has to be part of every team.

Story: Leaving LinkedIn - Choosing Engineering Excellence Over Expediency [Podcast] - not really about leadership, but an interesting inside view about what makes someone leave.

Friday Links 24-07

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 11:50:00 +0000

Nerd emoji

Good urbanism videos today.

If you got some time, I can also recommend the podcast about bonuses and the four part series about the bicycle industry bubble.

Leadership

Do bonuses actually make us work harder? [Podcast] - it is very tricky, and can go awfully wrong.

The Hagakure #76: Why Are You Not Hiring Junior Developers? - Your juniors will be faster seniors than you expect. But AI is working against them.

Friday Links 24-06

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 09:22:00 +0000

The flag of Ukraine at Kyiv City Hall

It has been two years since Russia’s invasion and beginning of the unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine.

There is fatigue and attention, and headlines are turning to the next topic.

I’m not as down about it now as I was two years ago, as it really got under my skin.

Now I stay mostly current with the news to not forget. I am impressed by The Guardian’s continued reporting on this.

Friday Links 24-05

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 11:15:00 +0000

The two leadership podcasts are good this week, both about trust.

I also like the Vision Pro review.

Leadership

Trust and Inspire With Stephen M.R. Covey 6 | 5 [Podcast] - pretty good episode with a guest talking about trust.

Jacob Morgan, 5x Best-Selling Author & Futurist [Podcast] - “Futurists” are always suspicious. His premise that being vulnerable without leading doesn’t help.

Friday Links 24-04

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 14:38:00 +0000

I seem to have fewer links recently.

Just check them all out. :-)

Leadership

A lesson from Richard Feynman for Engineering Leaders - I like the concept of Type 1 and Type 2 collaboration. The article is a bit unstructured at first, but comes with some practical strategies at the end.

Front-end Versus Back-end - Kent Beck about why there is a different working style between them and how to bring them together.

Friday Links 24-03

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 10:28:00 +0000

Atari 1200XL home computer

A quick one today. I especially recommended the articles about productivity tools and over-meeting culture.

Leadership

4 Productivity Tools I Use Everyday - I like that this is not about the tools that you buy, but how you use them.

Yes, You Should Estimate Software Projects - back in the good old days when teams were still doing time estimates, I truly enjoyed it when I got them right.

2023 in Games

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 14:49:00 +0000

I am not a gamer, though I obviously had too much time on my hand. The last time I played many games was on the PS2 with Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.

I also only have a Linux desktop, no console or Windows PC. Because of an upgraded graphics card and support in Steam and Heroic Game Launcher, a lot of the games nowadays are playable. Since I haven’t played in 20 years, I also was able to play some older games, which easily run on limited hardware.

Friday Links 24-02

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 13:37:00 +0000

Cheese on a plate

I am well impressed by the transparency of Atlassian on going distributed and Buffer about their salary report. Both a worth a read.

Leadership

Overcoming toxic positivity with Susan David [Podcast] - toxic positivity is only a small part of this interesting conversation.

ADRs and RFCs: Their Differences and Templates - I think nowadays ADRs are more common, maybe not always useful.

Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us [Paper] - some bad ideas of leadership that are still around.

Friday Links 24-01

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 18:45:00 +0000

New year, new links!

It has been fairly quiet on the blogs and podcasts recently, and I am focusing on some books at the moment.

For some fun, have a look at the Jungle & Tetris posts in the random section.

Leadership

Productivity Measurement as a Tradeoff - good view from Kent Beck.

Questionable Advice: “My boss says we don’t need any engineering managers. Is he right?” - I hope not! It’s a good summary of the purpose of managers.

#12in23 and Advent of Code 2023

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 11:20:00 +0000

Last year I did have too much time on my hand, and while I spent a lot of time chilling, I did miss using my brain at least a little.

So I worked on these two challenges.

Excercism #12in23 Screenshot Exercism #12in23

I am a big fan of exercism, which is a site with exercises to learn all kinds of programming languages. The quality of the tracks varies a lot, nonetheless the most popular ones are very useful. There is also a mentoring element, which I haven’t used myself.

2023 in Books

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 10:47:00 +0000

My year in books (according to Goodreads). 8443 pages read in 26 books.

I mostly binged on thrillers and series I am already following. Just one non-fiction!

I am currently reading / being stuck in these:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig - this is a reread. I read it as a teenager, and I am not getting through it at the moment.
Obsessive Compulsive Cycling Disorder by Dave Barter - collection of articles. The title might be the best bit.
Edges by Linda Nagata - I am not very excited.

Fiction

Mark Dawson

I just continue reading his multiple series.

Friday Links 23-31

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 11:51:00 +0000

I was lazy due to the festive season and travels.

That means plenty of links for today.

Leadership

Engineering strategy notes. - I think I posted the articles in a previous edition. Many good resources in this one.

Navigators - interesting approach. I guess in some companies these are architects or staff engineers.

TBM 257: How to Make the Case for Slowing Down to Speed Up - many strategies, align with the main values and strategies.

Friday Links 23-30

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 12:06:00 +0000

I liked the story about Backstage from Spotify.

The monaspace font is also lovely.

Leadership

Adam Bryant on how to know if you’re ready to become a leader. [Podcast] - lots of good stuff.

A Practical Handbook For Engineering Management- another guide. I have just browsed a bit for now.

Team Charters are a trap. - oh, I quite like them, but … “Empowering bottoms up mission-setting in an organization that practices top-down resource allocation is a trap.”

Friday Links 23-29

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 10:05:00 +0000

If you want to watch something inspiring today, I recommend the video about Germany’s Green City and Pedal to freedom.

Overall, a lot of interesting stuff to think about this week.

Leadership

How Do I More Effectively Build Stakeholder Alignment? [Podcast] - excellent example of coaching, where the thinker is already aware of the answers.

Communicating Your Engineering Team’s Impact at Work - Tips for Leaders [Podcast] - obviously pushing LinearB a bit, but still good.

Friday Links 23-28

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 08:31:00 +0000

I decided to stop posting depressing links and keep only the interesting and uplifting content.

This makes the list smaller and me more happy.

Leadership

TBM 247: 15 Metaphors for Waste In Product Development - excellent summary. I recognise all of them in past jobs.

Engineering

Open source advocacy: The benefits of open source software [Podcast] - another one of these, apparently necessary, since many people are moving in a more closed direction.

Friday Links 23-27

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 10:25:00 +0000

The podcasts I enjoyed especially this week are the Lego Overboard and Open source at a crossroad episodes.

I also liked the WFH vs RTO blog post.

Leadership

Managing cost efficiency at scale-ups [Podcast] - nothing surprising, but still good

S5, Ep. 20: What’s Up With Performance Improvement Plans? [Podcast] - interesting that they can be weaponised and figuring this out is nearly impossible.

Friday Links 23-26

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 13:54:00 +0000

Environment news seems especially depressing at the moment. There are some uplifting urbanism stories, the bike bus podcast did make me smile.

Both long leadership posts are definitely worth a read.

Leadership

Performance & Compensation (for Eng Execs). - massive topic and, as usual, Will really presents it well.

TBM 240: The Ultimate Guide to Developer Counter-Productivity - this seems to be the topic of the day again.

Friday Links 23-25

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 08:38:00 +0000

This time around I enjoyed the interviews with Simon Sinek and Olive Burkeman with Culture First.

Leadership

Are You Being the Bottleneck or Building the Bridge? Lessons on Cross-Functional Leadership [Podcast] - lots of good stuff about communication and DEI

Simon Sinek on the power of putting culture first [Podcast] - older interview

Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey - Gergely Orosz and Kent Beck responding to McKinsey’s post. (there is also a second part now)

Friday Links 23-24

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 09:19:00 +0000

I forgot to post Podcasts for a while. This makes this week Podcast Week!

Leadership

Follow the Leader: How to Be the Example and Transform Engineering Teams (with Jossie Haines, Executive Coach) [Podcast] - I like her focus on respect and empathy.

Wisdom for Work #16 - The Brightest Bulb Challenge: Moving From Individual Contributor to Team Leader [Podcast] - a common problem and I always enjoy the Reboot approach.

Friday Links 23-23

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 09:05:00 +0000

Lots of good stuff in the leadership section today, and lots of depressing stuff in the environment section.

Leadership

How We Run Performance Reviews At Buffer And Why I Have Mixed Feelings About Them - it’s tricky.

How To Measure the Value of Internal Tools - most companies are doing none of this.

Manage your priorities and energy. - “you’re going to accomplish less in your career if you’re so focused on correctness that you lose track of keeping yourself energized.”

Friday Links 23-22

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 07:58:00 +0000

Cargo bike with a panniers and boxes full of groceries

All the leadership articles are great this week and not too long. If you want mostly downers, have a look at the environment articles.

Leadership

Finding a buddy when you’re a team of one - if you can’t avoid them.

Gelling your Engineering leadership team. - I think this should be read by a lot of C-level teams, but it also applies to most teams.

Friday Links 23-21

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 12:34:00 +0000

Source: Lens Camera Taking Photos

Today I recommend the podcast about “Inclusivity and Leadership” and everything in Urbanisation.

If you are just looking for a bit of fun, then check out the video about building a camera in 3D software.

Leadership

Be a Door Opener, Not a Gatekeeper: Inclusivity and Leadership (with Karen Catlin, Leadership Coach) [Podcast] - you can’t give good feedback if you don’t delegate well, is an excellent point.

Friday Links 23-20

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 14:46:00 +0000

Two great long reads this week: “The Case Against Travel” and “How to reduce the damage done by gentrification”

Leadership

Platform Engineering Hype - I am not a big fan of these kinds of teams either. Maybe there is a scale where it makes sense, but not for most of the companies.

climbing the leadership ladder: from manager to director to VP - interesting perspective about managing in different directions and “If the things that you love are communicating, unblocking, and coaching, you must do more of that at higher levels.”

Friday Links 23-19

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 13:26:00 +0000

Group of professional cyclists passing on top of a climb in Barcelona

The last two weeks I enjoyed the interview with S.A. Cosby (and his book) and the story about the right-wing looney on ecstasy.

Leadership

Honor the Past, Present, and People: Creating and Managing Positive Change (with Esther Derby, Consultant) [Podcast] - “See the role of the middle manager as connecting the contextual knowledge from the top of the organization with the day-to-day operations at the bottom.”

Friday Links 23-18

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 16:04:00 +0000

I am skipping every second week currently, with the result that today is a bit long.

I loved the podcast about the U-Cycle initiative in Ukraine and one about the climate-grandmas in Switzerland.

Leadership

Measuring Success & Performance of Managers - A Deep Dive [Podcast] - measuring individual contributors is already hard, measuring managers even more so.

Admiral Linda Fagan on servant leadership [Podcast] - I usually skip military leadership lessons, this is great, though.

Friday Links 23-17

Fri, 26 May 2023 09:52:00 +0000

This week I enjoyed the tiny C compiler post and quite a bit of good news about the environment.

Work

Apply, Network, Repeat - “Skip the cover letter”

I Tried a Secret Google Project! [YouTube] - that looks like a pretty amazing and probably expensive way to do video calls. I also have no idea how this would help in group calls.

Rust-out is the workplace phenomenon making us all feel flat - just call it burn-out because that’s what it is.

Friday Links 23-16

Fri, 12 May 2023 08:52:00 +0000

Clearly, work hasn’t been on my mind this week. The podcast about the future of work is a nice crossover between work and urbanism.

The drought in Spain is still depressing and has been going through all the news.

Environment

Barcelona’s beaches could vanish as authorities abandon ‘enhancement’ - that would change Barcelona quite a bit.

Still dry

Urbanism

Why are 15-minute cities so unpopular? [Podcast] - because people don’t understand them and hate change.

Friday Links 23-15

Fri, 05 May 2023 11:35:00 +0000

The podcasts about the creator of LZ4 and the one about happiness science were interesting and entertaining.

Leadership

We Pay Out Unused Sabbaticals When Someone Leaves Buffer, Here’s Why - interesting choice.

With or without shared-component team - I don’t really like specialised teams in general

Engineering

Story: From Project Management to Data Compression Innovator [Podcast] - from the creator of LZ4 and ZStandard

Friday Links 23-14

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 08:04:00 +0000

I enjoyed the long read about Germany’s flat-rate train tickets and the podcast about a British cult.

Leadership

TWH#56: Becoming a Startup VP Engineering - While I am looking for a position like that, it does mean something different for everybody.

How We Handle Severance In Cases Of Mutual Separation - interesting concept.

Environment

German police call for crackdown on growing climate protests - “preventive detention and longer prison terms”

Friday Links 23-13

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 17:33:00 +0000

Best croissant in Barcelona

For some fun, watch the “Best croissant in Paris” video.

Less fun: Cory Doctorow about capitalism.

Leadership

Balancing your CEO, peers, and Engineering. - I like the supported/tolerated/resented framework.

Before your next offsite

Interviewing engineering executives. - “Avoiding the unicorn search”

Engineering

How We Built a Multi-Task Canonical Ranker for Recommendations at Etsy - these are so hard to get right.

Friday Links 23-12

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 10:02:00 +0000

Many videos about urbanism from the last two weeks.

The articles from LinkedIn about measuring developer productivity and happiness and the one about slack by Marting Fowler are also great.

This week we also have a short “Music” section.

Leadership

thedecider.app - a simple tool to choose a decision process … mostly useful for the overview of processes.

Inside Look: Measuring Developer Productivity and Happiness at LinkedIn - both difficult to measure, this is one approach.

Friday Links 23-11

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 13:10:00 +0000

Some nice urbanisation going on in Barcelona.

I also enjoyed the podcast about scams and trust.

Leadership

The MarsBased Handbook - I love this kind of open handbook. It is silly that everybody has to invent them from scratch.

Engineering

How LinkedIn automates cherry-picking commits to improve developer productivity - “While most repositories (e.g., web services) practice continuous delivery solely from trunk (or main branch), those (e.g., core libraries) that need to stabilize their release or release on a fixed schedule use release branches.”

Friday Links 23-10

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 14:09:00 +0000

Dog sunbathing outside a kitchen window

Lots of urbanism links, but apart from that, I can recommend the “The Pillars of Integrity” podcast episode and the (German) story about a dog “Bambam”.

Leadership

#161 Jim Dethmer: The Pillars of Integrity [Podcast] - this was a great episode, not only about the pillars, but the rest of the chat too

Net Promoter Score – Helpful or Harmful? (part 1) - critical view of NPS

Friday Links 23-09

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 10:33:00 +0000

Short one today!

I enjoyed the conversation about “Brains, hormones, and time” with Dunbar.

If you haven’t subscribed to “The War on Cars” yet, this 100th episode might be a good start.

Leadership

The Backbone of a Successful Team: 1:1s, Skip Levels, and the Delegation Framework (with Spencer Norman, VP of Engineering at Privy) [Podcast] - there is a lot in this. I don’t agree with all of it.

Friday Links 23-08

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 13:40:00 +0000

Wolf face

I enjoyed the podcast about Rawls’ Theory of justice and the article about “BAU work”, which is really about much more.

Leadership

Go Beyond Fixing It: How the VP of Engineering at Box Approaches High-Stake Change (with Tamar Bercovici, VP of Engineering at Box) [Podcast] - different levels of leadership and focusing on goals

What it takes to scale engineering [Podcast] - interesting insights in GitHub’s scaling

How to tackle friction between product and engineering in scale-ups [Podcast] - I liked the articles, this is good too.

Friday Links 23-07

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 12:32:00 +0000

Another week and too many links.

Slava Ukraini

But more importantly, today is the anniversary of the aggression against the Ukraine people.

It threw me off-centre quite a bit last year, more than the pandemic and more than many things I can remember living through.

I won’t forget until this is over and Ukraine free again.

Ukraine

Solidarity with Ukraine [Twitter] - Led by Donkeys still doing good work

Friday Links 23-06

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 13:45:00 +0000

In game screenshot from Zwift

I highly recommend the article about the man following the UK coastline.

I enjoyed the interview with Jason Warner too.

Leadership

#158 Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work [Podcast]

Better to micromanage than be disengaged. - or maybe neither?

Voices, Votes, and Vetos: Who Is Making the 100 Million Dollar Decisions? (with Jason Warner, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures) [Podcast] - I like his pragmatic approach over processes.

Friday Links 23-05

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 09:38:00 +0000

The black-tailed prairie dog

This week I recommend the reviews of NoSQL and “Spotify Model”. It is good to look back at these hypes after a bit of time and learn from the good and the bad bits.

Leadership

Becoming a Genius Maker: Liz Wiseman’s Approach to Multiplying Your Team’s Potential (with Liz Wiseman, Author and CEO of The Wiseman Group) [Podcast] - many good ideas about enabling your team to do their best work … instead of you doing it.

Friday Links 23-04

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 09:39:00 +0000

Two podcast suggestions for you today. Exposing rainforest carbon credits: why offsetting isn’t working, which is worrying but expected and Ukraine: Under the Counter, about people coming together to do help.

Leadership

30-60 days in a new leadership role: run experiments for change - that seems early to me

Internal comms for executives. - “Good communication is a series of habits”

Five Ways Toward a Fairer, More Transparent Hiring Process - transparency and good communication is the key here.

Friday Links 23-03

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 14:58:00 +0000

I enjoyed the podcast about the seven habits book (which I haven’t finished so far) and the post about meetings for engineering organisations.

A lot of good content in the urbanism section this week. The videos about cycling made me miss snow a bit.

Leadership

Starting the year with 7 Habits [Podcast] - since I haven’t made it through the book, this was a nice summary

Friday Links 23-02

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 17:37:00 +0000

I have nearly caught up with my podcast backlog!

This week’s post is short nonetheless.

I enjoyed the podcast about daily scrum meetings and if you can read German, I also recommend the article about digital nomads.

Leadership

Ep - 20 - What’s wrong with the software engineering industry? feat. Nick Rogers (VP of Engineering at Wagestream) [Podcast] - interesting chat

How to Run Successful Daily Scrum Meetings [Podcast] - many things I agree with, especially: doing daily meetings in Slack is not worth it

Friday Links 23-01

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 11:09:00 +0000

Happy new year! New year, new links!

I am not going to take a break just because I am on funemployment at the moment.

This week I loved the article about measuring engineering organisations and the podcast about Bauhaus.

Leadership

Measuring an engineering organization. - everything you need to start thinking about your metrics as engineering leader

2022 in Books

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:58:00 +0000

[2022 Goodreads Challenge](https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/32679723)

Like many things of 2022 my reading didn’t go to plan. It went different in a completely unexpected way.

My initial plan was to read about 18 books, which is a bit more than I manage in a normal year. I wanted to read a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and planned to alternate between one of each. I had a queue already on Goodreads and was all set.

Friday Links 22-41

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 12:41:00 +0000

“A collection of links on various topics, including overcoming disillusionment with the executive team, handling feedback, creating incentives for managers to grow, the pitfalls of using microservices, reflections on the state of Ruby and Rails, retaining high performing employees, closing a company for a week, transportation and urban planning in various cities around the world, tourism in Spain, a Netflix episode featuring David Letterman and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the LastPass breach, and the rescue of abused beagles, as well as several collections of links on various topics.”

Friday Links 22-40

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 10:40:00 +0000

Catching up with my podcasts. The Heroko one was fun and so was the one about retrospectives.

If you want to see something impossible, watch the making-of series by Danny McAskill.

Leadership

Radical Candor S4, Ep. 16: What Do Managers of Managers Do? (The Crank Call From Kim) [Podcast] - goes off the topic a bit at the end :-)

How Retrospectives, Public Channels, and Asynchronous Meetings Foster Inclusive & Culturally-Diverse Teams (with Alexandra Sunderland, Sr Engineering Manager at Fellow) [Podcast] - I am a big fan of retrospectives, even if you don’t do anything agile, do retrospectives

Friday Links 22-39

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 11:35:00 +0000

I was out for two weeks with holiday and then a Covid-19 episode.

Today I enjoyed the long read about female British spies.

Furthermore, some good articles about leadership and how Etsy is scaling. The whole remote work / return to the office discussion hasn’t been resolved either.

Leadership

Lessons from a 5x CTO: How to Retain Talent and Run Skip Level 1:1s Through Rapid Growth (with Rob Zuber, Chief Technology Officer at CircleCI) [Podcast] - clearly this was before they let many people go, but still good insights

Friday Links 22-38

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 14:35:00 +0000

Colourful AI generated mastodon

Another Mastodon week. Seems like another wave of users is migrating to Mastodon.

I also looked into on-call … for reasons.

And I enjoyed the old Barcelona videos and the article about the USE method.

Mastodon

How OSI got to Mastodon - good to see more institutions and organisations joining and creating their own instances.

The Fediverse Could Be Awesome (if we don’t screw it up) - the EFF chiming in … without creating their own instance.

Friday Links 22-37

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 15:22:00 +0000

Another round of Mastodon links. The migration is still ongoing, and Twitter seems to be moving toward the abyss.

I also enjoyed the $70k Android hack and the weird-old-book-finder.

Mastodon

bitbang.social - retrocomputing instance

Mastodon Moment - Tim Bray on Mastodon

Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, “Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack”) - Mastodon might have a scaling problem

Friday Links 22-36

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 14:24:00 +0000

Since Twitter has been going downhill for a while and I am mostly leaving Facebook and Instagram, I have been searching for an alternative.

Mastodon is the obvious candidate. I had created an account a while ago, and it offers an ad and algorithm free alternative. You can also take control by having your personal server.

Below are some of the links I found helpful.

Friday Links 22-35

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 09:23:00 +0000

A mixed bag of goodies this week.

Since Twitter might get even worse, I am now also publishing on Mastodon.

Leadership

Communication Models and How They Scale - “almost any model works for a group of <100” - I think the problem is that people cling to that for too long

3 big moments that can define your leadership career - start, choose, do

Friday Links 22-34

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 08:28:00 +0000

A few articles about writing stuff down this week.

I love the long read about NTP and the podcast about 1984.

Leadership

Putting Amazon’s PR/FAQ to Practice - I am not good at writing long documents, but I like the idea and even one-pagers would be already an improvement to most processes

Friday Links 22-33

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 09:29:00 +0000

I forgot about the bottleneck series, the new part about Product v Engineering is nice.

William Shatner’s reflections on space are also not what I expected.

Leadership

How Slack’s SVP Approaches Culture, Focuses on Outcomes, and Provides Flexibility (with Brian Elliott, Executive Leader of Future Forum and Senior Vice President) [Podcast] - Plenty of good ideas in here. I like the hybrid meeting moderator and surveying your teams.

Friday Links 22-32

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 08:44:00 +0000

AI generated Image, cyclists near a road leading to a city

The second part of the interview with Meri Williams is interesting.

I have been playing more with Emacs and got a bit depressed after watching what Toronto has done to the city.

Leadership

Ep - 13 - Why does feedback matter? feat. Meri Williams (ex-CTO Monzo, MOO, Healx) [Podcast] - second part of this great interview

new little song: “The Re-Org Rag (I’m My Own VP)” [Tweet, Video] - hits a bit close to home

Friday Links 22-31

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 08:24:00 +0000

Podcast edition!

I love the Björk: Sonic Symbolism podcast. It brings back so many memories from my time in London.

The Happiness Lab (in random) and leadership podcasts are also great.

Leadership

Ep - 12 - How do I grow a culture of empowerment? feat. Meri Williams (ex-CTO Monzo, MOO, Healx) [Podcast] - first part of the interview which I really liked.

Friday Links 22-30

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 08:29:00 +0000

Many topics this week. I love the hack of a stolen laptop, the post of cascading goals made me think, good climate news cheered me up and check out random for some fun and funny stuff.

Leadership

Setting your engineers up for success: how Skyscanner created greater clarity in our competencies and pathways to progression - interesting approach, kind of similar to my favourite one from Etsy

TBM 41/51: Why Goal Cascades are Harmful (and What to Do Instead) - interesting. I always thought top down, cascading goals were a good thing. I have to think about this more.

Friday Links 22-29

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 11:16:00 +0000

AI art: lady in front of cityscape

Two week of links again. Will’s post about hiring quality was fascinating.

And I learned about Sturgeon’s Bias, which I have to remember for the future.

Leadership

One-on-ones with executives. - cool advice from Will Larson about ad-hoc 1:1s with executives

Is Engineering Management Bullshit? - no

Sturgeon’s Biases - TIL: “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”

Eight Traps to Avoid When You Take Over a Team - a bit late, but thanks

Friday Links 22-28

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 11:25:00 +0000

AI generated art of modern, but run down office building

Quiet week. The team assessment repository has a lot in it and I just started looking through it.

Interesting papers about urbanism, but maybe I just say that because it confirms my bias.

Leadership

Multi-team Software Delivery Assessment - nice collection of useful team assessments, everything from team health, to delivery and security

Imposter Syndrome [Comic] – it’s me

Benefits of Pulse Surveys for Remote and Distributed Teams - a bit spammy. I used to be highly sceptical, but now I am a convert. If done right and with the right communication, these can be super helpful for all teams.

Friday Links 22-27

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 11:31:00 +0000

non-alcoholic cava

This week I enjoyed the podcasts about Culture AMP’s data and the one with Daniel Pink about regret.

I am still browsing the Gallup State of Workplace survey, it is a lot of data.

Leadership

Build Week at Buffer: What It Is and How We’re Approaching It - we used to call that just hack week. Build week is definitely more inclusive.

Friday Links 22-26

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 11:19:00 +0000

Two weeks worth of links. This time with a comics extra instead of leadership links.

Lots of good environment and urbanism articles.

And the most surprising podcast about how rescuing people from cars is changing.

Engineering

A Deep Dive into Memory Leaks in Ruby - part 2

CPAN - This Day In History [Podcast] - when I switched from Perl to PHP, CPAN was what I was missing the most

Backblaze Drive Stats for Q2 2022 - also available as raw data!

Friday Links 22-25

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 08:37:00 +0000

Some good long reads today: The classic “Give Away Your Legos”, how to slowly kill your org, Why Spotify Squads are a Failure and Bicycle Graveyards.

A few podcasts, the one about agile is definitely worth it.

Leadership

‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups - classic article

190 Brilliant Examples of Company Values - so many values, so similar. The ones from Build-A-Bear a fun.

We bought the most boring electric car

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 13:14:00 +0000

Most of the current electric cars are either very fast, very fancy or very cute. Ours definitely isn’t any of these.

We would have loved to get a cute small one like the Honda-e. We certainly didn’t want an SUV. There are some electric dream cars out there, like the Rivian R1S, but this isn’t available yet and also out of our price range.

Because of our large collection of dogs, we needed something with enough space for them. Ideally something robust and easy to clean as the dogs are currently nibbling at everything they get their hands on.

Friday Links 22-24

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 11:02:00 +0000

A few good articles about how to be a bad leader.

And some depressing environmental news.

Play Stray to cheer you up!

Leadership

Hierarchy of Metrics - this is a nice happy land of metrics and probably not happening in the real world

A Checklist Manifetsy - an Etsy checklist for new features and about checklists in general

Friday Links 22-23

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 10:28:00 +0000

Small wooden sailing boat

Lots of good news and videos in Urbanism this week. I also enjoyed the podcast with Marshall Goldsmith.

Leadership

When there’s a Re-org [TikTok] - not funny!

Screw SCRUM: Guide to Building a Truly Agile Organization [Podcast] - don’t actually screw scrum

TBM 30/52: Why Don’t We Have a Strategy? - “The problem is that there are disincentives to thinking strategically.”

A Customer-Focused Approach to Tooling - platform teams should treat their output as products with a focus on developers as customers

Friday Links 22-22

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 12:37:00 +0000

Climate protest in Barcelona

This week I have been looking at the good and bad of Agile Maturity Models.

I haven’t formed an opinion yet.

Good stuff in “Random”!

Leadership

Agile Maturity Models

TBM 29B/52: Asking for Feedback and Pushback - “Experience matters, and that includes your ability to foster an environment friendly to everyone giving and receiving feedback within their comfort zone.”

Friday Links 22-21

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 08:41:00 +0000

Two weeks of links. Sorry.

I have been thinking and catching up with my leadership reading, especially around the first team concept.

The flatground skateboard video is worth a watch, and the Ziggy Stardust podcast is great too.

Leadership

First Team Mindset - The concept from the book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” I have been looking into this again over the recent weeks, here is a collection of resources. I have a better idea about what this means as a director compared to a CTO now.

Friday Links 22-20

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 08:39:00 +0000

Acid House flyer with smiley illustration

For some reason I have no urbanism topics or podcasts!

Dave Kellogg brings an interesting perspective on leadership levels. It is an old article but still valid. He seems to be going against the stream in general. Worth a follow!

Leadership

Career Development: What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP - interesting perspective I agree on

What we learned in studying the most effective founders - mostly as expected, but this is interesting: “While most people would expect self-confidence to grow with time, our data suggests the most effective founders are not nearly as confident as the least effective founders are.”

Friday Links 22-19

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 09:07:00 +0000

A short one this week.

Some fun technical reads on Meta’s cache invalidation and Linux pipes.

Leadership

Valuing experience [Podcast] - another great discussions by two coaches

TBM 25/52: In Defense of Frameworks (and Process) - there are always frameworks and they make life easier and more predictable

CTO Craft MiniCon - The Complete Hiring Arc (In Under 3 hours!) - Full event [YouTube] - recording of a recent hiring conference

Friday Links 22-18

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 07:52:00 +0000

Quick one today with a new Hiring section.

The podcasts abut coaching and with the Meetup CEO are also pretty good.

Leadership

TBM 24/52: Your Head Hurts. But Why? - how to debug dissonance, very cool

Leader As Coach - with Andy Crissinger & Chris VandenBrink [Podcast] - also highlighting the difference between coaching as a leader and a coach

How to Improve Employee Retention During the Great Resignation [Podcast] - from the Meetup CEO

Friday Links 22-17

Fri, 27 May 2022 10:22:00 +0000

I have a new job. You can expect more about hiring and communication here in the coming weeks.

My weird hobby topics will continue.

Leadership

Leading your engineering team through an unexpected product pivot - Code as Craft is back and it is good. I really liked this one. Pivots are tricky, the ground shifts below you.

Octoverse Spotlight 2021: The Good Day Project—Personal analytics to make your work days better - nothing really news, but using surveys and data to figure out developer happiness

Friday Links 22-16

Fri, 20 May 2022 08:13:00 +0000

Cassette Mix Deck

I skipped last week because I was on the bicycle.

Sorry about the length today and the many podcasts. I had a lot of listening time.

Leadership

TBM 22/52: The Perfect Manager/Leader - “I see people putting themselves under so much pressure to be the perfect manager or leader.”

Radical Candor S4. Ep 7: Radically Candid Conversations — Kim Scott & Russ Laraway [Podcast] - this was a good episode of that podcast. I like that he doesn’t care about the difference between leadership and management any more :-)

Friday Links 22-15

Fri, 06 May 2022 19:20:00 +0000

R5 Turbo

This week I loved the article about the Single Threaded Owner.

Or if you want something to listen to: The Sistine Chapel discussed at In Our Time.

Leadership

Your migration probably isn’t failing due to insufficient staffing. - there are so many things to go wrong that I question the wisdom of doing them at all.

Dan Coyle can fix your culture [Podcast] - I quite like the book, this is good too

Friday Links 22-14

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 11:02:00 +0000

The paper about traffic safety messages is very surprising and interesting.

If you don’t measure your change you might make the wrong assumptions.

Leadership

Visualizing Team Dependencies with a Team API - aka team agreement

Founding Uber SRE. - I am pretty sure he is too modest. Interesting that hiring was so fast back then.

Episode #4: Nothing In Nothing Out - I never seen a good use of Jira for metrics, maybe something to aim for at $NEXTJOB

Friday Links 22-13

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 15:09:00 +0000

Bicycle in front of old stone village

I am switching to more off-line reading in the coming weeks. I still got a few interesting bits this week.

A lot of good summary posts this week. I like the principles and koans one for example.

Leadership

Job Ads to Hire Software Engineers: My Advice - nothing new here, but good to have it in one place

When your coaching questions freak someone out - I never even considered that. Maybe I have been lucky so far.

Saying goodbye to Devex

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 09:36:00 +0000

After more than eight years I have decided to leave Devex and look for new adventures.

This is a long time and except for my start-up back in the days, the longest stint at one company for me so far.

The world was very different in 2013. The iPhone 5S was released. 2012 Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus outbreak was starting to get going. Donald J. Trump announced Miss Universe 2013 To Take Place At Crocus City Hall In Moscow. Ruby 2.1.0 was released, so was Rails 4.0.2. On 23 January 2013, under pressure from many of his MPs and from the rise of UKIP, Cameron announced in his Bloomberg speech that a Conservative government would hold an in-or-out referendum on EU membership before the end of 2017.

Early Friday Links 22-12

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 08:10:00 +0000

Short and quiet week. I liked the refresher on engineering directors and 1:1s.

Leadership

Mailbag: Resources for Engineering Directors. - helpful summary of previous articles and book pointers

Episode #2: The First Taste of Metrics - continuation of the metrics blog post series

One on One Meetings: The Only Guide Managers Need - I get more and more annoyed by the Lighthouse posts, but this one is a good overview

Friday Links 22-11

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 08:59:00 +0000

Catching up with podcast. The ones about Coaching Habit, Brian Kernighan and The Pedestrian are very good.

Leadership

Tackling bottlenecks at scale-ups [Podcast] - Podcast with a summary of the idea behind the content I shared recently.

How To Do Less - about hard prioritization “First, you need to lower everybody’s expectations, ASAP.”

Why greater autonomy is the future of software development - release of the Atlassian State of the Developer Report [PDF]

Friday Links 22-10

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 09:22:00 +0000

I have to confess that I have been still doom-scrolling Ukraine news.I still have some interesting links and even some fun reads.

Leadership

The dreaded reorg - “draft your communication plan” is always a good start

Dimensions of Power - I didn’t realise companies do private/secret levels.

How We’re Helping Our Remote Team Feel More Connected - a lot of common sense, but good summary

Engineering

An update on recent service disruptions - I love these posts, we should all learn from each others outages

Friday Links 22-9

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 10:48:00 +0000

Blue Lobster

Some longer reads and good podcasts about leading and structuring teams.

And mostly amusing random links.

Leadership

The SPACE of Developer Productivity - framework for thinking about developer productivity

Refactor → Organisation - story of the reorganisation of BBC’s website team

When There’s Doubt, There’s No Doubt: How to Protect Culture and Eliminate Hiring Biases (with Nick Dimitrov, Founder of Bar Raiser) [Podcast] - good strategies for hiring

Friday Links 22-8

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 14:15:00 +0000

Vinyl record on recorder player

The war is on my mind, but not in my links.

I enjoyed the podcast about bad bosses and the discussion about time in the last article.

Leadership

Bottlenecks of Scaleups - new blog series that looks very promising

Applying Product Thinking to Slack’s Internal Compute Platform - that is probably one problem of some platform teams: they don’t treat their internal users as customers and the platform as a product.

Friday Links 22-7

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 09:54:00 +0000

Most of what I read this week was related to the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.

But I have nothing to add or to share about it. Lets hope that this gets resolved soon and Ukraine prevails.

Leadership

The State Of Burnout In Tech - results of surveying lots of tech professionals. As far as I am aware I suffered burnout three times in my career. They come in different severities and durations. I might have missed or ignored some of the smaller ones. The survey also comes with an risk assessment tool.

Friday Links 22-6

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 10:08:00 +0000

Cray 1

I am catching up with my reading and listening.

Nothing about the war in Europe. It is to fresh and too frustrating. I don’t even want to think about it.

Leadership

TBM 8/52: The Data-Informed Product Cycle - “We (hopefully) start with a Strategy”

You Won’t Have All the Answers: Why Being Intellectually Honest and Disassociating from Ideas Makes You a Better Leader (with Remi Guyot, Chief Product Officer at BlaBlaCar) [Podcast] - how to get into management and how to enable people

Friday Links 22-5

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 09:56:00 +0000

Focus on urbanism again, with a two video crossover about zoning.

I also enjoyed the origin story of Kayak.

Leadership

TBM 6/52: Inputs First. Bets Next - nothing new: start with the vision

The truth about management in Silicon Valley: It doesn’t exist - I don’t buy that, but still a good read

KAYAK: Paul English [Podcast] - cool Kayak origin story

Friday Links 22-4

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 09:22:00 +0000

The Guardian - Polar Bears

If you want to know more about web3, NFTs and crypto-currency mess, definitely watch the long YouTube video.

There seems to be a lot of reviewing about agile ideas at the moment. Which is great, because that is what agile is about.

Leadership

TBM 4/52: An Actionable Post With Examples (Tree/Loop Prompts) - prompts to think about north stars, goals, decisions, …

Friday Links 22-3

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 10:06:00 +0000

Corson-Heisner Live/Work House

Focus on urbanism today, as more people are realising that cities are made for people and not cars.

I also really enjoyed the interview with Peter Anderton and his ideas about leadership principles.

Leadership

Change Yourself, Change Your Team: The Underrated Leadership Principles All Good Managers Follow (with Peter Anderton, Director of Internal Alignment) [Podcast] - I like his two rules for leadership

Friday Links 22-2

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 11:45:00 +0000

Back to a reasonable number of links!

I enjoyed the scaling teams podcast, which I found very pragmatic.

For fun checkout the Wikipedia game and size of countries tool in the random section.

Leadership

TBM 3/52: That’s Not What They Are Hearing - communication is hard, being honest at work is hard, but we have to figure it out

Saying “no” - one of the most important skill for everyone

Friday Links 22-1

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 09:46:00 +0000

Aigüestortes National Park

New Year’s Resolution: limit the number of links in these posts.

Catching up with everything since before Christmas.

So much good stuff from BBC podcasts and The Guardian this time around.

Leadership

The Kool-Aid Factory - super useful and pretty site with play books about building teams and companies

Embracing Change and Mimicking Chaos: Why Leaders Need to Cringe Fast and Early (with Hamza Kahn) [Podcast] - another great episode

2021 - Year of the Dogs

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 11:09:00 +0000

I am pretty sure I said something along the lines of “2021 has to be better than 2020” a year ago.

It certainly was different than 2020. And for 2022 I am going to predict it will be different again. I am not going to try even harder.

Zoo

Yuki & puppies

The main thing that changed this year is what I now lovingly refer to as The Zoo.

2021 in books

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 09:42:00 +0000

2021 books

As with many things 2021 didn’t quite go to plan with my reading. There were too many distractions in the first half of the year, but I got some reading time in the second half. The lack of holidays, flying and commuting didn’t really help overall.

As always this is a mix of light fiction and books related to work, which this year mostly means management.

Friday Links 21-39

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 11:31:00 +0000

cocaine hippos

I enjoyed the in depth look into Pablo Escobar’s hippos. Amazing what kind of wide ranging effect this has on the country.

The whole Log4j incident was also fun to follow.

Management

How To Start A Book Club At Work - beginners guide

Hiring (and Retaining) a Diverse Engineering Team - lots of insights from different leaders and companies

Why it’s difficult to build teams in high growth organisations - because of changes

Friday Links 21-38

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 09:34:00 +0000

Townscape

Short one this week. I did catch up with my podcasts, but not many made it to the list.

I found the article series on architecture and devops interesting reads.

Management

Operator’s Manual #2: What Does It Mean To Let Others Lead? - with Ali Schultz & Jerry Colonna [Podcast] - “The simplest way to trust is to let go of perfection. If you can allow the team to make mistakes then it’s a lot easier to trust.”

Friday Links 21-37

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 12:11:00 +0000

Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s Calypso

I am a bit disillusioned with our response to the climate crisis and the pandemic. So I am focusing on other things like management, nostalgia and urbanism!

Management

Agility ≠ Speed - common misunderstanding well explained

My experience with Re-organising a team - some good tips to keep in mind for the next time

Please dogfood your software interview homework - this are some awful examples. Who would work on a test for a whole day?

Friday Links 21-36

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 10:30:00 +0000

Dakou Tapes

The Great Resignation has definitely arrived in mainstream media.

Lots of good podcasts this time, about career paths, engineering organisations, learning and weird Chinese cassette tape culture.

Management

Managing Platform Teams: How to Build and Structure Platform Engineering? [Podcast] - interview with Camille Fournier going into details of platform teams

Why all new managers want to quit - I feel you

Friday Links 21-35

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 10:24:00 +0000

Scrabble tiles

Some long reads this week. The one about longtermism and “Great Attrition” are very interesting.

Management

Ratings as Incentives - I once worked at a place doing the 1-5 ratings, with additional rules that acted as weird incentives. I liked the idea, but it failed in reality.

Experimenting with Focus Weeks and Mob Programming - I still haven’t tried mob programming, but then I never got into pair programming either

Friday Links 21-34

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 10:59:00 +0000

Lego Compact Cassette

Catching up and dreaming of a four day work week.

Management

The Sabotage List - nice idea to collect the stuff you are probably not going to do for reasons

Always do Extra - if you have slack, do extra, not more of the same

How to Understand the Power Structure [Comic] - funny :-)

How Amazon Raised the Hiring Bar and Leveraged Narratives for Decision-Making (with Colin Bryar, Former Amazon VP) [Podcast] - interesting, but most things probably don’t apply to my or your job

Friday Links 21-33

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 10:39:00 +0000

Too many articles about management today! I got pulled into a rabbit hole about Thomasson Hyperart this week, which was fun.

Management

The Skill of Org Design - great long read about organisation design

How to safely think in systems - “When your model and reality conflict, reality is always right”

TBM 41a/52: Slow Down on Your Own Terms - I like the idea of working in different speeds. When introducing changes for example it is important to slow down (or take a long breath I like to call it) before introducing more

Friday Links 21-32

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 10:32:00 +0000

Revenge Bedtime Procrastination

Catching up with everything again. Some good long reads in the Work section, especially the report about women in the workplace.

Management

Agile vs Kanban [YouTube] - forget about the “vs”, he just gives an introduction to both and some personal opinions

Don’t worry, you’re not wasting your mentor’s time. - good to know, now I need some mentors…

1.0 Is the Loneliest Number - “By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage”

Friday Links 21-31

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 11:07:00 +0000

ZX81 and Michael K Williams

Sad news about Michael K. Williams and Sir Clive Sinclair passing away. People who influenced me in quite different but profound ways.

Of course you also get the my usual link dump, again from the last two weeks.

Environment news are frustrating as always and I don’t think COP26 is going to cheer me up.

Friday Links 21-30

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 10:28:00 +0000

Catalan Cricket

Back from my holiday and catching up with the news.

New section on Agile this time as something at work required a bit of research into this.

Management

What’s going on with the ‘Great Resignation’? - I have heard this term in different contexts a few times now. I guess this will continue for a bit more.

Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story - example story about how this could happen and what to expect

Summer Cycling Trip 2021

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 15:44:00 +0000

As every year at Devex the company takes a week long Summer break in August. August isn’t really the best month to take holiday in Spain, because on the one hand everybody does and on the other hand tends to be really hot. That’s why I tend to do a trip on my own, without my girlfriend. In the recent years this have been cycling holidays.

Friday Links 21-29

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 12:59:00 +0000

Pets, Mssks & 12 Minutes

This week I was mostly thinking about Scrum and how it can affect developer happiness and productivity. I have certainly an opinion, but I am still in the data and information gathering phase.

I also caught up with podcasts again. Lots of good stuff about management.

Management

Introducing DecisionOps - I am not sure that word will catch on, but still a nice post

Friday Links 21-28

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 09:30:00 +0000

Feel My M.F. Base - Paul Johnson

I am rethinking these posts again. I have a plan … maybe.

If you enjoy a long read, check out The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done or The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream.

If you like photos Training for Tokyo: how athletes prepared and how they did or Dead white man’s clothes.

Management

The Big Project Syndrom - we all have been there

Friday Links 21-27

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 08:53:00 +0000

Basic Instructions

No random section today!

I am catching up with my podcasts and really enjoyed the one about Sad Days.

It also seems that climate change will affect more of our life sooner than most expected.

Management

How to Motivate Your Team [Comic] - another good strip from Basic Instructions

We should allow sad days, not just sick days [Podcast] - I certainly could have used a few sad days … and maybe I took them

Friday Links 21-26

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 09:48:00 +0000

Break-Dance Olympics

Because I am travelling at the moment we have another double pack.

Good stuff on management this week and depressing on the environment as usual.

I haven’t decided if I’ll add a anti-cryptocurrency section or if I just leave it out. For now it is in random.

Management

The 25 Micro-Habits of High-Impact Managers - I am not sure what is so micro about them, but still not bad for a list like this

Friday Links 21-25

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 09:27:00 +0000

Lots of technology links and longer reads today.

Management

The Planning Fallacy - what to do about underestimating

Limits to one Product Backlog - 3 - continuation, but I am slowly loosing interest

Windmills: Can Scrum be fixed? - Ron is still on a mission

Sharing our Engineering Career Framework with the world - another one. It has a lot of different roles, which is nice

Why ‘bring solutions not problems’ doesn’t work - I recently started wondering about this and some other common advice too

Friday Links 21-24

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Supperclub DJ Area

This weeks ransomware attack shines another light on the dumpster fire of cryptocurrencies. Some banks are waking up, but it is probably too late for a lot of people.

On the other hand some positive posts on management, engineering and urbanism.

Management

Leadership Stories from Slack by Michael Lopp [Podcast] - Rands telling stories about his experiences in various companies

do archeology on ONE product initiative … even something small. visualize the journey. - nice timeline of a product initiative by John Cutler

Friday Links 21-23

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 10:56:00 +0000

Old OSM of Worcester ~2008

Sorry for the long post, but this is again for two weeks.

A few podcasts and lots of blog posts about the usual topics. The random selection also got a bit out of hand.

Managment

Limits to one Product Backlog - 1 - PO on team or feature

There’s no ‘I’ in burnout “How do you give someone new work even as they’re drowning under the existing work?”

Friday Links 21-22

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 10:50:00 +0000

I am so looking forward to this

I was off last Friday, so this is a double dose.

Remote work is probably a topic which will stay with us for a while, but it seems people want to start a war about it. Maybe it is OK to like different things here?

Management

Building an Incident Management Response Team - do something like that or similar

Friday Links 21-21

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 10:39:00 +0000

#WorldBicycleDay

Some new articles about remote work. This is becoming interesting for a lot of companies now, as office are reopening and employees are wondering what it will mean.

Also some good thinking about testing and how to embrace your personality as a leader.

Management

TBM 23b/52: Cognitive Load "“My head hurts” is valid. It is a signal."

Do you know your communication style at work? Take our quiz to find out - silly quiz, but apparently I am dominant

Friday Links 21-20

Fri, 28 May 2021 09:13:00 +0000

Sonar 2003

Spotify and Shopify are publishing some good articles on technology and management recently. Also some good news for the environment.

Management

Achieving Team Purpose and Pride with Scrum - how one team at Spotify improved their team with Scrum

Who’s the Boss? [Podcast] - about giving employees the freedom to express themselves at work

Key Remote Work Statistics to Keep in Mind in 2021 - nothing surprising, the rest of 2021 will be interesting to watch

Friday Links 21-19

Fri, 21 May 2021 09:52:00 +0000

Lego Blocks (Wikimedia Commons)

I love the weird stuff people hack in their free time. Be it bringing retro computers back to life, weird use of MOV instructions or lock picking. Not everything has to be productive in the conventional sense.

Podcast backlog 29h 47m (!)

Management

The Surprising Power of Simply Asking Coworkers How They’re Doing - not that surprising

Spotify Guilds - I was looking for a refresher on the Spotify guilds, chapters and how they are managed. This is a good summary.

Friday Links 21-18

Fri, 14 May 2021 10:35:00 +0000

Little Computer People

Interesting podcast episodes about management and urbanism this week.

Lots of things happening in urbanism, especially with Paris planning to remove through traffic.

Management

Rapid Response: Inside Google’s Pandemic Safety Squad, w/Chief Health Officer Dr. Karen DeSalvo [Podcast] - interesting insights from the inside of Google, with someone who’s role has unexpectedly changed focus because of the pandemic

Friday Links 21-17

Fri, 07 May 2021 08:52:00 +0000

Lighthouse in Italy

Mixed bag this week. I wasn’t really able to focus much and could not dive deeper into some of the topics.

Podcast backlog: 19h 44m.

Management

Why we may be measuring burnout all wrong - interesting view in diagnosing burnout. I agree that a scientific approach makes sense if possible. I also think that over-diagnosing is probably less harmful than under-diagnosing.

A hybrid approach to work - Google is going hybrid, as I expect most companies will. The all-remote crowd is complaining about it, but I would argue that Google probably has some numbers to back this up.

Friday Links 21-16

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 08:25:00 +0000

Marvin the Paranoid Android

I got distracted by the basecamp dumpster fire a bit.

Besides that some good long reads and podcasts on technology and random topics.

Management

Managing Hybrid Teams: How to Keep Your Team Engaged and Productive [Podcast] - hybrid is probably the future for most teams. Ellen gives some insight how they are handling it.

Leadership at basecamp had a public meltdown and it played out on Twitter. I always have been critical of their books and egos, but they also had a lot of good ideas.

Friday Links 21-15

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 09:22:00 +0000

1995 party flyer

A lot of pledges for improving the environment are happening at the moment, while at the same time Bitcoin and NFTs seem to be out to burn the planet.

Management

Developer Velocity: How software excellence fuels business performance - every CTO / developer should probably bookmark this:

Companies that excel in providing the right tools, culture, product management, and talent management not only develop software faster but also deliver significantly stronger business outcomes.

Friday Links 21-14

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 09:51:00 +0000

my life is currently 90% puppies

A good mix today. I really enjoyed the CyclingTips podcast about more diversity and inclusivity in cycling and what organisations and companies could and should be doing.

Management

Software Development Trends 2021: The Latest Research Data - it is amazing how many of these surveys are out there … this is maybe one of the better ones

TBM 15/52: Stop Hiring Things to Do Too Many Jobs - “The problem with something that does lots of jobs is that it is very easy to send the wrong message.” - good point

Friday Links 21-13

Fri, 09 Apr 2021 09:27:00 +0000

Now that we might be nearing the end of the pandemic everybody is panicking about the future of offices, remote work and working from home.

I personally am looking forward to some time in the office, definitely the city and even the commute.

Management

TBM 14/52: Discussing Complex Problems with Leaders - I am not sure if my problems are really that complex

Welcoming Dissent: How to Build a Coaching Culture and Lead by Example with Russ Laraway (Employee Experience Evangelist at Qualtrics) [Podcast] - nice insights from an experienced manager

Bank Holiday Links 21-12

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 08:54:00 +0000

The Big Digitization Of Cassette Tapes

A big post today, as last week I was distracted by too many puppies.

I caught up with my podcasts and there is some good stuff like the Dunbar one.

Also a small section about my cassette tape problem.

Management

Robin Dunbar makes the case for human connection [Podcast] - sometimes one forgets that there are people behind things like the Dunbar Number.

Friday Links 21-11

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Country Centered Map Projections

I have been looking into remote compensation structures a bit … it is complicated.

Also some good long posts and podcasts about managing and teams.

I was quite distracted by animal life this week, so I am quite proud of the amount of blogs and podcasts I got through.

Current podcast backlog: 30h 28m

Management

Owning the Manager Role: How to Set Expectations and be “Super F*cking Clear” with Melissa and Johnathan Nightingale (founders of Raw Signal Group) [Podcast] - I often fall into the trying to be a peer trap, but then I hope this makes me also more approachable.

Friday Links 21-10

Fri, 12 Mar 2021 09:58:00 +0000

I am addicted to tape decks

This week I suggest you look into the article about the passive listening at technology companies and how wrong it went and the coaching podcast about feedback.

Management

Priority guideline - sometimes I dream of a company with only one team, one product and one backlog … I am not sure this does even exist any more

Onboarding to Flexport as a remote engineer - onboarding remotely is certainly different for everybody

Friday Links 21-09

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 11:31:00 +0000

The all fun pandemic section is back. This week I got flooded by good links. Lots of good stuff going on in cities all over the world and people in my bubble seem to be more aware of what we do to the environment.

Engineering Management

4 Steps to Remote Success: Hiring, Decision Making, Collaborating and Managing with Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering at Buffer [Podcast] - lots of of good stuff about remote teams … which most of us still are

Friday Links 21-08

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 09:49:00 +0000

Keanu plays with puppies

Back on the podcast train! Some interesting management stuff this week and a big bag of random puppies links.

Management

Influencing, Inspiring, & Failing? with Sophie Weston [Podcast] - great interview with a senior devops about management, agile and devops

How to Tell Your Boss You’re Burned Out - please do

Follow the Incentives, Waze Edition - Kent Beck started a new blog. Good points about incentives for people at companies.

Friday Links 21-7

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 11:06:00 +0000

Amiga Boing Ball

I’m still behind with my podcast backlog and even my reading. Some fun engineering links this week. Make sure you check out Morph in random.

Management

4-Day Work Weeks: Results From 2020 and Our Plan for 2021 - it sounds brilliant and probably work especially for creative work like programming. I am not quite sure how it would work for other jobs that are closely linked to time on seat.

Friday Links 21-6

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 09:57:00 +0000

No podcasts at all this week and very light on random links, which gives me the opportunity to post this pretty spring photo of our almond blossom getting going.

Management

Performance reviews should be unsurprising, fair, and motivating - nothing to add really. I wouldn’t say I am 100% there yet, but this should be the goal.

The 2021 State of Remote Work - Buffer asks remote workers about remote work … 2.4% don’t like it and 3% wouldn’t recommended it. Possibly some selection bias.

Friday Links 21-05

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 09:45:00 +0000

Some cool insights into the engineering of GitHub and Slack and the sudo vulnerability. Short one this week.

Management

Meetup Apps Team’s Virtual Onsite (and why your team should have one too) - some nice ideas for your virtual onsites or offsites

Fertile Mid-Stations - I like to work with people for a long time, but I also realise that all companies are just one station in the working life of most people The surprising root of resilience [Podcast] - spoiler: teams bound by experiences

Friday Links

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 10:25:00 +0000

Balesin Island

Your friendly neighbourhood Friday links. Very much on the technology side this time, plus some extra skateboarding urbanism.

Engineering Management

The Tech Debt Playbook - how to manage technical debt

Maximizing Developer Effectiveness - focused on feedback loops and organizational effectiveness

Make Boring Plans - I am all for keeping everything boring

Creating Security Decision Trees With Graphviz

Graphviz is pretty underused for these kind of things. It is too easy to go for some WYSIWYG diagram tool, that then becomes a maintenance nightmare

From Heartbreak, Through Resilience, To Equanimity - with Chad Dickerson & Jerry Colonna [Podcast] - I am looking into coaching at the moment. This is an interview with Chad Dickerson and his coach

Friday Links

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 09:38:00 +0000

2020 Game

I have been catching up with my podcasts. The environment section is probably here to stay. It will be one of the things of 2021 when people get bored of the virus.

Management

TBM 2/52: Start by Counting Things - how to start with metrics

TBM 3/52: Help Your Team Find Its Own Way - definitely worth looking into why these companies prefer six weeks. We tried it too and it wasn’t a good fit at the time.

Friday Links

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 10:26:00 +0000

Oriol Ferrer Mesià

Good stuff on management and random stuff today. And a new section “Environment”, which is just depressing.

Management

Optimize Your Time with The Balanced Calendar - good tips on creating free space or focused time

Meeting Rooms Are Now Free - but meetings are still expensive

Summarized – Tech and business books I read in 2020 - Daniel Bartholomae’s book tips

Recommended Engineering Management Books - good collection. I probably should write one of these lists at some point

2020 review

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 13:38:00 +0000

2020 was a bit unexpected to say the least. Here is a quick review from my perspective.

This is the second year we are living in the countryside and hour from Barcelona and over the year it turned out to have been a pretty good decision.

January

Pretty uneventful. I mostly cycled indoors and met the BRCG crew once for a longer ride. A storm hit Spain and led to a bit of damage on our house.

Post Holiday Friday Links

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 11:13:00 +0000

C64 Generator

A bit of a catch-up issue of the Friday Links. Full of urbanism, randomness, a few of 2020 reviews and the usual engineering management.

Relatively few podcast were released over the holidays. I managed to catch up with my back-log (for a while).

Management

What are our core values and practices for building software? - cool summary about Thoughtsworks engineering values. I think they probably apply to a lot of companies

2020 in Books

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 08:59:00 +0000

[goodreads books 2020](https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/20483515)

You would think a global pandemic would be good for your reading habit. This doesn’t seem to be the case for me. I am not sure where the time I spent on commute went, but definitely not towards some good use.

This list is kind of in order, but also grouped by author and series.

Most of the books are easy airport reads, with thrillers and some sci-fi.

Podcasts

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 15:29:00 +0000

I can’t remember when I started to listen to podcasts. I am sure I was not an early adopter. It might have been around 2004 using iPodder on Linux with the first iPod and later an iPod Shuffle.

Over the years I used various tools and devices to download podcasts and now have settled on Pocket Casts on Android. It has nice sync functionality between multiple devices and a useful web interface too. The web app is also useful to pull up the recently starred episodes for my Friday Links.

Friday Links

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 09:40:00 +0000

One of my favourite houses

Last one before the holidays, where I am going to post some other things. A little bit on productivity today as I look into the Zettelkasten hype.

Leadership

How to Lead When Your Team Is Exhausted — and You Are, Too - I am personally just looking forward to the holiday.

Shared vision on organization - I think this is one of the hardest things to get right

Friday Links

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 09:37:00 +0000

Ikea Catalogue 1969

Extra section for the mess that is happening with CentOS at the moment. Thanks Red Hat! Lots of good other stuff too.

Engineering Management

Weak and strong team concepts. - I am all for focus on teams, when you can. Good summary from Will Larson as usual.

Working From Home During a Pandemic: A Tale of Two Cities - “In the end, it looks like we are doing more and for longer. Some people are loving WFH. Some hate it. Productivity is personal and work from home is personal.”

Friday Links

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 10:14:00 +0000

Center of the Road

IFTTT is forgetting to push some of my links to Pocket, so I am figuring out a new way for my link posting work-flow.

Today some great podcasts about leadership and also a course I really enjoy.

Engineering Management

Shared vision on product - must be nice to have more teams than products :-)

Conway’s Law: Critical for Efficient Team Design in Tech - it might be my bubble, but recently I have been thinking a lot about Conway’s Law and the Reverse Conway Manoeuvre

Friday Links

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 09:11:00 +0000

It seems the whole world is slacking of for Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Focus on engineering management and urbanism with some good longer reads.

Engineering Management

Skills map for strategic growth - Great post about matching skills to requirements and to engage and coach your team. This is a great blog from a former colleague and I can’t believe I just discovered it now.

Chief Notion Officer - I have been thinking about knowledge management in companies forever. I tried everything from wikis, to google drive to github. They tend to be write-only or succumb to bit rot very quickly.

Friday Links

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 09:48:00 +0000

Engineering Management

How to Structure Teams for Building Better Software Products - the book is on my long to-read list, but this post is already a good summary

The 2020 Scrum Guide - references for “Pure(tm) Scrum” as not practised anywhere

How Facebook kept the lights on when the world went remote [Webinar] - series of upcoming webinars about facebook going remote

Creating & Achieving Goals [Podcast] - about setting clear goals and OKRs, probably one of the hardest subjects

Friday Links

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 11:23:00 +0000

A bit of a back-log again, lots of long reads about engineering, management and especially urbanism. Some good podcasts related to all of these too. The one from Mo Gawdat about happiness certainly made me think.

Management

The Art of the Awkward 1:1 - this is definitely one of my weak areas, my 1:1s are just not awkward enough most of the time

Google’s initiative for more inclusive language in open source projects - check out the style guide for the details, lots of good pointers and some I might not have noticed myself.

My thoughts on meetings

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 08:50:00 +0000

I used to really hate meetings. As a developer they seem to just get into the way of doing real work. You sit in a room with other people who are probably thinking the same thing and you are itching to get back to your desk and do “real work”.

But at some point you specialise, teams grow and you need some way to sync up.

Suddenly you realise that meetings are where some decisions are made and you want to join as many as possible.

What is in my bag. Part 2: Even Smaller Saddlebag

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 09:28:00 +0000

What is in my bag

I am slow, but at least I am persistent. Four years ago I posted “What is in my bag. Part 1: Small Saddlebag”, and I kind of promised to post about what I take on sportives / gran fondos. This is not that post, because I haven’t taken part in any sportives for a while. Instead this is an update to the original post. I am still using the bag from the first post on my commuter bike.

Friday Links

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 08:48:00 +0000

Wikipedia: Cold War

Very light on links this week, maybe everybody is on holiday already. But I compensate with some nice podcasts references.

Technology

More online protection with the new VPN by Google One - a VPN from Google. I hope this is coming to Google Suite/Workspaces too. I also hope this kills off most of the shady VPN providers

Bringing Personalized Search to Etsy - nice view inside an approach to personalised search

Friday Links

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 08:56:00 +0000

Vegan Burger (or Disc)

Urbanism bonanza today. Coronavirus has made people think more about their environment, walking and cycling.

Also some good long read technology articles about how people approach big projects in various companies.

Engineering Management

Can agile pods help your team win big at scale? - agile in marketing. If you have a marketing of 500+ people it does seem to make sense.

They Write the Right Stuff - from 1996, apparently a classic that I haven’t encountered before. About the software development for the Space Shuttle and how it was pretty much free of bugs

Friday Links

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 09:12:00 +0000

Wonderleaf “Gin”

Some longer reads and podcasts focusing on management, the current thing and random fun. I like stories about people managing their mental health with what is going on. We are all kind of in the same boat.

Engineering Management

Cycle time: a secret weapon of efficient software teams - It is a great metric and leads to overall improvements in processes. Even if you don’t bring it down to where you would like it to be, the way there is helping in many other areas

Friday Links

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 08:47:00 +0000

By BishkekRocks - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Short one today, just a random collection of gems. I am very slow catching up with my podcast back-log.

Technology

Ruby 3.0 brings new type checking and concurrency features [LWN] - some good new stuff, but I don’t like of having type definitions in separate files. That was already annoying in C and C++. The concurrency features probably also need some work.

Double Friday Links

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 10:49:00 +0000

Another week of holiday and another missed Friday brings you the double amount of links for your weekend reading pleasure.

A bit of everything today, the random links got a bit out of hand.

Engineering Management

TMB 40/53: 10 Tips for Sustainable Change Agency [LWN] - some good tips on encouraging change without stepping on other peoples toes

Trouble hiring senior engineers? It’s probably you - I take some of these tips in consideration when we hire again in a few weeks

Friday Links

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 08:45:00 +0000

I am an Eurobox kind of guy

Strong on urbanism again this week, but also some interesting random tidbits. It looks like the remote working section will stay with us for a long time. I am so curious about seeing how it will look beginning of next year.

Technology

Rails Concerns: To Concern Or Not To Concern - the example from Basecamp and responds by DHH should really tell you everything about what to do

Early Friday Links

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 08:04:00 +0000

Early and short list today, as I am off tomorrow.

Remote working seems to become a standard section now. It is interesting how the whole world is dealing with it and everybody having strong opinions about it.

Plus the usual technology, bike lanes and random links.

Technology

Fun and Games with Exposure Notifications - I love this stuff. Exposure Notifications is an open protocol by Apple and Google, there are open source reference implementations, most of the code is already available on Linux and someone can be bothered to implement it himself and document it.

Double Friday Links

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 09:17:00 +0000

Emma Everesting by CyclingTips

I was off cycling in the Pre-Pyrenees last week, so you are getting two Friday’s worth of links today. I caught up a bit with my podcast backlog and some of the longer articles. Especially the Random section is a bit long this time.

Engineering

Anti-IF framework - if/else based on type - I do get annoyed by lots of nested if/else or case statements, this is one way to approach it. The question always is if the refactoring is easier to understand.

Friday Links

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 09:29:00 +0000

Elite Game Screenshot

Last batch of links before I am off for a week on holiday. A bit of a mixed bag, with focus on management and technology.

Management

The Human Need to Vent - indeed we do. I would say most blog posts tend to be venting. Twitter and Facebook are Vent Central. I also like the post by Rands he references: The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster, which is about venting in the context of 1:1s

Early Friday Links

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 08:28:00 +0000

Summer Sunsets

I am off tomorrow, so Friday Links come on a Thursday.

I could blame the list being shorter than usual on this, but in reality I have been spend most of my time watching the twins reacting to music I like (see link below).

Managment

How to Build and Scale High-Performing Teams with David Sakamoto, VP of Customer Success at Gitlab [Podcast] - interesting perspective from a non technology fully remote VP

Friday Links

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 08:17:00 +0000

Tea in a microwave?

This week a bit light on the management and COVID-19 links. I balance it with lots of depressing news and some uplifting urbanism developments. So grab a tea and a biscuit …

Working

Collaborating During Coronavirus: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Nature of Work - apparently we are having more, but shorter meetings and work more hours. Definitely more meetings for myself, but not shorter and I am too lazy to work more hours.

Friday Links

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 08:15:00 +0000

This week Garmin exploded, the UK decided that cycling isn’t so bad after all, remote working is still a thing

Management

When We Need to Move Quickly We Work in Task Forces. Here’s How We Set Them Up - Kind of common sense, but as usual it is interesting how Buffer approaches it.

Zef’s Razor - I am going to spoil it: “People have good intentions” - this applies to live in general I guess

My Workspace

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 08:49:00 +0000

I like looking at pictures of other people’s office set-ups. With most people working from home at the moment you see more and more nice workspaces especially tuned for video conferencing.

I was lucky enough to have a space and a reasonable set-up already. By chance I also had ordered bits and pieces before everything was sold out on Amazon.

There are a few things I still want to improve. The light is not ideal for video conferencing and I am also going to try a separate microphone for better sound.

Friday Links

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 09:09:00 +0000

The Evolution of Product at Buffer and the Next Step: We’re Hiring a VP of Product - can I have one too? This sounds so familiar.

Engineering

Rebuilding messaging: How we bootstrapped our platform - how Linkedin is changing to a new messaging platform and database.

Machine Learning for a Better Developer Experience - How Netflix is using machine learning to better handle their logs.

Twitter engineers replacing racially loaded tech terms like ‘master,’ ‘slave’ - this is happening in a lot of companies and open source projects and is great to see.

Friday Links

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 09:31:00 +0000

Banksy

Technology

10 Years of “Continuous Delivery” - I have to confess I never read the whole book. It hovers somewhere on my goodreads to read list. But you should :-) Or follow him on twitter. His YouTube channel is a bit too trippy for myself.

Rust code in Linux kernel looks more likely as language team lead promises support - this feels like a natural fit.

Friday Links

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 08:38:00 +0000

#markharrisart

Fewer links than usual this week. The whole global pandemic situation is certainly acting as a catalyst in a few areas. For cities there are some good developments, for companies some interesting times ahead.

Engineering managment

Netflix releases open-source crisis-management tool [LWN link]. I think this has been announced a while ago certainly seems to be interesting if you have the capacity to set it up.

Friday Links

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 11:23:00 +0000

rjp inspired me with his random roundups to put a bit more work in my Friday Links.

This might have been a big mistake, as it takes me quite a bit more time to put this together and it might be even harder to read.

I also merged the podcasts and videos into the other sections to provide more context.

If you make it through this, please tell me if they are better or worse.

Friday Links

Fri, 26 Jun 2020 08:07:00 +0000

Random interests and too many podcasts. How to practice backend engineering. https://lethain.com/how-to-practice-backend-engineering/

Rands: WFH https://randsinrepose.com/archives/wfh/

COVID-19 Risks of Flying https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/06/covid_risks_of_.html

Making my doorbell work https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/55312.html

Announcing Perl 7 https://www.perl.com/article/announcing-perl-7/

Open-source contact tracing, part 1 https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/823532/64d96b8676118dc9/

Are pets really good for us – or just hairy health hazards? https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/oct/13/are-pets-really-good-for-us-or-just-hairy-health-hazards

Git is About Communication https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/06/24/git-is-about-communication.html

‘You can’t instagram tea’: is trouble brewing for the classic cuppa? https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/jan/30/you-cant-instagram-tea-is-trouble-brewing-for-the-classic-cuppa

Modern Software Over-Engineering Mistakes https://medium.com/@rdsubhas/10-modern-software-engineering-mistakes-bc67fbef4fc8

The Future of Virtual Events https://hopin.to/blog/the-future-of-virtual-events

I’ve Accidentally Become A Strava Stalker https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/culture/amp32955987/strava-stalker/

Friday Links

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 07:38:00 +0000

Some open source news, a bit about covid and some art. Corona-Warn-App Open Source Project https://www.coronawarn.app/en/

Introducing GitHub Super Linter: one linter to rule them all https://github.blog/2020-06-18-introducing-github-super-linter-one-linter-to-rule-them-all/

Tsunami: An extensible network scanning engine for detecting high severity vulnerabilities with high confidence https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/06/tsunami-extensible-network-scanning.html

Zoom Will Be End-to-End Encrypted for All Users https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/06/zoom_will_be_en.html

Loaded terms in free software https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/823224/390948dc629c3dcd/

Buffer is Moving to a 4-day Workweek for the Rest of 2020 https://open.buffer.com/4-day-workweek-2020/

Xing: We are moving our asset delivery to the cloud — and here is why we do that https://tech.xing.com/we-are-moving-our-asset-delivery-to-the-cloud-and-here-is-why-we-do-that-e0977e5f4c43

Friday Links

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:22:00 +0000

This week I am not even going to pretend that there is any theme to these.

In Grudging Defense of Structure https://avdi.codes/in-grudging-defense-of-structure/

Why the developers who use Rust love it so much https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/06/05/why-the-developers-who-use-rust-love-it-so-much/

We love individual responsibility more than we would admit https://blog.odd-e.com/yilv/2020/06/we-love-individual-responsibility-more-than-we-would-admit.html

As Diners Flock to Delivery Apps, Restaurants Fear for Their Future https://www.worldnewj.com/as-diners-flock-to-delivery-apps-restaurants-fear-for-their-future/

Rain Alarm https://www.rain-alarm.com/

Creating a Decision Journal: Template And Example Included https://fs.blog/2014/02/decision-journal/

Performance and N+1 Queries: Explained, Spotted, and Solved https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/06/09/n-plus-one-queries-explained.html

The RuboCop Name Drama Redux https://metaredux.com/posts/2020/06/08/the-rubocop-name-drama-redux.html

Friday Links

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 07:58:00 +0000

Black Lives Matter.

About Friday Links

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Sawfish phishing campaign targets GitHub users https://github.blog/2020-04-14-sawfish-phishing-campaign-targets-github-users/

How the new normal will change company culture for good https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/lessons-of-pandemic-change-company-culture/

The Definitive Answer: Who Really Owns a 1 on 1 Meeting? https://getlighthouse.com/blog/who-owns-1-on-1-meeting/

Black Lives Matter. https://lethain.com/black-lives-matter/

Skip Level Meetings for Interns https://managingdev.com/skip-level-meetings-interns/

Political Songs | Dub journalism, a cultural weapon https://www.newframe.com/political-songs-dub-journalism-cultural-weapon/

Poet on the front line https://theguardian.com/books/2002/may/04/poetry.books

List of cognitive biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change https://medium.com/@BarackObama/how-to-make-this-moment-the-turning-point-for-real-change-9fa209806067

About Friday Links

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 10:19:00 +0000

Since Summer 2018 I have been posting Friday Links on my blog. There are now nearly a hundred posts of these and I thought I write a little bit about these.

I picked this habit up at my job at Splendia. I can’t remember where it originated from. The idea is to collect interesting links to share with your team and post them all together on a Friday so people have some reading material for the weekend. Other team members would then add their own links in the same thread.

Friday Links

Fri, 29 May 2020 08:48:00 +0000

Working from home, working remote, dealing with the pandemic-era, product management and random fun.

Ergodox Keyboard

https://ergodox-ez.com/

LinkedIn’s approach to automated accessibility (A11y) testing https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2020/automated-accessibility-testing

Netflix to automatically cancel ‘hundreds of thousands’ of inactive accounts https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/netflix-account-cancel-delete-subscribe-renew-email-a9527626.html

Why Kotlin Multiplatform Is A Great Alternative To React Native https://mobilejazz.com/blog/why-kotlin-multiplatform-is-a-great-alternative-to-react-native/

Why GitLab pays local rates https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/

From Germany to Detroit and back: how Kraftwerk forged an industrial exchange https://theguardian.com/music/2020/may/25/from-germany-to-detroit-and-back-how-kraftwerk-forged-an-industrial-exchange

Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/can-remote-work-be-fixed/

Friday Links

Fri, 22 May 2020 08:50:00 +0000

Today free from “one thing or another”, some software news, working from home, making product decisions and fun video from the past.

TBM 21/53: “Vision” and Prescriptive Roadmaps

https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-2153-vision-and-prescriptive

The Cave Essentials https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-cave-essentials/

Developer Dilemmas Are Now Online https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/05/20/developer-dilemmas-are-now-online.html

Architecture Jams: a Collaborative Way of Designing Software https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-architecture-jams/

The state of the AWK https://lwn.net/Articles/820829/

Introducing Piranha: An Open Source Tool to Automatically Delete Stale Code https://eng.uber.com/piranha/

Digital Transformation Is About Talent, Not Technology https://hbr.org/amp/2020/05/digital-transformation-is-about-talent-not-technology

New controls for how you share albums in Google Photos https://blog.google/products/photos/new-controls-how-you-share-albums-google-photos/

Friday Links

Fri, 15 May 2020 08:14:00 +0000

This time with remote working, Ruby, management and random fun.

What can we learn from the COVID-19 pandemic about how people experience working from home and commuting? https://urbanstudies.uva.nl/content/blog-series/covid-19-pandemic-working-from-home-and-commuting.html

Universal basic income seems to improve employment and well-being https://www.newscientist.com/article/2242937-universal-basic-income-seems-to-improve-employment-and-well-being/

Building a Ruby CLI with Thor https://marsbased.com/blog/2020/04/27/building-ruby-cli-thor/

“Sorry, I have a walk scheduled then” https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/work-culture/-sorry--i-have-a-walk-scheduled-then-

Introducing portability of Google Authenticator 2SV codes across Android devices https://security.googleblog.com/2020/05/introducing-portability-of-google.html

rjp: Friday roundup for 2020-05-08 https://rjp.is/blogging/posts/2020/05/08_friday/

20 questions to ask instead of “How are you doing right now?” https://qz.com/work/1836105/20-great-questions-to-ask-instead-of-how-are-you-doing-right-now/

Friday Links

Fri, 08 May 2020 08:39:00 +0000

Today about management, mapping, programming languages, and insights into companies.

Better passwords in Ruby applications with the Pwned Passwords API https://www.twilio.com/blog/2018/03/better-passwords-in-ruby-applications-pwned-passwords-api.html

Urbanists of Twitter https://medium.com/opportunity-in-excess-capacity/urbanists-of-twitter-cec4615ff45f

How Our VP of Engineering Used Data to Support Our Engineering Team on a Human Level https://codeclimate.com/blog/how-our-vp-of-engineering-used-data-to-support-our-engineering-team-on-a-human-level/

How LinkedIn handles merging code in high-velocity repositories https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2020/continuous-integration

JavaScript Error Tracking with AppSignal v1.3.0 is Here https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/04/30/javascript-error-tracking-version-1-3-0.html

We’re Trying a 4-Day Workweek for the Month of May https://open.buffer.com/4-day-workweek/

rjp: Friday roundup for 2020-05-01 https://rjp.is/blogging/posts/2020/05/friday-01/

International Workers' Day Weekend Links

Thu, 30 Apr 2020 08:01:00 +0000

Alphabet’s Q1 2020 earnings call https://blog.google/inside-google/alphabet/alphabets-q1-2020-earnings-call/

Google Meet premium video meetings—free for everyone https://blog.google/products/meet/bringing-google-meet-to-more-people/

Case Study : Complex UI Testing https://blog.ndepend.com/case-study-complex-ui-testing/

Hiring programmers with a take-home test https://m.signalvnoise.com/hiring-programmers-with-a-take-home-test/

How to do Map Stuff: A Live Community Sharing Event https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2020/03/19/how-to-do-map-stuff/

Fedora Workstation : Swamp draining for 6 years https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2020/04/28/fedora-workstation-swamp-draining-for-6-years/

Development Environments at Slack https://slack.engineering/development-environments-at-slack-f3c1339c2445

Fedora 32 is officially here! https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-32/

Icebreaker https://icebreaker.range.co/

Most controversial rules in Arkency https://blog.arkency.com/most-controversial-rules-in-arkency/

The science of why remote meetings don’t feel the same https://blog.google/inside-google/working-google/science-why-remote-meetings-dont-feel-same/amp/

“It never gets easier, you just go faster.” https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/04/27/it-never-gets-easier-you-just-go-faster/amp/

Friday Links

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 08:29:00 +0000

Long-Term Planning https://medium.com/redbubble/long-term-planning-9c80dc2c1d8b

Rands: Technicality https://randsinrepose.com/archives/technicality/

Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-centers-work-harder-sun-shines-wind-blows/

Case Study: 2 Simple Principles to achieve High Code Maintainability https://blog.ndepend.com/case-study-2-simple-principles-to-achieve-high-code-maintainability/

How we reduced latency and cost-to-serve by merging two systems https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2020/reducing-latency-and-cost-for-identity-services

Is Remote Work Greener? We Calculated Buffer’s Carbon Footprint to Find Out https://open.buffer.com/carbon-footprint/

Clean Code: The Manager’s Guide to Building Quality Software https://codingsans.com/blog/clean-code

Failed #SquadGoals https://www.jeremiahlee.com/posts/failed-squad-goals/ Valve’s Proton project has brought 6,500 Windows games to Linux so far https://www.techspot.com/amp/news/84909-valve-proton-has-brought-6500-windows-games-linux.html

Friday Links

Fri, 17 Apr 2020 10:01:00 +0000

10 Things I Hate About Remote Work- Part One https://www.learntoscale.us/thought-bubbles/10-things-i-hate-about-remote-work-part-one

From 48k lines of code to 10—the story of GitHub’s JavaScript SDK https://github.blog/2020-04-09-from-48k-lines-of-code-to-10-the-story-of-githubs-javascript-sdk/

Ride Down Into JavaScript Dependency Hell https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/04/09/ride-down-the-javascript-dependency-hell.html

Kubernetes Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/04/kubernetes_secu.html

Business as Abnormal: Every Message We’ve Shared With Our Team (So Far) During COVID-19 https://open.buffer.com/covid19/

Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories https://medium.com/@herbcaudill/lessons-from-6-software-rewrite-stories-635e4c8f7c22

How often does Rust change? https://words.steveklabnik.com/how-often-does-rust-change

Contact Tracing COVID-19 Infections via Smartphone Apps https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/04/contact_tracing.html

Hacklang at Slack: A Better PHP https://slack.engineering/hacklang-at-slack-a-better-php-65f239cbc9e9

When should I write an Architecture Decision Record? https://labs.spotify.com/2020/04/14/when-should-i-write-an-architecture-decision-record/

Lead Dev Live 2020

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 16:26:00 +0000

I heard of the Lead Dev conference series some time at the end of the last year. There are not many conferences that focus on engineering leaders, most of the technology conferences are focused on specific technologies, methodologies or the business side.

It was too late for the Berlin 2019 conference, so I set my eyes on either the London or Berlin 2020 conference. In the end I decided against London, because I wanted to avoid short plane trips as much as possible and staying longer in London also wasn’t an option.

Easter Links

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 07:59:00 +0000

Swift: Google’s bet on differentiable programming https://tryolabs.com/blog/2020/04/02/swift-googles-bet-on-differentiable-programming/

Register now for the DevOps Online Summit 2020! https://www.devopsonlinesummit.com/2020

getlon.lat — Help! I need a geocoder. https://getlon.lat/

A Day in the Life of a Backend Product Engineer at Slack* https://slack.engineering/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-backend-product-engineer-at-slack-e786a8a08fc4

Build versus buy. https://lethain.com/build-vs-buy/

3 steps for leaders to take in emergencies https://larahogan.me/blog/3-steps-for-leaders-in-emergencies/

Paper debugging https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/paper-debugging/

10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL https://medium.com/@rbranson/10-things-i-hate-about-postgresql-20dbab8c2791

Knative https://knative.dev/

Apple, Amazon, and Common Enemies https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-amazon-and-common-enemies/

All Microsoft events will be held online until July 2021 https://www.siliconrepublic.com/companies/microsoft-events-held-online-july-2021

Announcing the Compose Specification https://www.docker.com/blog/announcing-the-compose-specification/

Friday Links

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 08:47:00 +0000

Goto: A Dozen New Masterclasses Are Now LIVE! https://blog.gotocon.com/2020/04/02/a-dozen-new-masterclasses-are-now-live/

Changing the Approach to Debugging in Ruby with TracePoint https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/04/01/changing-the-approach-to-debugging-in-ruby-with-tracepoint.html

AppSignal Now Supports Node.js: Roadmap for the Coming Weeks https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/04/01/appsignal-now-supports-node-roadmap-for-the-coming-weeks.html

Code Search for Google open source projects https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/04/code-search-for-google-open-source.html

Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-You-Should-Ignore-All-That/248366/

See Everyone with the Google Meet Grid View Extension https://www.controlaltachieve.com/2020/03/meet-grid-view.html

Optimizing Ruby Lazy Initialization in TruffleRuby with Deoptimization https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/optimizing-ruby-lazy-initialization-in-truffleruby-with-deoptimization

Eclipse Theia Offers a ‘True Open Source Alternative to Visual Studio Code’ https://thenewstack.io/eclipse-theia-offers-a-true-open-source-alternative-to-visual-studio-code/

Letting your CEO deploy to production

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 12:01:00 +0000

"One click" deploy (*)

Recently our CEO Raj Kumar spent a week in our Barcelona office where the majority of our engineering department is located.

I was working on some ideas for him to meet the team and get some insights into our daily work. While most of the company is aware of UI/UX and front-end changes we are doing to our site, some of the back-end and infrastructure work can seem like black magic. I think it is important to take every opportunity to bring this output closer to the rest of the company and especially the leadership.

Friday Links

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 09:31:00 +0000

My Pandemic Zoom Setup https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/3/26/my-pandemic-zoom-setup

Two Years With Rust http://brooker.co.za/blog/2020/03/22/rust.html

Helping FOSS conferences in the face of a pandemic https://lwn.net/Articles/815913/

O’Reilly shutting down its conference group https://lwn.net/Articles/815966/ https://www.oreilly.com/conferences/from-laura-baldwin.html

How to Run a Successful Online Conference https://ianlandsman.com/run-an-online-conference/

Video conferencing with Jitsi https://lwn.net/Articles/815751/

Remote Working: The home office desks of Basecamp https://m.signalvnoise.com/remote-working-the-home-office-desks-of-basecamp/

The Housekeeping of the Intangible https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-housekeeping-of-the-intangible/

Podcasts / YouTube

Setting Objectives and Key Results in your team | Whitney O’Banner | #LeadDevLondon https://youtu.be/Us6jaZoXgdU

Goal-Setting Workshops for Managers - Melinda Seckington | #LeadDevLondon 2018 https://youtu.be/np1rZvM9GD4

Friday Links

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 09:03:00 +0000

How to survive isolation with your roommates, your partner, your kids – and yourself https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/mar/17/self-isolation-survival-guide-relationships-coronavirus

The Simplicity of Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Schedule https://thefocuscourse.com/franklin-schedule/

A Few Small Things You Can Do as a Leader https://randsinrepose.com/archives/a-few-small-things-you-can-do-as-a-leader/

Asynchronous Communication and Why It Matters For Remote Work https://open.buffer.com/asynchronous-communication/

Hotspotting developer productivity. https://lethain.com/hotspotting/

List of Free Software and Services During Coronavirus Outbreak https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/list-of-free-software-and-services-during-coronavirus-outbreak/

What the heck is Backstage anyway? https://labs.spotify.com/2020/03/17/what-the-heck-is-backstage-anyway/

Facade Pattern in Rails for Performance and Maintainability https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/03/18/facade-pattern-in-rails-for-performance-and-maintainability.html

Atlassian finally unleashes free Jira tier – nearly six months late yet just in time for coronavirus crunch https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2020/03/19/atlassian_free_jira/

Friday Links

Fri, 13 Mar 2020 09:38:00 +0000

pocket-reader.el https://github.com/alphapapa/pocket-reader.el

retronym - Word of the Day : March 12, 2020 https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/retronym-2020-03-12

TBM 11/53: The Know-It-All CEO https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-1153-the-know-it-all-ceo

Why cycling in Palestine is an intensely political act https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2020/mar/10/why-cycling-in-palestine-is-an-intensely-political-act

How to Break Apart a Rails Monolith https://kellysutton.com/2020/03/12/how-to-break-apart-a-rails-monolith.html

One-track minds: Using AI for music source separation https://tech.fb.com/one-track-minds-using-ai-for-music-source-separation/

Atlassian brings rules-based automation to Jira Cloud https://venturebeat.com/2020/03/12/atlassian-brings-rules-based-automation-to-jira-cloud/

Powerful, no-code automation now available to all Jira Cloud customers https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/introducing-automation-in-jira

DBT: Your entire analytics engineering workflow https://www.getdbt.com/

Amazon teases Bottlerocket, its take on Linux specifically for running containers https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2020/03/11/amazon_launches_bottlerocket_new_linux_distro_for_running_containers/

Friday Links

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 08:37:00 +0000

The Ultimate 1-on-1 Meeting Questions Template https://www.peoplebox.ai/t/one-on-one-meeting-template-manager-questions-list One-on-one questions https://one-on-ones.app/ How a 2 person startup already uses 28 other tools https://acrossapp.com/blog/how-a-2-person-startup-already-uses-28-other-tools Project LightSpeed: Rewriting the Messenger codebase for a faster, smaller, and simpler messaging app https://engineering.fb.com/data-infrastructure/messenger/ Wi-Fi Chip Vulnerability https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/03/wi-fi_chip_vuln.html From one to two: how to start a successful distributed engineering office. https://lethain.com/how-to-start-distributed-engineering-office/ World Bank staff call for canceling Spring Meetings — permanently https://www.devex.com/news/world-bank-staff-call-for-canceling-spring-meetings-permanently-96683 How did software get so reliable without proof? https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2020/03/02/how-did-software-get-so-reliable-without-proof/ The WHO sent 25 international experts to China and here are their main findings after 9 days https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/fbt49e/the_who_sent_25_international_experts_to_china/ Production Oriented Development https://paulosman.me/2019/12/30/production-oriented-development.html

Friday Links

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 08:35:00 +0000

Cloud Computing Is Not the Energy Hog That Had Been Feared https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/technology/cloud-computing-energy-usage.html

Preparing for Coronavirus to Strike the U.S. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/preparing-for-coronavirus-to-strike-the-u-s/

Google programming language scorecard: How C, C++, Dart, Rust, Go rate for Fuchsia https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-programming-language-scorecard-how-c-c-dart-rust-go-rate-for-fuchsia/

Introducing Hanami::API http://hanamirb.org/blog/2020/02/26/introducing-hanami-api.html

Love it or hate it, Marmite is having a massive foodie moment https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/feb/26/love-it-or-hate-it-marmite-is-having-a-massive-foodie-moment

What is a Tech Lead? The 4 worst things about this promotion https://www.getclockwise.com/blog/what-is-a-tech-lead-the-4-worst-things-about-this-promotion

Some MVP and Experiment Tips https://cutle.fish/blog/mvp-and-experiment-tips

Second Sock Syndrome – What It Is and How to Fight It https://sheepamongwolves.net/2018/09/second-sock-syndrome-what-it-is-and-how-to-fight-it/

Friday Links

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 09:19:00 +0000

Debian discusses how to handle 2038 https://lwn.net/Articles/812767/

The Pyramid of Unit Testing Benefits https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/unit-testing-benefits-pyramid/

Internet of Things Candle https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/02/internet_of_thi.html

A Blueprint for Internal Open Source https://medium.com/@SkyscannerEng/a-blueprint-for-internal-open-source-7169745018c2

Open sourcing DataHub: LinkedIn’s metadata search and discovery platform https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2020/open-sourcing-datahub--linkedins-metadata-search-and-discovery-p

Titan Security Keys - now available in Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK https://security.googleblog.com/2020/02/titan-security-keys-now-available-in.html

When To Be Concerned About Concerns https://blog.codeship.com/when-to-be-concerned-about-concerns/

About Rails concerns https://medium.com/@carlescliment/about-rails-concerns-a6b2f1776d7d

Tech Debt Developer Survey Results 2020 - Impact on Retention https://codeahoy.com/2020/02/17/technical-debt-survey/

Survey results: What makes a company People-first? https://wildbit.com/blog/2020/02/17/what-makes-a-people-first-company

Using multiple git configurations

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 12:31:00 +0000

It is fairly common that you might be contributing to multiple git repositories which make different git configuration necessary.

Mine and probably the most common case is that I am using different contributor email addresses for my private and work git repositories. You might also want to have separate global git ignores or other options that differ in multiple repositories.

The way I do it is having one ~/.gitconfig which looks like this:

Friday Links

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 08:47:00 +0000

Supercharge your command line experience: GitHub CLI is now in beta https://github.blog/2020-02-12-supercharge-your-command-line-experience-github-cli-is-now-in-beta/ 3 (+1) Questions for impactful Sprint Goals! https://medium.com/@SkyscannerEng/3-1-questions-for-impactful-sprint-goals-48faa776aac3 Getting Started With System Tests in Rails With Minitest https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/02/12/getting-started-with-system-tests-in-ruby-with-minitest.html I love Free Software Day 2020 https://fsfe.org/campaigns/ilovefs/ Unlearning toxic behaviors in a code review culture https://medium.com/@sandya.sankarram/unlearning-toxic-behaviors-in-a-code-review-culture-b7c295452a3c Agile as Trauma https://doriantaylor.com/agile-as-trauma Rotary Cellphone http://justine-haupt.com/rotarycellphone/ Interview with Yukihiro Matsumoto: Ruby is Designed for Humans, not Machines https://hackernoon.com/interview-with-yukihiro-matsumoto-ruby-is-designed-for-humans-not-machines-1fee3610 How to Use the Distance Matrix API https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/maps-platform/how-use-distance-matrix-api Mythical man month : 10 lines per developer day https://blog.ndepend.com/mythical-man-month-10-lines-per-developer-day/ THE CYBERIZER! https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/02/the-cyberizer/ How Big Technical Changes Happen at Slack https://slack.engineering/how-big-technical-changes-happen-at-slack-f1569d25ee7b

Friday Links

Fri, 07 Feb 2020 08:27:00 +0000

3 research-backed principles that help you scale your engineering org https://www.atlassian.com/blog/technology/3-research-backed-principles-scaling-engineering

Paris mayor unveils ‘15-minute city’ plan in re-election campaign https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/07/paris-mayor-unveils-15-minute-city-plan-in-re-election-campaign

UN poverty expert’s visit shines light on struggles of Spain’s poor https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/un-poverty-experts-visit-shines-light-on-struggles-of-spains-poor

Street View’s 15 favorite Street Views https://www.blog.google/products/maps/street-views-15-favorite-street-views/

A new hash algorithm for Git https://lwn.net/Articles/811068/

Istio as an Example of When Not to Do Microservices https://blog.christianposta.com/microservices/istio-as-an-example-of-when-not-to-do-microservices/

Monoliths are the future https://changelog.com/posts/monoliths-are-the-future

Browsers, web sites, and user tracking https://lwn.net/Articles/811532/

Austerity, gentrification and big tunes: why illegal raves are flourishing https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/05/austerity-gentrification-and-big-tunes-why-illegal-raves-are-flourishing

Friday Links

Fri, 31 Jan 2020 08:53:00 +0000

Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy https://qz.com/work/1776841/zappos-has-quietly-backed-away-from-holacracy/

emacs-todoist https://github.com/abrochard/emacs-todoist

Use Emacs to get social and track your todo list https://opensource.com/article/20/1/emacs-social-track-todo-list

How we retired Python 2 and improved developer happiness https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2020/how-we-retired-python-2-and-improved-developer-happiness

Why the Guardian will no longer accept fossil fuel advertising https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2020/jan/29/why-the-guardian-will-no-longer-accept-fossil-fuel-advertising

Ring Doorbell App Packed with Third-Party Trackers https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/01/ring-doorbell-app-packed-with-third-party-trackers/

Terraform at Flexport https://flexport.engineering/terraform-at-flexport-c274a9d86d9f

New Enterprise IT Controls for Data Studio https://www.blog.google/products/marketingplatform/analytics/new-enterprise-it-controls-data-studio/

Google Receives Geofence Warrants https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/01/google_receives.html

How to Perform Concurrent HTTP Requests in Ruby and Rails https://pawelurbanek.com/ruby-concurrent-requests

Introducing Buffer’s Family Support Fund https://open.buffer.com/family-support-fund/

Saying goodbye to some legacy code

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 11:20:00 +0000

When I joined Devex a bit more than six years ago most of the code base was in one large monolith. This monolith was based on Ruby On Rails and was responsible for delivering devex.com.

urn

This part was called “neo”. I guess because it was a rewrite of a previous Java version. I am not sure if it was a reference to Matrix or the Greek meaning.

There were already some initiatives in place rewriting parts of it in different services, but the monolith was always looming in the background. Any changes to it required increasing amount of work. It was like someone tried to put the definition of technical code into code.

Friday Links

Fri, 24 Jan 2020 08:58:00 +0000

How we built the good first issues feature

https://github.blog/2020-01-22-how-we-built-good-first-issues/

Which of these 2020 Democrats agrees with you most?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/policy-2020/quiz-which-candidate-agrees-with-me/

KubeInvaders - Gamified Chaos Engineering Tool for Kubernetes

https://kubernetes.io/blog/2020/01/22/kubeinvaders-gamified-chaos-engineering-tool-for-kubernetes/

Rails is Fast: Optimize Your View Performance

https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/01/22/rails-is-fast-optimize-your-view-performance.html

PHP in 2020

https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2020

Linkedin: Global Talent Trends

https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/talent-solutions/resources/pdfs/global-talent-trends-2019-EMEA.pdf

How I Master My Calendar on Buffer’s Distributed Team

https://open.buffer.com/calendar/

Uber Has Been Quietly Assembling One of the Most Impressive Open Source Deep Learning Stacks in the Market

Friday Links

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 09:21:00 +0000

How Slack is Silently Killing Your Productivity https://www.userlike.com/en/amp/blog/slack-productivity

Goofonts https://goofonts.com/

Enroll in the new Advanced Protection Program in an instant https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/new-advanced-protection-program-account-security-instant/

Portfolio for Jira 3.0 and beyond https://www.atlassian.com/blog/portfolio-for-jira/portfolio-for-jira-3-and-beyond

“Up and to the right” with Data Studio https://www.blog.google/products/marketingplatform/analytics/up-and-to-the-right-with-data-studio/

Pros and Cons of Using structure.sql in Your Ruby on Rails Application https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/01/15/the-pros-and-cons-of-using-structure-sql-in-your-ruby-on-rails-application.html

My polyglot Advent of Code https://m.signalvnoise.com/my-polyglot-advent-of-code/

Engineering management: An Interview with Michael Lopp https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/btc-michael-lopp-interview-management

Why Cassettes Are The New 45s https://blog.discogs.com/en/cassettes-are-the-new-45s/

Floppy Sleeves https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/albums/72157682181421785

Google to phase out user-agent strings in Chrome https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/google-to-phase-out-user-agent-strings-in-chrome/

Friday Links (Post holidays podcast edition)

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 09:17:00 +0000

BeOS: The Alternate Universe’s Mac OS X https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/beos-the-alternate-universes-mac-os-x/

Outcome Over Output: Also Impact and Effort https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/outcome-over-output-also-impact-and-effort-8f9eb0ce0dbb

DoD Enterprise DevSecOps Initiative(Software Factory) https://software.af.mil/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/DoD-Enterprise-DevSecOps-Initiative-Keynote-v1.7.pdf

Why I’m putting Bra Theory on an indefinite hiatus http://bratheory.com/hiatus/

Twitter is probably not the right medium for explaining the intricacies of analyzing and refactoring crusty old FORTRAN. https://twitter.com/arclight/status/1208054147397894145

The C64 review – a captivatingly precise replica of the joys of 80s gaming https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/dec/19/the-c64-review-precise-replica-80s-gaming

Making instagram.com faster: Code size and execution optimizations (Part 4) https://instagram-engineering.com/making-instagram-com-faster-code-size-and-execution-optimizations-part-4-57668be796a8

Book Review: The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 12:45:00 +0000

The Phoenix Project

Someone recommended this to me and I got it for free on Kindle, so I thought I give it a go.

I kind of like the concept of a novelized version of a DevOps book.

I also liked the main characters and the general setup. It seemed a bit weird that a lot of best practices are completely unknown in the fictional company, but I guess this might also exist in the real world.

Christmas Friday Links

Fri, 20 Dec 2019 10:21:00 +0000

How to write Javascript in Rails 6 | Webpacker, Yarn and Sprockets https://blog.capsens.eu/how-to-write-javascript-in-rails-6-webpacker-yarn-and-sprockets-cdf990387463

Scaling Ruby Apps to 1000 Requests per Minute - A Beginner’s Guide https://www.speedshop.co/2015/07/29/scaling-ruby-apps-to-1000-rpm.html

Great Teams Break the “Rules” All the Time https://cutle.fish/blog/breaking-the-rules

Reviewing Pull Requests https://chelseatroy.com/2019/12/18/reviewing-pull-requests/

Programming Languages To Learn In 2020 https://dev.to/zaiste/programming-languages-to-learn-in-2020-to-boost-your-career-as-a-software-developer-56ll

The Skip-level 1-1 https://jwongworks.com/blog/2019/4/16/the-skip-level-1-1

Organizational Charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

Podcasts / YouTube

Remote Work with Philip Thomas https://pca.st/4zsvl5vw

Basic Income with Floyd Marinescu https://pca.st/b3crnyxu

Things https://pca.st/9jv9zw21

GitLab Engineering with Marin Jankovski https://pca.st/zw433gam

Technical Debt https://pca.st/tcer09vd

#139 – Pursuing a Mission While Bootstrapping to Millions with John O’Nolan of Ghost https://pca.st/mxapn3pc

Friday Links

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 10:14:00 +0000

RedoxOS: Real hardware breakthroughs, and focusing on rustc https://www.redox-os.org/news/focusing-on-rustc/

OOP Refactoring: from a god class to smaller objects https://blog.arkency.com/oop-refactoring-from-a-god-class-to-smaller-objects/

PHP 7.4.0 released https://lwn.net/Articles/805975/

A Distributed Meeting Primer https://randsinrepose.com/archives/a-distributed-meeting-primer/

The Evolution of Onboarding at Buffer: How We Welcome New Teammates https://open.buffer.com/onboarding/

Open-Sourcing Metaflow, a Human-Centric Framework for Data Science https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/open-sourcing-metaflow-a-human-centric-framework-for-data-science-fa72e04a5d9

Testing on the Toilet: Tests Too DRY? Make Them DAMP! https://testing.googleblog.com/2019/12/testing-on-toilet-tests-too-dry-make.html

RSA-240 Factored https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/12/rsa-240_factore.html

AWS has new tool for those leaky S3 buckets so, yeah, you might need to reconfigure a few things https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/03/aws_s3_buckets/

Friday Links

Fri, 29 Nov 2019 09:30:00 +0000

Notes on Building Evolutionary Architectures. https://lethain.com/building-evolutionary-architectures/

7 leadership lessons over 2.5 years https://m.signalvnoise.com/7-leadership-lessons-over-2-5-years/

Test Flakiness – Methods for identifying and dealing with flaky tests https://labs.spotify.com/2019/11/18/test-flakiness-methods-for-identifying-and-dealing-with-flaky-tests/

How we scaled our design system to unleash Skyscanner’s new brand https://medium.com/@SkyscannerEng/how-we-scaled-our-design-system-to-unleash-skyscanners-new-brand-845a1f501b0b

Officevibe Just Got A Makeover – And It’s Making Room for Your Teams https://www.officevibe.com/blog/officevibe-makeover-teams

How to Play Windows-only Games on Linux with Steam Play https://itsfoss.com/steam-play/

The Fallacy of needing a technical manager https://unwiredcouch.com/2019/11/19/technical-manager.html

Hey Google, play me the news https://www.blog.google/products/news/your-news-update/

Blade Runner Day https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/11/blade-runner-day/

Friday Links

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 13:22:00 +0000

Managing packages with GitHub Packages https://help.github.com/en/github/managing-packages-with-github-packages

Hey! Ho! Ten Years of Go!https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/11/hey-ho-ten-years-of-go.html

Announcing the Bytecode Alliance https://lwn.net/Articles/804648

How to Write Fast Code in Ruby on Rails https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/write-fast-code-ruby-rails

Launch: Basecamp Gets Personal https://m.signalvnoise.com/launch-basecamp-gets-personal/

Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q3 2019 https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q3-2019/

Static Typing in Ruby with a Side of Sorbet https://blog.heroku.com/static-typing-ruby-with-sorbet

Addressing Technical Debt https://thoughtbot.com/blog/addressing-technical-debt

Slack app in Python series https://lethain.com/creating-slack-app-python/

Scaling in the presence of errors—don’t ignore them https://programmingisterrible.com/post/188942142748/scaling-in-the-presence-of-errorsdont-ignore

Downsizing the office. Upsizing remote-first. https://wildbit.com/blog/2019/11/08/downsizing-the-office-upsizing-remote-first

AWS Begins Sunsetting RIs; Replaces Them With Something Much, Much Better https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-begins-sunsetting-ris-replaces-them-with-something-much-much-better/

Friday Links

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 08:53:00 +0000

Do This Now: 8 Ways to Focus your Product Team on Impact, Not Features https://amplitude.com/blog/focus-product-team-on-impact

To sell your car faster, take a side picture first! https://medium.com/letgo/if-you-want-to-sell-your-car-you-should-take-a-side-picture-first-1cfa80c0e45e

Journey to Product Teams (Infographic) https://amplitude.com/blog/journey-to-product-teams-infographic

Management in ten tweets https://medium.com/@marcprecipice/management-in-ten-tweets-5157dc4bdcad

Git v2.24.0 https://github.blog/2019-11-03-highlights-from-git-2-24/

Forecasting synthetic metrics. https://lethain.com/forecasting-synthetic-metrics/

How to Read Performance Metrics in AppSignal https://blog.appsignal.com/2019/11/05/how-to-read-appsignal-performance-metrics.html

Identifying buggy patches with machine learning https://lwn.net/Articles/803695/

Wil Wheaton: The Purge. http://wilwheaton.net/2019/11/the-purge/

Pack Your Bags – Systemd Is Taking You To A New Home https://hackaday.com/2019/10/16/pack-your-bags-systemd-is-taking-you-to-a-new-home/

Microsoft Japan tested a four-day work week and productivity jumped by 40% https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/04/microsoft-japan-four-day-work-week-productivity

Friday Links

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 09:21:00 +0000

Dark Web Site Taken Down without Breaking Encryption https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/10/dark_web_site_t.html

Cycling through all the streets in central London http://davis.vilums.me/all-the-streets/

How the Internet Archive is Digitizing LPs to Preserve Generations of Audio https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/10/how-the-internet-archive-is-digitizing-lps-to-preserve-generations-of-audio/

Organic Software Architecture https://dev.to/kmruiz/organic-software-architecture-3548

We Tried ‘Half-Day Fridays.’ Here’s How It Went. https://open.buffer.com/half-day-fridays/

Vint Cerf’s top moments from 50 years of the Internet https://www.blog.google/inside-google/googlers/vint-cerf-top-moments-50-years-internet/

Linus Torvalds: ‘I’m not a programmer anymore’ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-im-not-a-programmer-anymore/

Is Google’s new BERT technology another nail in traditional SEO’s coffin? https://econsultancy.com/googles-bert-algorithm-seo-dead/

Carbon Offsetting: What Is It, and Does It Even Work? https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/pa78d7/carbon-offsetting-what-is-it-and-does-it-even-work

Friday Links

Fri, 25 Oct 2019 07:58:00 +0000

Announcing our acquisition of Code Barrel, makers of Automation for Jira https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/welcome-code-barrel-automation-for-jira

Seniority for Software Engineers: a Tech Talk https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/seniority-tech-talk/

Letting Birds scooters fly free https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/53258.html

Client Consistency at Slack: Beyond Libslack https://slack.engineering/client-consistency-at-slack-beyond-libslack-c9cfbe778fb7

PostgreSQL Connection Pooling: Part 1 – Pros & Cons http://highscalability.com/blog/2019/10/18/postgresql-connection-pooling-part-1-pros-cons.html

Learnings from the journey to continuous deployment https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2019/learnings-from-the-journey-to-continuous-deployment

Do Software Developers Normally Code on Weekends? Work-life Balance and Overtime in the Tech Industry https://codeahoy.com/2019/10/19/do-software-developers-work-weekends-work-life-tech/

Towards a Culture of Teams https://agileoutloud.wordpress.com/2019/10/17/towards-a-culture-of-teams/

Skip level meetings: What they are, and exactly how to run them https://m.signalvnoise.com/skip-level-meetings-what-they-are-and-exactly-how-to-run-them/

Friday Links

Fri, 18 Oct 2019 08:39:00 +0000

Vulcain https://github.com/dunglas/vulcain Software Architecture is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design is Underrated https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-architecture-is-overrated/ How We Run Hack Week on a Remote Team https://open.buffer.com/hack-week-remote/ The 5 mistakes you’re likely making in your one-on-one meetings with direct reports https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-5-mistakes-youre-likely-making-in-your-one-on-one-meetings-with-direct-reports/ Debugging hidden memory leaks in Ruby https://samsaffron.com/archive/2019/10/08/debugging-unmanaged-and-hidden-memory-leaks-in-ruby Nobody cares about quality. https://lethain.com/nobody-cares-about-quality/ How to start blogging https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/10/14/how-to-start-blogging/ Perl 6 renamed to Raku https://lwn.net/Articles/802329/ Cracking the Passwords of Early Internet Pioneers https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/10/cracking_the_pa.html The lines of code that changed everything https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/10/the-lines-of-code-that-changed-everything/ Basecamp no longer requires Google for two-factor authentication https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-no-longer-requires-google-for-two-factor-authentication/ Launching JavaScript Error Tracking v1.0. https://blog.appsignal.com/2019/10/16/javascript-error-tracking-launch.html JavaScript Errors: An Exceptional History https://blog.appsignal.com/2019/10/17/javascript-errors-an-exceptional-history.html

Friday Links

Fri, 11 Oct 2019 15:34:00 +0000

Understanding Scheduling Behavior with SchedViz (Google Open Source Blog)

https://lwn.net/Articles/802022

BPF at Facebook (and beyond) https://lwn.net/Articles/801871

A forty year career. https://lethain.com/forty-year-career/

Announcing The Buffer Overflow Podcast https://overflow.buffer.com/2019/10/07/announcing-the-buffer-overflow-podcast/

The guide to workplace communication channels you didn’t know you needed https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/choosing-communication-channels-workplace

Questions to Ask a CEO to Ensure a Healthy Company Culture https://getlighthouse.com/blog/questions-to-ask-a-ceo-healthy-culture/

Timely: Google Posts H1 Tag Video After H1 SEO Controversy https://www.seroundtable.com/amp/google-posts-h1-tag-video-after-h1-seo-controversy-28325.html

Investigating the security of Lime scooters https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/53024.html

No More Mixed Messages About HTTPS https://security.googleblog.com/2019/10/no-more-mixed-messages-about-https_3.html

Podcasts & YouTube

The Toolbox Fallacy https://youtu.be/sz4YqwH_6D0

Friday Links

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 08:38:00 +0000

Developer Burnout: How Can a Manager Spot It and Stop It https://codingsans.com/blog/developer-burnout 3 command line games for learning Bash the fun way https://opensource.com/article/19/10/learn-bash-command-line-games

PostgreSQL 12 released https://lwn.net/Articles/801204/

The path of least resistance towards one backlog https://blog.odd-e.com/yilv/2019/10/the-path-of-least-resistance-towards-one-backlog.html

Keeping privacy and security simple, for you https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-privacy-and-security-simple-you/

To stay secure online, Password Checkup has your back https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/password-checkup/

Engineering Career Development at Etsy https://codeascraft.com/2019/10/02/engineering-career-development-at-etsy/

Don’t burn out, burn down: how we learned to sprint on shifting sands https://medium.com/@SkyscannerEng/dont-burn-out-burn-down-how-we-learned-to-sprint-on-shifting-sands-a67341c34fa8

‘We live for gravity biking’: deadly sport is way of life in Medellín https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/02/we-live-for-gravity-biking-deadly-sport-is-way-of-life-in-medellin

Friday Links

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 07:16:00 +0000

Moore’s Law graphed vs real CPUs & GPUs 1965 - 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uvUiq_jTLM

Fresher data in your site’s Search Performance report https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/search-performance-fresh-data.html

12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory — 3 Years Later https://amplitude.com/blog/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-factory-3-years-later

Atlassian commits to the fight against global climate change https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-commits-to-the-fight-against-global-climate-change

After Dark has been ported to Twitter https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/09/after-dark-has-been-ported-to-twitter/ https://twitter.com/dot_scr/

Coder deletes open source add-on for Chef in protest over ICE contract https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/coder-deletes-open-source-add-on-for-chef-in-protest-over-ice-contract/

Release for CentOS Linux 8 and CentOS Streams https://lwn.net/Articles/800455/

Friday Links

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 07:34:00 +0000

The big lie: What it’s like to ride illegally as a woman in Iran https://cyclingtips.com/2019/09/the-big-lie-what-its-like-to-ride-illegally-as-a-woman-in-iran/

The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmasters-magnus-carlsen-fabiano-caruana-lose-weight-playing-chess

Google Structured Data: Dataset https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/dataset

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF https://lwn.net/Articles/799375/

Raising Prices is Hard https://www.backblaze.com/blog/raising-prices-is-hard/

Tetris challenge: emergency services worldwide go flat-out in viral meme https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/18/tetris-challenge-emergency-services-world-wide-go-flat-out-in-viral-meme

Warhol Data Recovery http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/projects/warhol-data-recovery

Improving trust in the cloud with OpenStack and AMD SEV https://blog.adamspiers.org/2019/09/13/improving-trust-in-the-cloud-with-openstack-and-amd-sev/

GraphQL: Overlapping Fields Can Be Merged Fast https://tech.xing.com/graphql-overlapping-fields-can-be-merged-fast-ea6e92e0a01

70 Applications, 15 Teams, 9 Months: Lessons from the Guardian’s “All-In” Move to AW https://www.cbronline.com/news/guardian-aws-migration/

Friday Links

Fri, 13 Sep 2019 08:13:00 +0000

Google Engineering Practices Documentation https://google.github.io/eng-practices/

Want autonomous teams? Improve management! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/want-autonomous-teams-improve-management-gregor-hohpe/

The (Mostly) Complete History of Grafana UX https://grafana.com/blog/2019/09/03/the-mostly-complete-history-of-grafana-ux/

Rob’s Friday Links https://rjp.is/blogging/posts/2019/09/friday-links-06/

Enabling Developers and Organizations to Use Differential privacy https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/09/enabling-developers-and-organizations.html

AI Is Coming for Your Favorite Menial Tasks https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/artificial-intelligence-will-make-your-job-even-harder/597625/

Organizing team offsites. https://lethain.com/offsites/

Saying goodbye to the old Search Console https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/goodbye-old-search-console.html

Running GitHub on Rails 6.0 https://github.blog/2019-09-09-running-github-on-rails-6-0/

Answers to arguments against 100% coverage https://blog.ndepend.com/answers-to-arguments-against-100-coverage/

Here They Are: The World’s 10 Most Beautiful Offices of 2019 https://www.inc.com/graham-winfrey-kevin-j-ryan/worlds-coolest-offices-2019.html

Collaboration vs Increment? https://ronjeffries.com/articles/019-01ff/mmm-collaboration/

Friday Links Overload

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 07:57:00 +0000

A combination of holidays and everybody posting interesting stuff at the same time created a very long list. YouTube and podcast links are grouped at the bottom.

The usual disclaimer: links are included because I find them interesting, not necessarily because I fully agree with the content.

Topics are usually a mix of software engineering, management, security, urbanism and general nerd interest.

Understanding Agile with Complete Rate https://yiming.dev/clipping/2019/08/07/understanding-agile-with-complete-rate/

5 Ways Founders Wreck Their Company Culture (and How to Create a Great Company Culture Instead) https://getlighthouse.com/blog/great-company-culture/

Friday Links

Fri, 09 Aug 2019 08:04:00 +0000

Meet Yabeda: A Ruby instrumentation framework https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/meet-yabeda-modular-framework-for-instrumenting-ruby-applications

Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2019 https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/

Code as Craft: Understand the role of Style in e-commerce shopping https://codeascraft.com/2019/08/02/code-as-craft-understand-the-role-of-style-at-e-commerce-shopping/

How We Think About Time Off As a Global Team https://open.buffer.com/time-off-global-team/

Big Ball of Mud http://www.laputan.org/mud/

On Paper; Or: how not to look like a dick in meetings https://zef.me/on-paper-782b4c0f1078

California farmers are planting solar panels as water supplies dry up https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-agriculture-farmlands-solar-power-20190703-story.html

Building a First Team Mindset https://www.attack-gecko.net/2018/06/25/building-a-first-team-mindset/

Hosting a Paper Reading Group https://lethain.com/hosting-paper-reading-group/

Friday Links

Fri, 02 Aug 2019 08:32:00 +0000

GNOME and KDE to co-host the Linux App Summit in November https://lwn.net/Articles/795116/

What webmasters should know about Google’s “core updates” https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/08/core-updates.html

Disasterpiece Theater: Slack’s process for approachable Chaos Engineering https://slack.engineering/disasterpiece-theater-slacks-process-for-approachable-chaos-engineering-3434422afb54

Facebook Plans on Backdooring WhatsApp https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/facebook_plans_.html

Inspection without adaptation is pointless in Scrum https://medium.com/@ullizee/inspection-without-adaptation-is-pointless-in-scrum-492679711bf6

The Ethics of Web Performance https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2019-01-09-the-ethics-of-performance/

Square’s Growth Framework for Engineers and Engineering Managers https://developer.squareup.com/blog/squares-growth-framework-for-engineers-and-engineering-managers/

The Management Bit https://avivbenyosef.com/the-management-bit/

A new way to unify app and website measurement in Google Analytics https://www.blog.google/products/marketingplatform/analytics/new-way-unify-app-and-website-measurement-google-analytics/

Work/life/Skyscanner: Stephen Hailey, full stack engineer https://medium.com/@SkyscannerEng/work-life-skyscanner-stephen-hailey-full-stack-engineer-21d292c5e013

Friday Links

Fri, 26 Jul 2019 08:09:00 +0000

Feature toggle life time – best practiceshttps://www.unleash-hosted.com/articles/feature-toggle-life-time-best-practices

How to be an effective leader, according to Googlehttps://www.atlassian.com/blog/leadership/qualities-of-an-effective-leader

Slacking on securityhttps://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/07/slacking-on-security/

New information about Slack’s 2015 security incidenthttps://slackhq.com/new-information-2015-incident

Taming the ‘Fear of Missing Out’: How We Create a Retreat-From-Home Experience For Those Who Can’t Make Ithttps://open.buffer.com/retreat-from-home/

When a rewrite isn’t: rebuilding Slack on the desktop https://slack.engineering/rebuilding-slack-on-the-desktop-308d6fe94ae4

10x Managers Supermanagers https://www.fellow.app/blog/2019/10x-managers-supermanagers/

Spidey-Sense https://randsinrepose.com/archives/spidey-sense/

Is Trump Still President (As A Service) https://istrumpstillpresident.io/

Google for Nigeria: making our products more helpful to more people https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-africa/google-nigeria/

Friday Links

Fri, 19 Jul 2019 07:53:00 +0000

5 Steps to Become More Comfortable Using Data https://amplitude.com/blog/5-steps-to-become-more-comfortable-using-data

Managing technical debt https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/10/05/managing-technical-debt/

What is technical debt? https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/04/what-is-technical-debt/

It can’t be left to Europe’s cities to clean up noxious air https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/12/europe-toxic-air-madrid?CMP=share_btn_tw

Working Fast and Slow https://hackernoon.com/working-fast-and-slow-efc3c48dae31

Am I micromanaging my team? https://m.signalvnoise.com/am-i-micromanaging-my-team/

How we keep Search relevant and useful https://www.blog.google/products/search/how-we-keep-google-search-relevant-and-useful/

JavaScript Iterators and Iterables https://blog.appsignal.com/2019/07/16/javascript-iterators-and-iterables.html

Who’s afraid of a big bad optimizing compiler? https://lwn.net/Articles/793253/

What is Silverblue? https://fedoramagazine.org/what-is-silverblue/

Two Years Ago, We Started Building a Product that Now Earns Over $500,000. Here’s How We Did it. https://open.buffer.com/buffer-analyze-journey/

Friday Links

Fri, 12 Jul 2019 07:46:00 +0000

It’s high time to rewrite the hiring script https://m.signalvnoise.com/its-high-time-to-rewrite-the-hiring-script/

Drowning in a Fountain of Knowledge https://avivbenyosef.com/drowning-in-a-fountain-of-knowledge/

PM “Responsibilities” ? https://medium.com/@johnpcutler/pm-responsibilities-75c4ac9dbb95

Applied Cryptography is Banned in Oregon Prisons https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/07/applied_cryptog_2.html

The hardest leadership advice to follow https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-hardest-leadership-advice-to-follow/

Expediting Data Fixes and Data Migrations https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2019/expediting-data-fixes-migrations

Bug bounties and NDAs are an option, not the standard https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52432.html

RFC-115 Some Network Information Center Policies on Handling Documents https://write.as/365-rfcs/rfc-115

Announcing Docsy: A Website Theme for Technical Documentation https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/07/announcing-docsy-website-theme-for.html

Announcing “Shape Up”, a deep dive into how we work https://m.signalvnoise.com/announcing-shape-up-a-deep-dive-into-how-we-work/

Friday Links

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 08:06:00 +0000

GOTCHA: Taking phishing to a whole new level https://medium.com/intigriti/gotcha-taking-phishing-to-a-whole-new-level-72eda9e30bef

Which smart bulbs should you buy (from a security perspective) https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/51910.html

FreeDOS turns 25 years old: An origin story https://opensource.com/article/19/6/freedos-anniversary

How to speak Silicon Valley: 53 essential tech-bro terms explaine https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/26/how-to-speak-silicon-valley-decoding-tech-bros-from-microdosing-to-privacy

Creating a career ladder for engineers - Marco Rogers https://youtu.be/jA1Q94d2z10

Formalizing the Robots Exclusion Protocol Specification https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/07/rep-id.html

Google’s robots.txt parser is now open source https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/07/repp-oss.html

A note on unsupported rules in robots.txt https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-in-robotstxt.html

Get to insights quicker with Data Studio’s new home page https://www.blog.google/products/marketingplatform/analytics/get-insights-quicker-data-studios-new-home-page/

Friday Links

Fri, 28 Jun 2019 07:45:00 +0000

Integrating UX Design into a Continuous-Delivery Environment https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2019/06/integrating-ux-design-into-a-continuous-delivery-environment.php

How 5 minutes of preparation can finally make standup meetings productive https://codeclimate.com/blog/productive-standup-meeting/

Open-sourcing Sorbet: a fast, powerful type checker for Ruby https://sorbet.org/blog/2019/06/20/open-sourcing-sorbet

Here’s one great way to use your tech skills https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/William-Wu-changed-his-career-to-help-the-poor

The Quantified Value of 1:1 Meetings and How to Make the Most of Them https://getlighthouse.com/blog/11-meetings-value-make-most/

Fake News and Pandemics https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/06/fake_news_and_p.html

World Population Growth https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth

What does negative harmony sound like? Here’s the answer! https://blog.adamspiers.org/2019/06/23/negative-harmony-app-shimanator/

Some career advice. https://lethain.com/career-advice/

Our Curated Angular Reference Guide https://marsbased.com/blog/2019/06/24/angular-resources-documentation-tutorials

Friday Links

Fri, 21 Jun 2019 08:12:00 +0000

Technical Debt: Poor System Understanding While Time Constrained https://medium.com/dm03514-tech-blog/technical-debt-poor-system-understanding-while-time-constrained-66385d110498

Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt. https://lethain.com/migrations/

Comparing the Same Project in Rust, Haskell, C++, Python, Scala and OCaml http://thume.ca/2019/04/29/comparing-compilers-in-rust-haskell-c-and-python/

The only good use for Smart Quotes, ever https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/06/the-only-good-use-for-smart-quotes-ever/

In praise of SWARMing https://dannorth.net/2018/01/26/in-praise-of-swarming/

GitHub acquires Pull Panda—a better way to collaborate on code reviews https://github.blog/2019-06-17-github-acquires-pull-panda/

Delusions in Tech https://medium.com/@bdcroteau/delusions-in-tech-87f6571ced89

Comparing the Three Angular View Encapsulation Methods https://marsbased.com/blog/2019/06/17/angular-view-encapsulation/

Continual improvement at scale https://medium.com/sagefuturemakers/second-article-4ff562dd32af

The ideal DevOps team structure https://about.gitlab.com/2019/06/12/devops-team-structure/

Friday Links

Fri, 14 Jun 2019 08:04:00 +0000

Straight to Prod https://medium.com/better-programming/straight-to-prod-ca12205841fc?sk=3a39b24b0977532926e79d00c3306042

iOS Shortcut for Recording the Police https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/06/ios_shortcut_fo.html

Introducing TensorNetwork, an Open Source Library for Efficient Tensor Calculations https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/06/introducing-tensornetwork-open-source.html

Number of backlogs and multi-learning: 1) see the backlogs https://blog.odd-e.com/yilv/2019/06/number-of-backlogs-and-multi-learning-1-see-the-backlogs.html

Number of backlogs and multi-learning: 2) functional team and component team https://blog.odd-e.com/yilv/2019/06/number-of-backlogs-and-multi-learning-2-functional-team-and-component-team.html

Why black metal is great music for programming (but doom metal isn’t) https://www.atlassian.com/blog/technology/metal-music-for-programming

The Myth of the Top Management Team https://hbr.org/1997/11/the-myth-of-the-top-management-team

Should We Have Two Leadership Teams? http://www.onhumanenterprise.com/two-leadership-teams

Introducing Matrix 1.0 and the Matrix.org Foundation https://lwn.net/Articles/790910

Friday Links

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 08:02:00 +0000

These Aren’t Your Ordinary Data Centers https://www.backblaze.com/blog/these-arent-your-ordinary-data-centers/

France Bans Judge Analytics, 5 Years In Prison For Rule Breakers https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2019/06/04/france-bans-judge-analytics-5-years-in-prison-for-rule-breakers/

Building Culture: Naming, Symbols, Rituals, Stories https://medium.com/@joedunnSFCoach/building-culture-naming-symbols-rituals-stories-471f2398a3b7?sk=37b280820632d1f2419dfa3f91c74980

Taking Jira Software Cloud to Mac https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/jira-cloud-app-for-mac

The programmer as decision maker https://blog.ploeh.dk/2019/03/18/the-programmer-as-decision-maker/

My First 2 Months of Practicing the Buffer Values https://open.buffer.com/first-months-reflection/

Friday Deploy Freezes Are Exactly Like Murdering Puppies https://charity.wtf/2019/05/01/friday-deploy-freezes-are-exactly-like-murdering-puppies/

Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/

Tokyo Mechanical Keyboard Meetup Vol. 6 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/06/tokyo-mechanical-keyboard-meetup-vol-6/

Software Community Growth Through “first-timers-only” Issues https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/06/software-community-growth-through-first.html

Friday Links

Fri, 31 May 2019 07:25:00 +0000

GitHub: Configuring automated security fixes https://help.github.com/en/articles/configuring-automated-security-fixes

Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost? https://martinfowler.com/articles/is-quality-worth-cost.html

New Data Studio Developer Tools Make Building Connectors and Viz Easier https://www.blog.google/products/marketingplatform/analytics/new-data-studio-developer-tools-make-building-connectors-and-viz-easier/

Not All Developing Nations Are Created Equal https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-28/not-all-developing-nations-are-created-equal

The 6 Lessons We’ve Learned About Product Marketing at a Startup https://open.buffer.com/product-marketing/

Why Don’t They Trust Us? https://hackernoon.com/why-dont-they-trust-us-9d942338d848

Wil Wheaton: “I’m full.” http://wilwheaton.net/2019/05/im-full/

Failure KPIs https://theagiledirector.com/article/2015/12/31/failure-kpis/

How to build a company culture that will last https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/what-is-company-culture

Quick note: Friday wins and a case study in ritual design https://kellanem.com/notes/friday-wins

Frdiay Links

Fri, 24 May 2019 07:52:00 +0000

GitHub launches Sponsors, lets you pay your favorite open-source contributors https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/23/github-launches-sponsors-lets-you-pay-your-favorite-open-source-contributors/amp/

Tag Manager: Introducing Custom Templates https://www.blog.google/products/marketingplatform/analytics/tag-manager-introducing-custom-templates/

3 reasons you fail at communication in the workplace and how to improve https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/how-to-improve-communication-in-the-workplace

Improving a session cookie https://rjp.is/blogging/posts/session-cookies/

Structured data and Google https://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2019/structured-data-and-google/

Let’s talk about procrastination https://wildbit.com/blog/2019/05/21/lets-talk-about-procrastination

Kent Beck: SB Changes https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/bs-changes-e574bc396aaa

Fowler: TechnicalDebt https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html

4 reasons your marketing team needs a new approach https://www.atlassian.com/blog/confluence/ultimate-guide-for-marketing-teams

Uber, Lyft drivers manipulate fares at Reagan National causing artificial price surges https://wjla.com/news/local/uber-and-lyft-drivers-fares-at-reagan-national

5 Ways Your Company May Be Misusing OKRs https://medium.com/@itamargilad/5-ways-your-company-may-be-misusing-okrs-3d5cdb22aa4e

Friday Links

Fri, 17 May 2019 08:00:00 +0000

The Metrics of Backpacks https://www.artpractical.com/column/the-metrics-of-backpacks/

Stop Playing Tetris (With Teams, Sprints, Projects, and Individuals) https://medium.com/@johnpcutler/stop-playing-tetris-with-teams-sprints-projects-and-individuals-b1e4ed6d8bc0

Quit Planning Ahead and Keeping People Busy https://medium.com/@johnpcutler/quit-planning-ahead-and-keeping-people-busy-937e74d5a1fb

The Empty Promise of Data Moats https://a16z.com/2019/05/09/data-network-effects-moats/

Object Detection with 10 lines of code https://towardsdatascience.com/object-detection-with-10-lines-of-code-d6cb4d86f606

How to Move Beyond a Monolithic Data Lake to a Distributed Data Mesh https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-monolith-to-mesh.html

The Seven Areas Of Software Management https://medium.com/@inowland/the-seven-areas-of-software-management-be89d213ea7

How To Grow as An Engineering Manager in 7 Steps https://medium.com/@inowland/how-to-grow-as-an-engineering-manager-in-7-steps-a1bf4dcf5e78

The importance of teamwork (as proven by science) https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/the-importance-of-teamwork

Friday Links

Fri, 10 May 2019 09:34:00 +0000

The agile guide to winning at team development https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/navigate-tuckman-stages-of-team-development

Inside the Team at Facebook That Dealt with the Christchurch Shooting https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/inside-the-team-at-facebook-that-dealt-with-the-christchurch-shooting

A Conspiracy To Kill IE6 http://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Guardian breaks even helped by success of supporter strategy https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/may/01/guardian-breaks-even-helped-by-success-of-supporter-strategy

Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote https://stripe.com/fr/blog/remote-hub

Cocktail Robotics Grand Challenge with Jim Sweeney 7/15/2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ4qKkav0ns

Windows 10 will soon ship with a full, open source, GPLed Linux kernel https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/windows-10-will-soon-ship-with-a-full-open-source-gpled-linux-kernel/

The Atlas of Inequality https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/the-atlas-of-inequality/overview/

The Power of the Pause: Introducing Sabbaticals at Buffer https://open.buffer.com/sabbaticals/

Friday Links

Fri, 03 May 2019 07:52:00 +0000

Why Did a YouTube Bot Make an Unwatched Video of Our Blog Post? https://hmmdaily.com/2019/04/25/why-did-a-youtube-bot-make-an-unwatched-video-of-our-blog-post/

Facebook’s highly-accurate Africa population maps are available for free download https://geoawesomeness.com/facebooks-highly-accurate-africa-population-maps-are-available-for-free-download/

Ruby’s Hidden Gems: Delegator and Forwardable https://blog.appsignal.com/2019/04/30/ruby-magic-hidden-gems-delegator-forwardable.html

Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q1 2019 https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2019/

Engineering a Studio Quality Experience With High-Quality Audio at Netflix https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/engineering-a-studio-quality-experience-with-high-quality-audio-at-netflix-eaa0b6145f32

Introducing auto-delete controls for your Location History and activity data https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/automatically-delete-data/

How the Best Tech Companies Run Growth Experiments https://labs.openviewpartners.com/how-the-best-tech-companies-run-growth-experiments/#.XMoTfXzRaf0

The 5 Whys of Organizational Design. https://kellanem.com/notes/whys-of-organizational-design

Co-Responsibility Is No Responsibility https://avivbenyosef.com/co-responsibility-is-no-responsibility/

Friday Links

Fri, 26 Apr 2019 07:23:00 +0000

Google: Better protection against Man in the Middle phishing attacks https://security.googleblog.com/2019/04/better-protection-against-man-in-middle.html

Welcome to the world’s simplest agile maturity model https://www.equalexperts.com/blog/our-thinking/welcome-to-the-worlds-simplest-agile-maturity-model/

Making the Most of Retrium with David Horowitz https://blog.retrium.com/making-the-most-of-retrium-webinar

A year with Spectre: a V8 perspective https://v8.dev/blog/spectre

Kafka and Ruby, a Sidekiq lovestory https://blog.appsignal.com/2019/04/23/kafka-sidekiq-ruby.html

Farmer vs. sand: Spain’s fight against desertification https://www.politico.eu/article/farmer-sand-spain-fight-against-desertification-soil-degradation/

Google: Steps toward a more sustainable future https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/steps-toward-more-sustainable-future/

The simplest prioritization tip money can buy https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/simple-prioritization-technique

Iranian Cyberespionage Tools Leaked Online https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/04/iranian_cyber-e.html

Core Memory https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/04/core-memory/

Anti-Management? No, Different Management https://ronjeffries.com/articles/019-01ff/management/

Friday Links

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 07:38:00 +0000

Self-made superheroes and street naps: Manila – a cartoon https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/apr/12/self-made-superheroes-and-street-naps-manila-a-cartoon-marius-black

Technical Skills https://ronjeffries.com/articles/019-01ff/tech-skills/

Software Engineeringat Google https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1702/1702.01715.pdf

Research: Why Managers Ignore Employees’ Ideas https://hbr.org/2019/04/research-why-managers-ignore-employees-ideas

The Agile Crisis — a Primer https://medium.com/@wischweh/the-agile-crisis-2016-9fb1c2f52af5

The tax you are paying for using Scrum https://medium.com/@aevitas/the-tax-you-are-paying-for-using-scrum-50f12298b422

Google makes the power of BigQuery available in Sheets https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/10/google-makes-the-power-of-bigquery-available-in-sheets/

The 9 mistakes you don’t know you’re making as a new manager https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-9-mistakes-you-dont-know-youre-making-as-a-new-manager/

Infocom https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/04/infocom/

Zork Text https://zork.glitch.me/

How To Grow as An Engineering Manager in 7 Steps https://medium.com/@inowland/how-to-grow-as-an-engineering-manager-in-7-steps-a1bf4dcf5e78

Rage Against the Codebase: Programmers and Negativity https://medium.com/@way/rage-against-the-codebase-programmers-and-negativity-d7d6b968e5f3

Friday Links

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 07:41:00 +0000

From bare-metal to Kubernetes http://highscalability.com/blog/2019/4/8/from-bare-metal-to-kubernetes.html

Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click Tracking Privacy Risk https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/major-browsers-to-prevent-disabling-of-click-tracking-privacy-risk/

To innovate, first deprecate. https://lethain.com/innovate-deprecate/

Magnitudes of exploration. https://lethain.com/magnitudes-of-exploration/

Why Setting Ambitious Goals Backfires https://wistia.com/learn/culture/why-setting-ambitious-goals-backfires

Having it both ways: Larry Wall, Perl and the technology and culture of the early web https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24701475.2018.1495810

trailblazer http://trailblazer.to/

The 70-20-10 Rule for Innovation https://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2018/09/20/the-70-20-10-rule-for-innovation/

The new and improved Jira Software Cloud and GitHub integration https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/github-for-jira

Developers love Python and TypeScript, get paid for Clojure, and aren’t using blockchain https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/developers-love-python-and-typescript-get-paid-for-clojure-and-arent-using-blockchain/

Friday Links

Fri, 05 Apr 2019 07:46:00 +0000

The Programming Language Conundrum http://evrl.com/programming/2019/03/28/the-language-conundrum.html

Compile-time Dependency Injection With Go Cloud’s Wire https://blog.golang.org/wire

Software Roles and Titles https://medium.com/javascript-scene/software-roles-and-titles-e3f0b69c410c

Ruby Object Mapper is an open-source persistence and mapping toolkit for Ruby built for speed and simplicity. https://rom-rb.org/

dry-rb is a collection of next-generation Ruby libraries https://dry-rb.org/

Why I stuck with Windows for 6 years while developing Discourse https://samsaffron.com/archive/2019/03/31/why-i-stuck-with-windows-for-6-years-while-developing-discourse

Technical Debt? Probably not. https://ronjeffries.com/articles/019-01ff/tech-debt/

Our Latest Pay Analysis: Examining Buffer’s Gender Pay Gap in 2019 https://open.buffer.com/gender-pay-gap-2019/

AppSignal: Memory Magic Dashboard https://blog.appsignal.com/2019/03/29/memory-magic-dashboard.html

Friday Links

Fri, 29 Mar 2019 08:46:00 +0000

A new app to map and monitor the world’s freshwater supply https://www.blog.google/products/earth/new-app-map-and-monitor-worlds-freshwater-supply/

How to create the work schedule of your dreams https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/compressed-work-week-how-to

Building Spotify’s New Web Player https://labs.spotify.com/2019/03/25/building-spotifys-new-web-player/

Mobile Jazz: Creativity Without Borders - A New Vision For Mobile Working https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook

New data tools from the Google News Initiative, built for publishers https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/new-data-tools-google-news-initiative-built-publishers/

Introducing Magic Dashboards https://blog.appsignal.com/2019/03/27/magic-dashboards.html

Programmers Who Don’t Understand Security Are Poor at Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/03/programmers_who.html

Take action and stay up-to-date with dynamic email in Gmail https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/take-action-and-stay-up-to-date-with-dynamic-email-in-gmail/

Friday Links

Fri, 22 Mar 2019 08:26:00 +0000

Let’s try dwm — dynamic window manger https://fedoramagazine.org/lets-try-dwm-dynamic-window-manger/

MySpace lost all music uploaded from 2003 to 2015 https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/b2381s/myspace_lost_all_music_uploaded_from_2003_to_2015/

Year 1 of GDPR: Over 200,000 cases reported, firms fined €56 meeelli… Oh, that’s mostly Google https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/03/14/more_than_200000_gdpr_cases_in_the_first_year_55m_in_fines/

AppSignal: Revamped dashboards! https://blog.appsignal.com/2019/03/21/revamped-dashboards.html

The next chapter for GDPR compliance https://www.atlassian.com/blog/platform/the-next-chapter-for-gdpr-compliance

International Docking Standard dot com https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/03/international-docking-standard-dot-com/

A scary side of ActiveRecord’s find https://blog.arkency.com/a-scary-side-of-activerecords-find/

Great minds don’t always think alike. Or, how to build a culture of respectful dissent https://www.atlassian.com/blog/leadership/respectful-dissent

Friday Links

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 08:49:00 +0000

Announcing Bundler 2.0 https://bundler.io/blog/2019/01/03/announcing-bundler-2.html

Incremental Development https://ronjeffries.com/articles/019-01ff/incremental/

Supporting people with disabilities: Be My Eyes and phone support now available https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/accessibility/supporting-people-disabilities-be-my-eyes-and-phone-support-now-available/

How cognitive biases influence software development https://www.atlassian.com/blog/add-ons/how-cognitive-biases-influence-software-development

Judging Facebook’s Privacy Shift https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/03/judging_faceboo.html

Barcelona From Above https://www.behance.net/gallery/74468471/BARCELONA-FROM-ABOVE

Basecamp outage: When it rains, it pours https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-outage-when-it-rains-it-pours/

How much would you pay for Apple News? https://medium.com/enrique-dans/how-much-would-you-pay-for-apple-news-ce8d46949527

String of British firms switch over to four-day working week https://theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/12/string-of-british-firms-switch-over-to-four-day-working-week

Can you describe what I’d need to do to buy a $50 book? https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1103903715046486016 https://twitter.com/redman/status/1105479002808967169

New – Open Distro for Elasticsearch https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/

Friday Links

Fri, 08 Mar 2019 09:53:00 +0000

How to evolve an engineering organization. https://lethain.com/how-to-evolve-eng-org/

How is software developed at Amazon? http://highscalability.com/blog/2019/3/4/how-is-software-developed-at-amazon.html

What happened to OpenStack? https://aeva.online/2019/03/what-happened-to-openstack/

Google: Disclosing vulnerabilities to protect users across platforms https://security.googleblog.com/2019/03/disclosing-vulnerabilities-to-protect.html

calc.exe is now open source; there’s surprising depth in its ancient code https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/03/calc-exe-is-now-open-source-theres-surprising-depth-in-its-ancient-code/

2019 Database Trends – SQL vs. NoSQL, Top Databases, Single vs. Multiple Database Use http://highscalability.com/blog/2019/3/6/2019-database-trends-sql-vs-nosql-top-databases-single-vs-mu.html

Introducing a new JavaScript SEO video series https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/03/introducing-new-javascript-seo-video.html

Standalone AppSignal Agent installation https://docs.appsignal.com/standalone-agent/installation.html

StatsD in Standalone AppSignal Agent https://docs.appsignal.com/standalone-agent/statsd.html

prince.gif https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/03/prince-gif/

Using Data GIF Maker to compare data and tell stories https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/using-data-gif-maker-compare-data-and-tell-stories/

Friday Links

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 09:06:00 +0000

What is Scrum? https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-scrum

Monitoring MongoDB Replicaset Lag with AppSignal https://blog.appsignal.com/2019/02/12/replica-set-lag-monitoring-with-appsignal.html

Hygiene Factors for Software Development http://www.davefarley.net/?p=272

Why limiting work-in-progress works. https://lethain.com/limiting-wip/

The future of software development is here https://www.atlassian.com/software-development/practices

An Inside Look at the Backblaze Storage Pod Museum https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-storage-pod-museum/

On the Security of Password Managers https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/on_the_security_1.html

Paying the predictability tax. https://lethain.com/predictability-tax/

Valuing already-solved problems. https://lethain.com/no-value/

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 22nd, 2019 http://highscalability.com/blog/2019/2/22/stuff-the-internet-says-on-scalability-for-february-22nd-201.html

Winning Systems & Security Practitioners 7. Attack Surface Reduction https://blog.eutopian.io/winning-systems--security-practitioners-7.-attack-surface-reduction/

Zeitwerk integration in Rails 6 (Beta 2) https://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2019/2/22/zeitwerk-integration-in-rails-6-beta-2/

Fosdem 2019

Fri, 08 Feb 2019 09:50:00 +0000

This year I managed for the first time to attend Fosdem in Brussels. Since I started to be involved in open source software I always wanted to go, but somehow something else always came up. This time I made an early effort to book my vacation days, hotel and flight. I stayed at the Bedford Hotel & Congress Center, which was the worst part of the whole trip. Just avoid it.

Friday Links

Fri, 08 Feb 2019 08:56:00 +0000

Keep your dependencies secure and up-to-date with GitHub and Dependabo https://github.blog/2019-01-31-keep-your-dependencies-secure-and-up-to-date-with-github-and-dependabot/

Retiring from ‘sad’ on twitter https://brokenco.de/2019/01/01/retiring-from-sadness.html

The right amount of perfect https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-right-amount-of-perfect/

Avoiding the Unintended Consequences of Casual Feedback https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140602024642-22330283-avoiding-the-unintended-consequences-of-casual-feedback/

Executing a Sunset https://codeascraft.com/2019/02/01/executing-a-sunset/

Snopes quits Facebook’s factchecking program amid questions over its impact https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/01/snopes-facebook-factchecking-program-false-news

It’s 2019, and a PNG file can pwn your Android smartphone or tablet: Patch me if you can https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/02/07/android_january_patches/

Consolidating your website traffic on canonical URLs https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/02/consolidating-your-website-traffic-on.html

Major Zcash Vulnerability Fixed https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/major_zcash_vul.html

XING Kubernetes components published as Open Source https://tech.xing.com/xing-kubernetes-components-published-as-open-source-368829289c96

Nearly Friday Links

Thu, 31 Jan 2019 09:33:00 +0000

Article review: “The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures” https://paulmck.livejournal.com/52490.html https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-hard-truth-about-innovative-cultures

Kickoffs! https://m.signalvnoise.com/kickoffs/

Making Gmail on mobile better for you https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/making-gmail-on-mobile-better-for-you/

Protect your work life balance – take a real sick day https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/take-real-sick-days-work-life-balance

Microsoft decides Internet Explorer 10 has had its fun: Termination set for January 2020 https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/01/29/microsoft_internet_explorer_10/

On Being A Principal Engineer https://blog.dbsmasher.com/2019/01/28/on-being-a-principal-engineer.html

Growing with your company’s complexity. https://lethain.com/growing-with-your-company/

An update on our work to prevent abuse ahead of the EU elections https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/update-our-work-prevent-abuse-ahead-eu-elections/

An instrumental intro to GraphQL with Ruby https://blog.appsignal.com/2019/01/29/graphql.html

Friday Links

Fri, 25 Jan 2019 08:36:00 +0000

Metrics for the unmeasurable. https://lethain.com/metrics-for-the-unmeasurable/

How to Get Buy in at Work: a Step by Step Guide https://getlighthouse.com/blog/get-buy-in-at-work-how-to/

Putting on some wait https://m.signalvnoise.com/putting-on-some-wait/

Rails 6.0.0 beta1: Action Mailbox, Action Text, Multiple DBs, Parallel Testing, Webpacker by default https://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2019/1/18/Rails-6-0-Action-Mailbox-Action-Text-Multiple-DBs-Parallel-Testing/

Schneier: Evaluating the GCHQ Exceptional Access Proposal https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/01/evaluating_the_.html

10 Ways to Build More Value Into Your Product https://productcoalition.com/how-your-customers-think-of-product-value-51d80f78305f

Work From Home – in Vermont! https://oduinn.com/2019/01/21/work-from-home-in-vermont/

Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2018 https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2018/

Why are companies scared to hire “junior” people? https://uxplanet.org/why-are-companies-scared-to-hire-junior-people-676a3463e5b3

Friday Links

Fri, 18 Jan 2019 08:54:00 +0000

From Vision to Values: The Importance of Defining Your Core https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20121029044359-22330283-to-manage-hyper-growth-get-your-launch-trajectory-right/

WebMSX, or simply WMSX, is a new cross platform MSX emulator designed for the Web. https://webmsx.org/

Dawn of the Second Epoch https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/01/dawn-of-the-second-epoch/

Approaching the kernel year-2038 end game https://lwn.net/Articles/776435/rss

IKEA has an ingenious plan to dominate the smart home market https://www.wired.co.uk/article/why-ikeas-perfectly-positioned-to-own-the-smart-home

The State of Meetings 2019 https://en.blog.doodle.com/state-of-meetings-2019/

Field notes: London, England https://devonzuegel.com/post/field-notes-london-england

Jack Dorsey Has No Clue What He Wants https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jack-dorsey-twitter-interview_us_5c3e2601e4b01c93e00e2a00?guccounter=1

Google raises G Suite prices across the world https://www.itproportal.com/news/google-raises-g-suite-prices-across-the-world/

Friday Links

Fri, 11 Jan 2019 09:31:00 +0000

Timeline for the release of Rails 6.0 https://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2018/12/20/timeline-for-the-release-of-Rails-6-0/

To stop terror content online, tech companies need to work together https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/stop-terror-content-online-tech-companies-need-work-together/

Thank You For Smoking https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/12/thank-you-for-smoking/

What Is Glitter? A strange journey to the glitter factory. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/style/glitter-factory.html

How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html

The Firecracker virtual machine monitor https://lwn.net/Articles/775736

So, You Want to be an Engineering Manager https://zef.me/so-you-want-to-be-an-engineering-manager-bcddaf302938

365 IETF RFCs: a 50th anniversary dive https://write.as/365-rfcs/365-ietf-rfcs-a-50th-anniversary-dive

Some delightful developer experiences in 2019. https://lethain.com/examples-delightful-developer-experiences/

Holiday Friday Links

Fri, 21 Dec 2018 09:01:00 +0000

500 Atlassians worked remotely for a week – here’s what we learned https://www.atlassian.com/bloginside-atlassian/working-from-home-tips

Ultimate Hacking Keyboard http://xahlee.info/kbd/ultimate_hacking_keyboard.html

On a Scale of 1-10: Why Tracking Your Team’s Satisfaction Matters https://open.buffer.com/measuring-employee-satisfaction/

The Silver Bullet Romantic https://zef.me/the-silver-bullet-romantic-8b6278137f3d

Getting started with the AWS Cloud Development Kit for Amazon ECS https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/getting-started-with-the-aws-cloud-development-kit-for-amazon-ecs/

The practical value of semantic HTML https://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2018/the-practical-value-of-semantic-html/

AppSignal: Ruby gem 2.8: Container memory & JRuby on Alpine Linux support https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/12/20/ruby-gem-2-8.html

Introducing the Data Studio Community Visualizations Developer Preview https://www.blog.google/products/marketingplatform/analytics/introducing-data-studio-community-visualizations-developer-preview/

A “First Step” towards criminal justice reform https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/first-step-towards-criminal-justice-reform/

Friday Links

Fri, 14 Dec 2018 11:51:00 +0000

From zero to a million users: how to quickly grow a successful tech team https://medium.com/@albertobeta/from-zero-to-a-million-users-how-to-quickly-grow-a-successful-tech-team-6ea8464437c2

Expediting changes to Google+ https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/expediting-changes-google-plus/

JWZ: Pete Shelley, screensaver and demoscene pioneer https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/12/pete-shelley-screensaver-and-demoscene-pioneer/

Reducing gender bias in Google Translate https://www.blog.google/products/translate/reducing-gender-bias-google-translate/

Our learnings from adopting GraphQL https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/our-learnings-from-adopting-graphql-f099de39ae5f

The latest on Messages, Allo, Duo and Hangouts https://www.blog.google/products/messages/latest-messages-allo-duo-and-hangouts/

Make sure Google can see lazy-loaded content https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/lazy-loading

How to Surface Open Source Copyright Notices and License Texts in a Phone App https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFjouycdkFI

Imagining new ways to learn Morse code’s dots and dashes https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/accessibility/imagining-new-ways-learn-morse-codes-dots-and-dashes/

Friday Links (AWS Edition)

Fri, 30 Nov 2018 08:46:00 +0000

Using Machine Learning to Create Fake Fingerprints https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/using_machine_l.html

Rails 4.2.11, 5.0.7.1, 5.1.6.1 and 5.2.1.1 have been released! https://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2018/11/27/Rails-4-2-5-0-5-1-5-2-have-been-released/

Tidal 1.0.0 refactor https://slab.org/tidal-1-0-0-refactor/

decidim/decidim https://youtu.be/f6JMgJAQ2tc https://github.com/decidim/decidim

Perceived Barriers to Trunk Based Development http://www.davefarley.net/?p=269

Stack Overflow: How We Do Monitoring - 2018 Edition https://nickcraver.com/blog/2018/11/29/stack-overflow-how-we-do-monitoring/

Go 2, here we come! https://blog.golang.org/go2-here-we-come

Fully Automated Continuous Deployment on Android with Bitrise https://overflow.buffer.com/2018/11/29/fully-automated-continuous-deployment-on-android-with-bitrise/

event-stream, npm, and trust https://lwn.net/Articles/773121/

AWS

AWS Launches, Previews, and Pre-Announcements at re:Invent 2018 – Andy Jassy Keynote https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-previews-and-pre-announcements-at-reinvent-2018-andy-jassy-keynote/

New – Amazon DynamoDB Transactions https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-dynamodb-transactions/

Friday Links

Fri, 23 Nov 2018 09:16:00 +0000

Stripe’s Will Larson on Designing a Performance Management System from Scratch https://blog.gitprime.com/designing-performance-management-systems/

Have tech perks gone too far? https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/employee-retention-is-about-more-than-perks

New – Train Custom Document Classifiers with Amazon Comprehend https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-train-custom-document-classifiers-with-amazon-comprehend/

Headcount dilemmas. https://lethain.com/headcount-dilemmas/

Configuration as code https://twitter.com/springrod/status/1063412788670926849

JWZ: Weird Machines https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/11/weird-machines/

Google News may shut over EU plans to charge tax for links https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/18/google-news-may-shut-over-eu-plans-to-charge-tax-for-links

Worst-Case Thinking Breeds Fear and Irrationality https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/worst-case_thin_1.html

How your office building is tricking you into going green https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/sustainable-workspaces-and-practices

From Maker to Manager: How to Take the Leap https://open.buffer.com/maker-to-manager/

Early Friday Links

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 11:07:00 +0000

We have hackdays this week, so this is a bit early.

Schneier: The Pentagon Is Publishing Foreign Nation-State Malware https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/the_pentagon_is.html

Android: a 10-year visual history https://www.theverge.com/2011/12/7/2585779/android-10th-anniversary-google-history-pie-oreo-nougat-cupcake

Kellan: What I’m up to: tech leadership http://laughingmeme.org/2018/11/12/what-im-up-to-tech-leadership/

The next version of HTTP won’t be using TCP https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/the-next-version-of-http-wont-be-using-tcp/

New – Redis 5.0 Compatibility for Amazon ElastiCache https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-redis-5-0-compatibility-for-amazon-elasticache/

PageSpeed Insights, now powered by Lighthouse https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/11/pagespeed-insights-now-powered-by.html

Basecamp: Postmortem on the read-only outage of Basecamp on November 9th, 2018 https://m.signalvnoise.com/postmortem-on-the-read-only-outage-of-basecamp-on-november-9th-2018-9165c315ee7f

Answer these 10 questions to understand if you’re a good manager https://qz.com/work/1447711/how-to-tell-if-youre-a-good-manager/

Friday Links

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 08:52:00 +0000

How Meetup scales notification queue consumers https://medium.com/making-meetup/how-meetup-scales-notification-queue-consumers-ed98b0ecec0a

JWZ: Epochryphal https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/11/epochryphal/

Troy Hunt on Passwords https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/troy_hunt_on_pa.html

GitHub Services Brownout Updates and Timeline https://developer.github.com/changes/2018-11-05-github-services-brownout/

GitHub: Postponing stricter validation https://developer.github.com/changes/2018-11-07-strict-validation/

Double-bucketing in A/B Testing https://codeascraft.com/2018/11/07/double-bucketing-in-ab-testing/

Update on Basecamp 3 being stuck in read-only as of Nov 8, 12:41pm CST https://m.signalvnoise.com/update-on-basecamp-3-being-stuck-in-read-only-as-of-nov-8-9-22am-cst-c41df1a58352

Introducing Team Radar Retrospectives in Retrium https://blog.retrium.com/introducing-team-radar-retrospectives-in-retrium

Friday Links

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 09:07:00 +0000

AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) Command Line Interface – Build, Test, and Debug Serverless Apps Locally https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-serverless-application-model-sam-command-line-interface-build-test-and-debug-serverless-apps-locally/

Why Transparency in Business Matters (and How to Get Started) https://open.buffer.com/transparency-in-business/

IBM to Acquire Linux Distributor Red Hat for $33.4 Billion https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-28/ibm-is-said-to-near-deal-to-acquire-software-maker-red-hat

Introducing reCAPTCHA v3: the new way to stop bots https://security.googleblog.com/2018/10/introducing-recaptcha-v3-new-way-to.html

HBR: A Quick Introduction to Agile Management https://hbr.org/video/4846148015001/a-quick-introduction-to-agile-management

GitHub: October 21 post-incident analysis https://blog.github.com/2018-10-30-oct21-post-incident-analysis/

What is Your Password? https://youtu.be/opRMrEfAIiI

Buying Used Voting Machines on eBay https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/11/buying_used_vot.html

Moving to three-person engineering teams https://medium.com/do-not-erase/moving-to-three-person-engineering-teams-bcf599670c2a

Friday Links

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 07:55:00 +0000

Schneier: West Virginia Using Internet Voting https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/10/west_virginia_u.html

Facebook: Open-sourcing StateService: Automating recovery of third-party services after a major outage https://code.fb.com/open-source/stateservice/

How to counteract 3 types of bias and run inclusive meetings https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/how-to-run-inclusive-meetings

Welcome to WebPerl! https://webperl.zero-g.net/

Fowler: The State of Agile Software in 2018 https://martinfowler.com/articles/agile-aus-2018.html

Dark Scrum https://ronjeffries.com/articles/016-09ff/defense/

Devex: Using the ’lean startup’ methodology to optimize for impact https://www.devex.com/news/using-the-lean-startup-methodology-to-optimize-for-impact-93702

GDPR: Good for privacy, even better for Google’s dominance https://boingboing.net/2018/10/18/briar-patches-r-us.html

Capacity planning for Etsy’s web and API clusters https://codeascraft.com/2018/10/23/capacity-planning-for-etsys-web-and-api-tiers/

Discontinuing support for Android Nearby Notifications https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/10/discontinuing-support-for-android.html

Friday Links

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 07:37:00 +0000

Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, and sunsetting consumer Google+ https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/project-strobe/

The new and improved Jira Software Cloud and GitHub integration https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/github-for-jira

Why don’t we add a element to HTML? https://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2018/why-so-hard-to-add-new-html-elements/

Control Flow Integrity in the Android kernel https://security.googleblog.com/2018/10/posted-by-sami-tolvanen-staff-software.html

Git Submodule Vulnerability Announced https://blog.github.com/2018-10-05-git-submodule-vulnerability/

AppSignal: Improved Navigation https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/10/08/improved-navigation.html

LWN: What’s a CPU to do when it has nothing to do? https://lwn.net/Articles/767630/

Peeling back the curtain: How the Economist is opening the data behind our reporting https://medium.economist.com/peeling-back-the-curtain-487bd3be0c47

Friday Links

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 07:28:00 +0000

Schneier: Chinese Supply Chain Hardware Attackhttps://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/10/chinese_supply_.html https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-amazon-apple-supermicro-and-beijing-respond

Computing comfortably at 30,000 feethttps://mgsloan.com/posts/comfortable-airplane-computing/

How Etsy Handles Peeking in A/B Testinghttps://codeascraft.com/2018/10/03/how-etsy-handles-peeking-in-a-b-testing/

Schneier: The Effects of GDPR’s 72-Hour Notification Rulehttps://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/10/the_effects_of_5.html

Introducing Action Text for Rails 6 https://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2018/10/3/introducing-action-text-for-rails-6/

How to Hold a Hackathon (When No One’s in the Same Room)https://open.buffer.com/hackathon/

Why Reducing Nonprofit Employee Turnover Will Better Your Good Causehttps://getlighthouse.com/blog/nonprofit-employee-turnover-reducing/

Upgrading GitHub from Rails 3.2 to 5.2https://githubengineering.com/upgrading-github-from-rails-3-2-to-5-2/

Schneier: Conspiracy Theories Around the “Presidential Alert”https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/10/conspiracy_theo_2.html

If you sometimes feel left out at work, you’re doing it righthttps://qz.com/work/1412529/fomo-is-not-a-useful-concept-at-work/

Friday Links

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 07:44:00 +0000

Saying no.https://lethain.com/saying-no/

#to_s or #to_str? Explicitly casting vs. implicitly coercing types in Rubyhttps://blog.appsignal.com/2018/09/25/explicitly-casting-vs-implicitly-coercing-types-in-ruby.html

How Bosses Waste Their Employees’ Timehttps://www.wsj.com/articles/how-bosses-waste-their-employees-time-1534126140

Dali Clock Emularityhttps://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/09/dali-clock-emularity/

How Etsy Localizes Addresseshttps://codeascraft.com/2018/09/26/how-etsy-localizes-addresses/

The kernel’s code of conduct, one week later [LWN subscriber-only content]https://lwn.net/Articles/766699/

10 things I learned from Jason Fried about Building Productshttps://uxplanet.org/10-things-i-learned-from-jason-fried-about-building-products-5b6694ff02aa

Win at quarterly planning by avoiding these OKRs mistakeshttps://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/how-to-avoid-common-okrs-mistakes

A sysadmin’s guide to containershttps://opensource.com/article/18/8/sysadmins-guide-containers

#noprojects - A Culture of Continuous Value https://www.infoq.com/minibooks/noprojects-value-culture

GitHub: Stricter validation coming soon in the REST API https://developer.github.com/changes/2018-09-25-stricter-validation-coming-soon-in-the-rest-api/

Friday Links

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 07:20:00 +0000

GitHub: Towards Natural Language Semantic Code Searchhttps://githubengineering.com/towards-natural-language-semantic-code-search/

Introducing Experiments, an ongoing research effort from GitHub https://blog.github.com/2018-09-18-introducing-experiments-an-ongoing-research-effort-from-github/

Spotify: Scalable User Privacyhttps://labs.spotify.com/2018/09/18/scalable-user-privacy/

Slack-off Fridays: What Happened When One Team Experienced a Day Without Slackhttps://open.buffer.com/turn-off-slack-experiment/

Resource control at Facebook [LWN subscriber-only content]https://lwn.net/Articles/764761/

JavaScript Equality Table Gamehttps://slikts.github.io/js-equality-game/

Guide: Set goals with OKRshttps://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/set-goals-with-okrs/steps/introduction/

Bing starts serving AMP pages as Google prepares to reduce its controlhttps://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/bing-starts-serving-amp-pages-as-google-prepares-to-reduce-its-control/

New – Parallel Query for Amazon Aurorahttps://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-parallel-query-for-amazon-aurora/

Books I wish I read earlier

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 15:22:00 +0000

When I wrote the review of The Manager’s Path I started to think about other books I wish I had read earlier.

Usually these triggered some kind of change in how I approach my work or life. This list is definitely incomplete and I will add more to the goodreads list at the bottom of this post.

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck

I still remember when and where I read this for the first time. It was on a plane from the US OSCON back to London where I had my start-up.

Friday Links

Fri, 14 Sep 2018 08:16:00 +0000

Time management: the leadership meta-problem.https://lethain.com/time-management/

Advice for a new executivehttps://larahogan.me/blog/advice-for-new-executive/

The Second Edition of “Refactoring”https://martinfowler.com/articles/refactoring-2nd-ed.html#most-people-will-be-disappointed-by-the-second-edition https://martinfowler.com/articles/refactoring-2nd-changes.html

Use channels, not direct messages - 9 tipshttps://blog.arkency.com/use-channels-not-direct-messages/

Notes on “A Philosophy of Software Design.”https://lethain.com/notes-philosophy-software-design/

Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontendhttps://githubengineering.com/removing-jquery-from-github-frontend/

Why We Prioritize Reading at Buffer and the 19 Most-Read Books From Our Teamhttps://open.buffer.com/prioritize-reading/

The 5 Whys Process We Use to Understand the Root of Any Problemhttps://open.buffer.com/5-whys-process/

CI and the Change Loghttp://www.davefarley.net/?p=263

PostgreSQL 11: something for everyone [LWN subscriber-only content]https://lwn.net/Articles/764515/

Friday Links

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 07:44:00 +0000

60 agile pros tell me what really matters in agile todayhttps://www.atlassian.com/blog/agile/ask-me-anything-agile

Valve’s “Steam Play” uses Vulkan to bring more Windows games to Linuxhttps://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/08/valves-steam-play-uses-vulkan-to-bring-more-windows-games-to-linux/

Signalhttps://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/08/signal/

Serverless Firsthttps://zef.me/serverless-first-d2117ecc12da

James Mickens on the Current State of Computer Securityhttps://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/08/james_mickens_o.html

New T3 Instances – Burstable, Cost-Effective Performancehttps://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-t3-instances-burstable-cost-effective-performance/

The not-so-secret trick to cutting solo car commutes: Charge for parking by the day https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/the-not-so-secret-trick-to-cutting-solo-car-commutes-charge-for-parking-by-the-day/

Engineering Ladders at Meetuphttps://medium.com/making-meetup/engineering-ladders-at-meetup-caacbea4916e

Questions for our first 1:1https://larahogan.me/blog/first-one-on-one-questions/

Sharing Our Engineering Ladder http://dresscode.renttherunway.com/blog/ladder

Liz Fong-Jones - Adopting SRE and Error Budgetshttps://youtu.be/7VeU6LnOUms

My manager README

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 09:41:00 +0000

Original is here: https://github.com/christofdamian/manager-readme#manager-readme

Update December 2020: I decided to make the repository private for now. I have some doubt if a manager README makes sense and mine was also not up to date. I might pick this up again in the future.

Manager README?

A few people (not only managers) now share information in a README or how-to style document on the web. The first one I came across was How to Rands. I thought it is a good idea for new team members, but also for people in the company who don’t have constant contact with me.

Frankenscrumcycle

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:19:00 +0000

Originally posted on the Devex Tech Blog.

Frankenscrumcyle presentation slide

At Devex we try to optimise every aspect of our work and at times try radical new things. In this post I describe one of these journeys, that led us from Scrum, to Six Week Cycles, to Frankenscrumcyle and a possible future.

Scrum

In the product team at Devex we used a pretty standard Scrum process for about four years. In the beginning with one team in Manila and one in Barcelona and later with one or two teams just in Barcelona. As it is the case for most companies this wasn’t a 100% out of the book Scrum, but slightly adapted to our needs.

How to balance technical and business needs - Video Interview

Sat, 18 Aug 2018 14:43:00 +0000

Steven from Drive To Improve interviewed me and Fernando Palomo about balancing technical and business needs of a company.

Steven did a very good job and made it did feel much shorter than it was. Good to see Fernando again too, working with him at Splendia was brilliant.

Excuse my English and hair.

Friday Links

Fri, 17 Aug 2018 07:36:00 +0000

12 “Manager READMEs” from Silicon Valley’s Top Tech Companies https://hackernoon.com/12-manager-readmes-from-silicon-valleys-top-tech-companies-26588a660afe

Make your peers your first team. https://lethain.com/first-team/

Aurora Serverless MySQL Generally Available https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aurora-serverless-ga/

Churn Prediction: First Contact https://overflow.buffer.com/2018/08/13/predicting-churn/

Workplace Wellness Programs Don’t Work Well. Why Some Studies Show Otherwise. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/upshot/employer-wellness-programs-randomized-trials.html

5 reasons to check out the World Bank’s new data catalog https://medium.com/world-of-opportunity/5-reasons-to-check-out-the-world-bank-new-data-catalog-e342f3889cc2

Google Public DNS turns 8.8.8.8 years old https://security.googleblog.com/2018/08/google-public-dns-turns-8888-years-old.html

TravelTime Platform https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/

Running an All-hands https://medium.com/@gokulrajaram/all-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-all-hands-but-were-afraid-to-ask-b13f7b97f2d9

AppSignal Ruby gem 2.7: Improvements and bug fixes https://blog.appsignal.com/2018/08/13/ruby-gem-2-7.html

Experiences with running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes https://gravitational.com/blog/running-postgresql-on-kubernetes/

Review: The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 11:26:00 +0000

The Manager's Path Cover

I should start a list of books I wish I read earlier. This one would definitely be on that list. Thankfully it is fairly recent, so I don’t have myself to blame.

Most people that I know in some kind of lead or management role stumbled into them. This was certainly the case for me. One day you are the lone developer in a small shop or start-up and without your fault it does start to grow. All is well until you have a handful of people in the team, suddenly there is a need for some structure and dare I say the word “management”. A lot of developers, including myself, are introverts and also prefer the technology side of a company. Taking on the role of a lead or manager will force you to talk to more people and reduces your time on the keyboard. I never wanted to manage people, but working at my start-up (guideguide, war stories another time) I realised that someone had to do it and if I cared for the company it probably had to be me.

Friday Links

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 07:56:00 +0000

New data tools for relief organizations: network coverage, power, and displacementhttps://research.fb.com/new-data-tools-for-relief-organizations-network-coverage-power-and-displacement/

Chaff Bugs: Deterring Attackers by Making Software Buggierhttps://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.00659.pdf

Everything Goes in a Context Buckethttp://randsinrepose.com/archives/everything-goes-in-a-context-bucket/

Repeat yourself, do more than one thing, and rewrite everythinghttps://programmingisterrible.com/post/176657481103/repeat-yourself-do-more-than-one-thing-and

Is group chat making you sweat?https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat-744659addf7d

Data Studio’s new features help you tell more compelling storieshttps://www.blog.google/products/marketingplatform/360/data-studio-new-features-help-tell-compelling-stories/

Double Shippinghttps://zachholman.com/posts/double-shipping

You don’t need standuphttps://medium.com/@jsonpify/you-dont-need-standup-9a74782517c1

GLB: GitHub’s open source load balancerhttps://githubengineering.com/glb-director-open-source-load-balancer/

Friday Links

Fri, 03 Aug 2018 07:28:00 +0000

Kickstarter Engineering Ladderhttps://gist.github.com/jamtur01/aef437a79fee5a9cefdc

The Software Engineering Job Ladderhttps://blog.usejournal.com/the-software-engineering-job-ladder-4bf70b4c24f3

Sizing engineering teams.https://lethain.com/sizing-engineering-teams/

Imaginary problems, the root of bad softwarehttps://medium.com/@george3d6/imaginary-problems-d4f2921bd1b8

An Introduction to Elasticsearch SQL with Practical Examples - Part 1https://www.elastic.co/blog/an-introduction-to-elasticsearch-sql-with-practical-examples-part-1

Generating Random Numbers in Rubyhttps://blog.appsignal.com/2018/07/31/generating-random-numbers-in-ruby.html

PNG anticshttps://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/07/png-antics/

Remote Spectre exploits demonstratedhttps://lwn.net/Articles/761100/rss

What Are Machine Learning Models Hiding?https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/07/26/what-are-machine-learning-models-hiding/

Pretty big side-effect https://pavelmachek.livejournal.com/142883.html

No bosses, no managers: the truth behind the ‘flat hierarchy’ facade https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/30/no-bosses-managers-flat-hierachy-workplace-tech-hollywood

My First Line of Code: Linus Torvaldshttps://youtu.be/S5S9LIT-hdc

Friday Links

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 07:15:00 +0000

Coaching & Facilitation Formats I Use http://www.plays-in-business.com/facilitation-formats-i-use/

Scrum Checklist https://www.crisp.se/gratis-material-och-guider/scrum-checklist

Marketing Can Be Agile Too https://www.dmnews.com/customer-experience/article/13034674/marketing-can-be-agile-too

5 tips for getting started with feature flags https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/tips-for-feature-flagging

A pre-history of weeknotes, plus why I write them and perhaps why you should too (Week 16) https://medium.com/job-garden/a-pre-history-of-weeknotes-plus-why-i-write-them-and-perhaps-why-you-should-too-week-16-31a4a5cbf7b0

CSS Tricks: Aspect Ratio Boxes https://css-tricks.com/aspect-ratio-boxes/

A Guide to Mindful Communication in Code Reviews https://kickstarter.engineering/a-guide-to-mindful-communication-in-code-reviews-48aab5282e5e

Atlassian: Announcing our new partnership with Slack https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/new-atlassian-slack-partnership

5 project prioritization lessons from the pros https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/project-prioritization-mistakes-and-cures

‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI alarmingly wrong https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/25/ai-artificial-intelligence-social-media-bots-wrong

Friday Links

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 08:09:00 +0000

What 30 years of Stanford research tells us about company culturehttps://www.stride.com/blog/what-30-years-of-stanford-research-tells-us-about-company-culture

Operationalizing Node.js for Server Side Renderinghttps://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/operationalizing-node-js-for-server-side-rendering-c5ba718acfc9

Planning A Company Retreat: Things We Did Differently for Buffer’s 9th Retreathttps://open.buffer.com/9th-retreat/

Our week off from Slackhttps://wildbit.com/blog/2018/07/17/our-week-off-from-slack

Time Flies: Levitating Nixie Clockhttps://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/07/time-flies-levitating-nixie-clock-2/

Just gonna leave this regexp herehttps://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/07/just-gonna-leave-this-regexp-here/

mathr performs with Clive https://media.ccc.de/v/lac2018-22-mathr_performs_with_clive

Sir, Your Most Brutal Web Site, Please.https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/07/sir-your-most-brutal-web-site-please/

5 Red Flags Signaling Your Rebuild Will Fail https://www.pkc.io/blog/five-red-flags-signaling-your-rebuild-will-fail/

Evolution of Application Data Caching : From RAM to SSDhttps://medium.com/netflix-techblog/evolution-of-application-data-caching-from-ram-to-ssd-a33d6fa7a690

Friday Links

Fri, 13 Jul 2018 08:02:00 +0000

I am going to give this another try. I post links I find interesting every Friday at work. There was some interest to make these public. As I don’t have any other place to put them I am just going to post them here.

Important disclaimer: inclusion of a link doesn’t mean I agree with the content, it just means that I find it interesting. I do include a lot of links of Buffer and Basecamp, but I often disagree completely with their position.

Kindle Oasis 2 (2017)

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 17:30:00 +0000

I am a relatively long user of the Kindle. I got my first Kindle Keyboard in November 2010 and had to replace it twice, once for theft and once because a broken display.

I liked it so much that I was never tempted to switch to one of the newer versions. Most of them come with better displays, back-light, are smaller and lighter, but at the same time remove one feature that I especially like: the page turning buttons.

Cycling in the Pyrenees

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 19:08:00 +0000

Last week I went on my first supported cycling trip.

Supported means that there are cars carrying your luggage from one hotel to the next one. They provide you with food on the tour, space for spare clothes and help out when needed. They also take pictures and sort out random stuff that comes up.

It was quite a spontaneous decision on my side and I had fixed dates for the holiday, so the choice of providers of these trips was limited. My first idea for a destination were the Dolomites, but this would have required flights and more organization on my side. In the end I went with Canigou Cycling, who conveniently provide a Barcelona Airport pick up service - or for me a pick up from home.

London Ride 100

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 12:02:00 +0000

Last weekend I travelled to London for the Prudential RideLondon 100. It is a 100 miles (160km) sportive going through London and the Surrey Hills. This one is held on completely closed roads and is also the biggest sportive I have ever attended, with around 30000 cyclists on the road.

I stayed in an Airbnb in Homerton, which I mainly choose because it was near the Olympic Park, where the start was. And it was good to be close, because I had there by 6:40 latest. You are assigned a colour and a starting wave. They stagger the waves to avoid congestion on the road. I think faster riders will also be in the earlier waves. I guess I was somewhere in the middle. It rained all night, so the roads were pretty wet, but the sun came out a bit later.

2016 New Year Resolutions Review

Tue, 27 Dec 2016 20:44:00 +0000

The year comes to a close and it is time to see what happened to my New Year Resolutions.

Yoga Everyday

Well, this didn’t go so well. Overall I managed about every second day, though I have done most of it in the first half of the year. But it turned into a habit now, so I tend to do it a few times a week.

Cycling Mini Adventures

I managed to do quite a few and had fun doing them.

Shanghai 144 hour transit visa

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 13:54:00 +0000

Short tip this time, just to confirm to anyone googling for the 144 hour transit visa for Shanghai that it really works.

I have just been to Shanghai using the 144 hour transit visa. My trip was from Barcelona via Dubai to Shanghai and finally Manila.

You can find more information on the net, but this is how it basically works:

you can stay only 144 hours (there are some rules on when these begin and end)
it has to be transit, you can’t just return to your origin after the visit. you have to go to a third country (Hong Kong doesn’t count either)
you have to use one of the two main airports in Shanghai, you can’t just use any odd border (I think there is a port option too)
it doesn’t cost anything
you have to have a passport from certain countries Europe/Schengen and USA are fine for example

The main problem of the transit visa is that nobody knows about it. The Chinese consulate here had no idea and the Emirates staff also had not heard about it.

Solo cycling weekend in Ripoll

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 18:59:00 +0000

Amazingly this is the first multiple day cycling trip that I have done alone so far. I had the weekend for myself and decided to use it to explore some new roads in Catalonia.

After asking my cycling friends for some tips I decided on using Ripoll as a base. It is a two hours and €8 train ride from Barcelona and surrounded by nature parks and nice mountains.

What is in my bag. Part 1: Small Saddlebag

Wed, 24 Aug 2016 13:21:00 +0000

I wanted to this for a while, but it came up again recently, so here it goes.

This is my small saddle bag, that I use daily and in group rides. For sportives or Gran Fondos I use a slightly bigger bag, which I will come to in a different post.

I don’t really like to have too much stuff in the jersey pockets. On the usual rides I just carry my phone, cash, credit card and keys and maybe one gel. When it is colder or changing also a wind jacket.

La Ruta Minera

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 16:53:00 +0000

Mauro talked me into taking part in the La Ruta Minera sportive, conveniently he broke his collarbone before and didn’t join.

On paper this looked like a lot of fun. It is a bit shorter than Gran Fondo La Mussara and a “bit” more climbing.

The event starts and finishes in Berga, which is an hour away with the car. There is no good rail connection, so I rented a car for the long weekend. I booked a hotel through the sportive organisation from Friday to Sunday, with the race being on Sunday. The Hotel HCC Ciutat de Berga was nothing special, but the front desk was very friendly and he did the sportive last year. He even checked out my gears to make sure I was not trying with a 11-25 cassette. They allowed bikes in the rooms for this weekend and also provided extra early breakfast and late checkout on Sunday.

Half Time for New Year Resolutions

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 20:43:00 +0000

Half a year is over and it is time to see how my New Year Resolutions are going.

Yoga Everyday

Pretty well I would say. Since I started tracking it with HabitBull I have done it in three of four days. I found it harder when traveling or with days where I have work and evening events. But I am happy with this so far.

Cycling Mini Adventures

I didn’t put a number on this, but I was imagining something like about once a month. I had to cancel the Velothon Berlin because of work. But I did some other stuff.

Gran Fondo La Mussara 2016 Report

Mon, 23 May 2016 10:14:00 +0000

Last year I attended the the Gran Fondo La Mussara, it is a great event, well organized and with a beautiful route. Sadly I was not able to finish it. I had to give up after 110 of the 189 km. I was not properly prepared due to various injuries and illnesses in the beginning of the year. And I got another injury during the ride. But I decided to give it another try this year, so I registered early as this event sells out pretty fast.

Gran Fondo Barcelona 2016 Review

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 17:00:00 +0000

race number

This year I took part in the second Gran Fondo Barcelona. A Gran Fondo or Sportive is basically a large group ride with a given route, which shouldn’t be competitive. The advantage is that you are often travelling on closed roads and there is some support in form of food stops and mechanical support.

I already took part in the 2015 edition, so I knew a lot of the things that were expecting me.

Track Everything

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 13:09:00 +0000

I like to track stuff. I think it has always been like this.

But later I realized that this can also be useful to achieve goals and discover problems. Because we are very bad at noticing patterns over longer periods of time.

We might step on the weight scale every morning and see that it varies up and down a kilogram, at least if we can remember what it said yesterday. But this is not how your weight changes, it changes very slowly over a long period of time and unless you write it down you won’t notice.

Yoga

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 21:07:00 +0000

As I have mentioned in my New Year Resolutions 2016 post I have started doing yoga.

The main reasons for this are:

The meditation part Some of the sessions are so relaxed that you fall asleep and even if your mind is racing at the beginning of a practice, after a few minutes you get distracted by doing stuff. In that aspect it is like cycling for me, getting out of your head and into your body. Breathing exercises are a big part of this.

New Year Resolutions 2016

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 12:19:00 +0000

It’s that time of the year, when everyone makes empty promises to themselves. And I don’t want to skip this important tradition. The last one I did was in 2012, which seems like a long time ago.

Usually these are along the lines of sporty stuff or loosing weight. I have already stopped drinking alcohol and coffee end of last year and I am doing two hours of activity (as tracked by google fit) already. And nobody will stop me cycling too much anyway.

Bloomsky Review Update: Much better

Thu, 31 Dec 2015 12:16:00 +0000

In September I published a review of the Bloomsky Weather Station, which I summarized with “a nice toy with brilliant hardware and rubbish software.”.

My main complaint was that it was impossible to share an URL of the station and to get to the data, photos and images in any way.

Today all of this has changed.

Now there is a map with all the stations, and each station has it’s own URL like mine for example. It includes the current data and webcam image and last timelapse.

Bloomsky Review

Sat, 12 Sep 2015 18:56:00 +0000

UPDATE: I posted a followup to this, with information about the new software and API and now highly recommend the Bloomsky Station

The Bloomsky “Weather Camera” is a weather station with built-in camera.

I first saw it on a Kickstarter Campaign, which was pretty successful. I snapped one of the early birds deals and later added a solar panel. Expected delivery was December 2014 (ha!), it turned up in August 2015. But this is already better than some other campaigns. They had some problems to get the CE approval for Europe, so that explained some of the delay.

A year of cycling

Fri, 02 Jan 2015 14:26:00 +0000

For some reason this year turned out to be a year with a lot of time spend on bicycles. While I have been cycling more since I changed to a company which allowed me to park my bicycle in the office, this year I increased this even more. One part of this has definitely be Strava, which allows me to track my riding and improvements (or not) over time.

Some numbers for 2014, 2013 in brackets:

Friday Links

Fri, 09 May 2014 07:41:00 +0000

Wheeler: How to Prevent the next Heartbleed http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/heartbleed.html

Rails 3.2.18, 4.0.5 and 4.1.1 have been released! http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2014/5/6/Rails_3_2_18_4_0_5_and_4_1_1_have_been_released/

Is TDD Dead? The big fight live! https://plus.google.com/events/ci2g23mk0lh9too9bgbp3rbut0k

Atlassian: Moving from roadmaps to requirements http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/05/moving-roadmaps-requirements/

Update on Disqus: It’s Still About Realtime, But Go Demolishes Python http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/5/7/update-on-disqus-its-still-about-realtime-but-go-demolishes.html

Friday Links

Fri, 02 May 2014 08:24:00 +0000

The Three Flaws in Software Design & How to Avoid Them http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOU2XLYxmsIJ7HGm2bv20QrtwcWemSRCI

Github: Updated Services UI https://github.com/blog/1827-updated-services-ui

Atlassian: Now in JIRA Agile Labs: an all new control chart http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/04/now-jira-agile-labs-new-control-chart/

Atlassian: 6 key ways to optimize development with a control chart http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/04/6-key-ways-optimize-development-control-chart/

How Disqus Went Realtime with 165K Messages Per Second and Less than .2 Seconds Latency http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/4/28/how-disqus-went-realtime-with-165k-messages-per-second-and-l.html

3 ways to do eager loading (preloading) in Rails 3 & 4 http://blog.arkency.com/2013/12/rails4-preloading/

Drowning in problems: http://game.notch.net/drowning/

There were also some rants about TDD, which I am not going to bother to list

Friday Links

Fri, 11 Apr 2014 09:30:00 +0000

John Resig: Write Code Every Day http://ejohn.org/blog/write-code-every-day/

Agilar: Scrum teams: self-organizing or self-directed? http://blog.agilar.org/index.php/2014/04/09/scrum-teams-self-organizing-or-self-directed/

etsy engineering youtube https://www.youtube.com/user/etsyengineering

Friday Links

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 07:56:00 +0000

Spotify engineering culture (part 1) http://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/

Etsy: Web Experimentation with New Visitors http://codeascraft.com/2014/04/03/web-experimentation-with-new-visitors/

TED: What motivates us at work? 7 fascinating studies that give insights http://blog.ted.com/2013/04/10/what-motivates-us-at-work-7-fascinating-studies-that-give-insights/

Friday Links

Fri, 28 Mar 2014 08:01:00 +0000

facebook: Looking back on “Look Back” videos https://code.facebook.com/posts/236248456565933/looking-back-on-look-back-videos/

Github: No Conversation Left Behind https://github.com/blog/1811-no-conversation-left-behind

A Robot for Timo http://blog.printf.net/articles/2014/03/18/a-robot-for-timo/

Testing on the Toilet: What Makes a Good Test? http://googletesting.blogspot.de/2014/03/testing-on-toilet-what-makes-good-test.html

Only 90s Web Developers Remember This http://zachholman.com/posts/only-90s-developers/

Tuenti Blog Tag: Continuous Integration: http://corporate.tuenti.com/en/dev/blog/tags/continuous%20integration

Why your previous developer was terrible https://medium.com/p/506a06ae35ea

Github: Switch your picture with ease https://github.com/blog/1803-switch-your-picture-with-ease

Big, Small, Hot or Cold - Examples of Robust Data Pipelines from Stripe, Tapad, Etsy and Square http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/24/big-small-hot-or-cold-examples-of-robust-data-pipelines-from.html

You Don’t Have Big Data… http://blog.mongohq.com/you-dont-have-big-data/

Friday Links

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 03:31:00 +0000

Responsive emails that really work http://codeascraft.com/2014/03/13/responsive-emails-that-really-work/

High Tempo, High Consequence http://www.kitchensoap.com/2014/03/13/high-tempo-high-consequence/

10 ways to be a faster code reviewer (slightly spammy) http://blog.codacy.com/top-10-faster-code-reviews/

The Netflix Signup Flow - Our Journey to a Responsive Design http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/03/the-netflix-signup-flow-our-journey-to.html

Why you need infrastructure and deployment automation http://qafoo.com/blog/065_infrastructure_automation.html

Friday Links PHP Edition

Fri, 14 Feb 2014 09:39:00 +0000

Google Geo Developer Blog: Marker Clustering and Heatmaps: New features in the Google Maps Android API Utility Library http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.de/2014/02/marker-clustering-and-heatmaps-new.html

HHVM and Hack – Can We Expect Them to Replace PHP? http://www.sitepoint.com/hhvm-hack-part-1/

What Application Layer Does A DI Container Belong In? http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/5914

Mockery 0.9.0 Has Landed…Mostly In One Piece! http://blog.astrumfutura.com/2014/02/mockery-0-9-0-has-landed-mostly-in-one-piece/

Coding Standards: Humans Are Not Computers http://blog.astrumfutura.com/2014/02/coding-standards-humans-are-not-computers/

Friday Links

Fri, 07 Feb 2014 10:53:00 +0000

Chromebox, now for simpler and better meetings http://googleblog.blogspot.de/2014/02/chromebox-now-for-simpler-and-better.html

Evaluating JIRA Agile – Scrum masters http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/02/evaluating-jira-agile-scrum-masters/

Evaluating JIRA Agile – Product owners http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/02/evaluating-jira-agile-product-owners/

Why Google has 200m reasons to put engineers over designers http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/05/why-google-engineers-designers

AWS Tips I Wish I’d Known Before I Started http://wblinks.com/notes/aws-tips-i-wish-id-known-before-i-started/

Google Testing: Minimizing Unreproducible Bugs http://googletesting.blogspot.de/2014/02/minimizing-unreproducible-bugs.html

Tuenti: Continuous Integration http://corporate.tuenti.com/en/dev/blog/tags/continuous%20integration

Friday DevOps Links

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 09:46:00 +0000

Hierarchy of DevOps needs https://www.kickstarter.com/backing-and-hacking/hierarchy-of-devops-needs

10 Things We Forgot to Monitor http://word.bitly.com/post/74839060954/ten-things-to-monitor

Friday Links

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 12:33:00 +0000

Github: Better Organizations https://github.com/blog/1763-better-organizations

Code Reuse By Inheritance http://qafoo.com/blog/063_code_reuse_by_inheritance.html

The Google Test and Development Environment http://googletesting.blogspot.com.es/2013/12/the-google-test-and-development.html http://googletesting.blogspot.com.es/2014/01/the-google-test-and-development.html http://googletesting.blogspot.com.es/2014/01/the-google-test-and-development_21.html

xkcd: Automation http://xkcd.com/1319/

Github: Optimizing large selector sets https://github.com/blog/1756-optimizing-large-selector-sets

Github: DNS Outage Post Mortem https://github.com/blog/1759-dns-outage-post-mortem

Mark your calendar: Barcelona Ruby Conference 2014 is definitely happening! http://www.baruco.org/blog/announcing-baruco-2014

Google’s vs Facebook’s Trunk Based Development http://paulhammant.com/2014/01/08/googles-vs-facebooks-trunk-based-development/

Friday Links Double Bill

Fri, 13 Dec 2013 11:27:00 +0000

Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy? http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmers-working-hard-or.html

Emulation in Chrome DevTools http://youtu.be/z7sTRdSpA04

22 Crazy Perks You Should Ask Your Boss For (spot the ones we already enjoy) http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131203162756-5799319-22-crazy-perks-you-should-ask-your-boss-for

The Guardian responsive front-end open sourced https://github.com/guardian/frontend

Performance Calendar: Reducing Domain Sharding http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2013/reducing-domain-sharding/

Rails 3.2.16 and 4.0.2 have been released! http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2013/12/3/Rails_3_2_16_and_4_0_2_have_been_released/

github: Expanding context in diffs https://github.com/blog/1705-expanding-context-in-diffs

Devops road at Tuenti https://vimeo.com/album/2565361/video/76750531

How to initiate a DevOps Transformation (Video) http://dev2ops.org/2013/12/how-to-initiate-a-devops-transformation-video/

Baruco 2013: Building a Culture of Quality, by Bryan Helmkamp http://youtu.be/Jsi1YTkXwxA

Friday Links

Fri, 29 Nov 2013 09:14:00 +0000

Why GNU grep is fast http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-August/019310.html

CMS Trap http://hakunin.com/cms-trap

Friday Links

Fri, 22 Nov 2013 08:47:00 +0000

At my current job at devex and my previous job at Splendia we have a tradition of everyone sending an email with interesting links to the internal mailing list on every Friday.

The idea is to spread the knowledge and give everyone something to read for the weekend, when there is plenty of time (ha!).

I am going to start posting some of these here too, because I think they are good and also because I have nothing else to write about at the moment.

Moving on...

Wed, 17 Jul 2013 20:13:00 +0000

I have confess that this was shorter than I would have thought or wished for, but Thursday is my last day at Splendia.

Splendia is a very different company from my previous employer Softonic. While Softonic has all the perks and advantages of a big successful company with a large development team.

Splendia is much smaller and when I arrived the whole team had just arrived too and was confronted with a “legacy” code base.

WeLovePHP Talk: Methodologies and tools used by the Splendia development team

Sat, 13 Jul 2013 12:17:00 +0000

Today I gave a talk at WeLovePHP, which is a quarterly talk and workshop series organized by Softonic in Barcelona. They also do one about JavaScript. I can highly recommend them if you are interested in PHP, JavaScript or related topics.

I talked about the processes and tools we are using at Splendia. There are no pictures in the slides … sorry.

Klaus Damian R.I.P.

Fri, 05 Jul 2013 19:46:00 +0000

Last month my father Klaus Damian died much too young and rather unexpected.

He was a hero to me, like every father should be. But he made it especially easy.

When he retired he was the Head of the Astronauts Training Division at the EAC (European Astronaut Centre) of the ESA (European Space Agency). As far as I can remember he always worked with satellites and spacecrafts. He travelled the world to go diving with astronauts in the Caribbean, do zero gravity flights, to see rockets or spaceships take off from all continents. I always remember the map of the world he had on his wall, which had a pin for every trip and they were everywhere.

A Code Review and Continuous Integration Workflow

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:43:00 +0000

As hopefully most people working on software projects nowadays we are writing unit tests and do code reviews.

Work-flow at Splendia

As our project is a large PHP site we are using PHPUnit for unit testing and various static code checking tools (checkstyle, phpmd, pdepend, phpcpd) to verify the quality of our code.

All of these are run on our integration branch, whenever a new feature is integrated.

Before this can happen the code will be reviewed by other people in the team and only if there is a consensus it will be merged into the integration branch.

Splendia

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:17:00 +0000

I must admit that this post comes a bit late. As I have mentioned before, I have left Softonic last year.

The main reason was that it was too difficult to change anything there and nobody seemed to know what to do about it. This might have changed by know. After Softonic I started at Splendia, where I am still at. Splendia is a hotel booking website focusing on luxury hotels. The company is much smaller than Softonic in every respect.

Leaving Softonic

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:06:00 +0000

moving on

Pretty much exactly two years ago I started working for Softonic. I changed from the rather small opus5 to what has been the largest company I have worked for so far.

Working in a company of about 250 people with a development team of around 80 people is certainly a different beast. I learned a lot of things especially regarding scrum management and web technologies. I also learned that it is very difficult to change things once something big like this is in motion.

2012 New Year's Resolutions

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:06:00 +0000

It is that time of the year again where I make up stuff to ignore for the following twelve months. Last year I didn’t do it, but this year I will give it another try. I has been pointed out that these kind of resolutions doesn’t really fit into the agile way of making decisions that I do subscribe to in my professional life. I will again try to make follow up posts to check how I am doing during the year and possibly adjust the goals.

Calm

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 15:49:00 +0000

Before:

#include

int main(void) { printf(“Hello world\n”); return 0; }

After:

<>;;.""(()){}# 0 acddddeeefhiiiiiillllmnnnnnnooooprrrrsttttuuvw H

Test Ride Triumph Tiger 800 XC

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 18:06:00 +0000

I had my test ride of a 800XC today. I took it on my usual routes through Barcelona and Collserola.

I must say it is a very nice bike. Compared to my current more agricultural Yamaha XV 1600 (picture of my bike fully packed) the motor feels like an electric drive and it handles like my mountain bike. The motor is quite boring in a good way, but missing the kick of my current one. While the handling is really appreciated, the Yamaha really doesn’t like corners. Ideally you drive up to a corner and find someone to lift it and turn it around. It also loves to follow any lines on the road and kills your behind with any bump, while the XC ignores all of this very nicely.

International PHP Conference 2011 Spring Edition impressions

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 16:44:00 +0000

I planned to post this a lot earlier, but I wanted to do the presentation at Softonic first and I am also very lazy.

My employer was so nice to send a colleague and me to the International PHP Conference 2011 Spring Edition in Berlin this year. It was a three day conference. There also was one day of workshops, which we skipped. We also skipped most of the keynotes, because most of them were in German and didn’t seem very useful.

sphinx search config scripts

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 14:45:00 +0000

I just finished converting the bikesoup search to use the sphinx search engine instead of a simple doctrine fulltext search with filters.

One thing I found helpful are sphinx config scripts. Instead of hard-coding the configuration you can use any scripting language to produce the sphinx configuration. They just have to start with #! and sphinx will execute them and use the output as the configuration.

This is the simplified version of my main config file /etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf:

Symfony RPM for Fedora and RHEL

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 16:54:00 +0000

I am a big fan of Fedora and the PHP Symfony framework. Quite early I decided that it would be nice to have Symfony packaged as a Fedora package. What I didn’t realize was how long it would take me.

I submitted my Package Review Request on the 12.8.2009. One of the first comments pointed to me to an older request, which was abandoned because the packager run into some difficulties with the Fedora guidelines. But

Tumi Alpha International Wheeled Office Review

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 15:48:00 +0000

International Wheeled Office with cable pouch

To go with my new Lenovo T510 I now also bought a carry-on with space for the laptop. As it goes with purchases like this I spend a lot of time researching them on the net, it just seems to be the German or nerd to do. Also quite typical for a German is to choose something which is of better quality than you need, but also not the most expensive one out there. Other bags I considered where by Rimowa, Victorinox, Samsonite and Briggs & Riley. The reason why I am writing about this at all is that the Tumi website doesn’t include the information I needed and there seems to be a lack of information about this bag on the, so this is more about the facts as an actual review.

Why I am deactivating my facebook account

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 13:35:00 +0000

I have decided to deactivate my facebook account. It isn’t done yet, so this message gets through and I am also waiting for the download of my information.

The reason is not a concern about privacy. I am sure that facebook is doing all kind of evil stuff with the information I provide them, but my guess most of this is used to present me with ads to make some money for them. I think that facebook is probably the site with the best privacy settings out there. Every other site I am using from small forums over job sites to other network sites like xing or linkedin, doesn’t provide anywhere near the privacy options that facebook provides. And none of them in under the scrutiny that facebook has to face all the time.

Fedora 14 on a Lenovo Thinkpad T510

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 20:11:00 +0000

[IMAG0206 by Jemimus, on Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/jemimus/5122707603/)

Another brand new toy. After my last trip to the UK for bikesoup I decided that it was about time to get a proper laptop. So far I only have a netbook, which is very convenient when size and weight matter. But for getting work done it is just to small, the main problem is the screen size and resolution. I had a look around for good full sized laptops and the only brands producing something with the quality I had in mind were Apple and Lenovo. The advantages of the Apple over Lenovo are better built quality, battery life and easy to buy locally. I choose the Lenovo, because you can order it with more gadgets, swappable batteries and mostly because it isn’t an Apple as I despise where the company is going and I already had bad experiences with Linux and iPods. This is the configuration I finally got.

Kindle and ebooks

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 22:37:00 +0000

I was planning to buy an ebook reader for a while. I mean it is 2010 and if we don’t have flying cars at least everyone should have a robot and not read from dead trees.

It took me a while because I wasn’t able to decide on a brand and when I decided on Amazon I couldn’t decide on which Kindle to get. My girlfriend took the decision off me by giving me a Kindle 3G+Wifi for my birthday. So here is a quick review.

git workflow for the bikesoup project

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 10:10:00 +0000

I have been one of the many converts to git and try to use it whenever possible. So far this has been mostly for smaller project, open source projects, Fedora and a little bit at work.

bikesoup is my first bigger project using git. I started with initial development on the master branch and created feature branches which got merged back into master. Before going live for the first time I created a live branch. This is pretty much what you would do in subversion too, maybe with the exception of any feature branches.

bikesoup

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 09:47:00 +0000

Yesterday one of my side projects went live: www.bikesoup.co.uk .

Last December Anthony approached me about doing the site and I agreed to work on it in my free time. It took a while, but this included finding a designer ( d2tstudio ), going through the process of finding a feature set for the launch and the programming. And all of this while I started my new proper job at Softonic, which means I didn’t really have as much time to invest in it as I would have liked.

Can Kenji

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 14:26:00 +0000

Today I tried a restaurant which has been on my list for a while. Firstly because it is just one block away from my flat and second because it seems to be one of the few authentic Japanese restaurants in Barcelona.

Can Kenji is located in an ugly tower block near Passeig de Sant Joan in the Eixample district. If you don’t know it is there it will be difficult to find. The restaurant itself is pretty small with just a handful of tables and a bar at the tiny kitchen.

Batik

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 15:24:00 +0000

Checked out another Asian restaurant this Friday.

The menu contains a selection of Korean, Thai and Malaysian dishes.

I went for the lunch menu again, which was a Laksa Lemak soup as starter and a merluza with sweet sauce. The soup was nice, the merluza rather bland. The deserts were the usual yoghurt/flan/cake selection, so I went for a coffee.

Because they are one of my favourite dishes I also ordered Thai spring rolls. These are served cold and show their ingredients through their translucent rice skin. Very nice and I will be back to see if the other a la carte dishes are as good.

Bembi

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 17:04:00 +0000

Onion Bhaji

Last week I finally checked out Bembi. It is supposed to be one of the few good Indian restaurants in Barcelona. As with Chinese restaurants it seems to be very difficult to find a good one in the rather large selection of Indian restaurants.

I went for the lunch menu, which probably doesn’t represent the overall quality because it is rather cheap at about 14€.

The restaurant itself is nicely decorated and non-smoking.

New Computer Toys

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:35:00 +0000

I treated myself to some nice new toys and I am very happy with them, so here comes a short review.

Logitech G9x Laser Mouse

I already have a G9 at home, which is the best mouse I ever used. It is really a gamer mouse, but the high resolution laser, free rolling scroll wheel and the cable make it perfect for programming and desktop use. It also comes with adjustable weights, which helps to make it feel just right. I just bought a new one because I wanted to replace the G5 I had at work with this one.

Pulpo and Tomatoes Salad

Sat, 15 May 2010 16:33:00 +0000

While my girlfriend is away on holiday I use the opportunity to eat the things she hates. Today a quick little octopus salad. The idea for this one is from my sister.

200g pulpo (octopus), boiled and cleaned
3 tomatoes
1 small onion
1 lime
pepper
light soy sauce
sesame oil
lots of fresh coriander

Cut the octopus and tomatoes into slices and small pieces. Slice onion. Add juice of lime, coriander, a little bit of soy sauce and sesame oil. Pepper to taste.

2010 Triannually New Year's resolutions update

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:01:00 +0000

This year I am doing the updates every four months and April is nearly over, so here it goes.

1. Loose weight: going very well. I dropped from an average weight of 79 to 74.7kg and moved from “overweight” to “normal weight” BMI category. I didn’t my lifestyle too much, I just eat and snack a bit less. One big helper has been the physics diet website, which keeps a nice average graph and helps me to stay motivated. I just have to go another 1.7kg to reach my goal for the year.

New Job: Softonic

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:40:00 +0000

This week I started my new job at Softonic.

After three years at opus5 I decided that it was time to move on. I learned a lot in this time and as I like to say, a lot of things I really never wanted to learn. I worked in a great team and wish them all the luck for the future (And in case you are looking for a PHP job, I am sure they are looking for more people).

Marrakesh

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:05:00 +0000

Katja and I spend the last few days in Marrakesh. We were looking for a cheap holiday in a not too cold country and Morocco was pretty much the only choice.

The flight to Morocco was with Ryan Air. I already knew how much I hate them, but they confirmed it again.

We stayed at a small hotel Riad Alksar in the Medina. A Riad is a house with a courtyard and the rooms build around it. It doesn’t have any large windows to the outside. The area of the hotel is pretty poor with the exception of a handful of similar hotels. The hotel has eight rooms and each of these would usually house a family. Our host was very nice and the hotel clean and with a minimal design. One of the perks is the roof terrace, which we used a lot to chill and for breakfast.

Surprises

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:45:00 +0000

Once in the while I do something I haven’t done for a while and get surprised by how much fun it is.

Today I wanted to get the ITV (Spanish motorcycle inspection), which has been overdue for a while. I didn’t do it because I haven’t used it for a while and can’t used it because I didn’t have the ITV.

Turns out that I needed an appointment, so I run some errands. I got a new zoo membership card and cancelled my old gym. This took me with the motorbike down and along the beach. The weather was beautiful and it was reasonable warm. I saw the beach, smelled the sea and felt the Barcelona air in my face.

Fedora and PHP QA

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 16:14:00 +0000

After hearing again about many QA tools at the 2009 PHP Barcelona conference I decided that it would be nice if these would be available through packages on Fedora (and through EPEL on RHEL).

Turns out that the most important ones were already packaged, some needed a new packager, some were waiting for review and a few still need to be packaged.

Here are the once already available, with the packager name:

2010 New Year's resolutions

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:55:00 +0000

by boite-en-valise

A new year means new resolutions. But first a quick look back at the ones from last year.

On the fail side: I didn’t loose weight, neither did I use my motorcycle more or took a lot more advantage of Barcelona. Success on: sorting out my music collection, travelling somewhere new, doing more programming and blogging a bit more.

2000 to 2009

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:34:00 +0000

Now that another decade comes to an end, it is time for me to see if the ten years really were worth the effort. Overall it seems to have been more pain than was strictly necessary.

2000 - it all started quite nice. I just turned 30 and was living in London, just got together with my girlfriend and working for guideguide a very nice start-up which was going quite well at the time. One highlight of the year was a trip to OSCON in California, where I witnessed the beginning of Perl6, which seemed brilliant at the time and now appears a bit pointless.

Fedora 12

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 13:25:00 +0000

Fedora now has been out for a few weeks and I can summarize my experience with it a bit.

I have installed it on four machines: - netbook (Eee PC 901) new install with a 32bit live USB stick - media centre (ancient custom AMD Duron) upgrade with the 32bit DVD - home PC (AMD Phenom 9350e) upgrade with the 64bit DVD - work PC (Dell Intel) with 64bit preupgrade

Barcelona PHP Conference Day 2 #phpbcn2009

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:07:00 +0000

Even shorter summary of the second day of the Barcelona PHP conference. (see here for day 1)

Zend_Cache… by Enrico Zimuel

This was a introduction to the cache component of the Zend framework. It pretty much does what you expect: it wraps the common types of caching ( file, apc, memcached, …) into a common API to make them easy to swap and use. It also has helper objects to support caching of PHP output with output buffering.

Barcelona PHP Conference Day 1 #phpbcn2009

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:12:00 +0000

First day of phpconference.es is finished and it was very enjoyable. The location was the same as last year, so was the quality of the organization. I saw six talks, here are small summaries:

KISS by Derick Rethans: Pretty much a beginners, introduction and common sense talk. Most of it not even directly relevant to PHP. A bit of a disappointment, might have been more interesting for customers than developers.

No slides up yet, but they were very similar to these: Kiss Phpnw08 Trees in the database by Lorenzo Alberton:

New hobby: OpenStreetMapping

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:03:00 +0000

I always loved the idea behind OpenStreetMap. Mostly because of my open source experience and sites Wikipedia, these show that with enough people doing a little bit of work in the area they know, it is possible to create results which are better and more free than the conventional commercial offerings.

I remember the time in London, when we had our little start-up and needed location maps for our customers and couldn’t find a good provider for this (there was no google maps or map24 at that time). So fools that we were we decided to write it ourself. We got the raw data on CD from TeleAtlas and one of our programmers got pretty far with a renderer. But before we could get anything useful map24 produced a much better version which we started using. But I always have been frustrated by the lack of open map data and open source renderers.

Untitled

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:17:00 +0000

Another look at my New Year resolutions. I decided to do them every four months now, every three was a bit much.

loose weight fail - I am doing more mountain biking and eat sensible, but I gave up on the gym. Working out with my N79 Active turned out to be a lot of fun.

use my motorcycle more a little bit more use, small trips and some usage in town. Now I need to get a new ITV.

Summer Holiday Cádiz

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 12:53:00 +0000

Last week Cat and I went to Cádiz for our Summer holiday.

It was just a week this year and we didn’t really decide what to do this year until the last minute. It was either a motorcycle tour around Catalonia, France or a short flight to somewhere in Europe.

Because Cat likes the Atlantic and we had never been to the very South of Spain we decided to take the Trenhotel night train from Barcelona to Cádiz and rent a car there for a few days. We booked train and car and I also bought a backpack and some trekking shoes for the trip.

Happy Cat

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:24:00 +0000

reusing this blog as playground

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:23:00 +0000

I am not using it anyway

Nokia N79 Active

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:20:00 +0000

Recently I started using twitter, facebook and blogs more and I got a little bit annoyed that I couldn’t update those sites with my mobile phone. And then my digital camera died on me, which resulted in no new photos by me in the last couple of months. The final point which made me want to get a new fancy phone was me getting lost on Tibidabo without a GPS.

Gravlax

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:55:00 +0000

Simple gravlax recipe:

two pieces of salmon with skin on
dill (handful)
sea salt (two tablespoon)
crushed pepper corns (two tablespoon)
sugar (one tablespoon)

cut dill, mix with salt and pepper. Put one piece of salmon skin down on large bit of cling-film. cover with the mix, put other salmon on top. wrap everything tight in cling-film. Off into the fridge and put something on top to weight it down.

The Big Digitization Of Cassette Tapes

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:01:00 +0000

Today I finally finished digitizing all of my techno and house cassette tapes. It took me a little bit over two months. Here are some statistics:

290 “a” sides
278 “b” sides (sometimes the tapes broke after the first side)
12 tapes which unusable
41 tapes which turned out to be copies of CDs which are available to buy
5 tapes were copies of stuff I have also on CDs which are not available to buy
8 tapes had unreadable labels
249 GB in 16 bit 48khz WAVE files
the whole list

I probably still have some tapes flying around somewhere and my girlfriend also has some, but the vast majority of my music is digitized now. The music is mainly mixed techno and house DJ sets, from my friends like DJ Gomez, Motik and Nitin. A lot of sets are recorded from radio like HR3/HRXXL and Hithouse Stuttgart and in clubs around Stuttgart and Cologne. The most popular DJs are Sven Vaeth, Roland Casper, Richie Hawtin, DJ Hello, Dag, and Laurent Garnier.

Quick weekend hack: statistics on Richie Hawtins DJ set tweets

Sun, 03 May 2009 08:34:00 +0000

Richie Hawtin recently started to post the records he is playing on twitter. He is using Traktor while he plays, which now has a new plugin which allows this functionality. Others have posted about this and what it means for techno music enthusiasts, DJs and the music industry.

I think it is one of the few good applications of twitter and I decided to hack something together to display this information in a little bit nicer way.

Spaghetti with clams and aioli

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:38:00 +0000

New recipe for me, inspired by something I saw Rick Stein doing in some cookery show.

Put clams in a hot pan, add a cup of white wine. Cover and cook until they opened. Drain with a colander, but keep the liquid. Discard the clams which did not open.

Put some spaghetti or tagliatelle into a pot with boiling water and cook according to package instructions.

Meanwhile put one sliced onion and some sliced garlic into a pan with olive oil and fry them until soft. I added some small and medium peeled prawns and some leftover cod pieces. Then add the clams with shells and the white wine liquid you kept. Finally add some aioli. Season with salt pepper and herbs.

Quarterly resolutions review

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 08:59:00 +0000

Ok, lets see how I am doing on my New Year resolutions:

loose weight not much to see there. I think it is mainly because I am not going to the gym enough and haven’t started mountain biking yet because of various illnesses. But I am teetotal now, so that should make a difference in the future.

use my motorcycle more that is a no. I blame it on the weather.

Radio & Talk Podcasts

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:28:00 +0000

This is the second list of podcasts. These are all the talk, radio and video podcasts I listen too. At the moment I have a bit of a problem of lacking behind. This is a sign of me skipping the gym to often.

It is a mix of news, technology, documentary and comedy. Most of the podcasts are from the BBC

Apple Keynotes rss www
Book Reviews With Simon Mayo rss www
Broadcasting House rss www
Daily Mayo rss www
Digital Planet rss www
Discovery rss www
Documentaries rss www
Excess Baggage rss www
From Our Own Correspondent rss www
Gastrocast rss www
Global News rss www
Great Lives rss www
H&M Fashion TV rss www
In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg rss www
iTunes: Meet the Author rss www
John Cleese Podcast rss www
Jonathan Ross rss www
Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s Film Reviews rss www
Men.Style.com: Fashion, Gear & Style for Men rss www
One Planet rss www
Open Voices: The Linux Foundation Podcast rss www
Open Web Podcast rss www
Pods and Blogs rss www
Radio 1 Stories rss www
Radio 4 Choice rss www
Russell Brand rss www
Science in Action rss www
Snowmail Podcast rss www
Start the Week with Andrew Marr rss www
Stephen Fry’s PODGRAMS rss www
The Economist rss www
The Film Programme rss www
The Moth Podcast rss www
Thinking Allowed rss www
World Book Club rss www
You and Yours - Environment rss www

Amsterdam

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:11:00 +0000

View Larger Map

I returned yesterday from a four day trip to Amsterdam. As I met my Cat there we tend to go every February and celebrate our anniversary.

The last years we stayed at the Winston Hostel in the red light district, but last years experience was so bad that we looked for something new this time.

We found the Sunhead 1617, which is a nice small B&B in the centre of town. I tried to book the red room, which has views of the canal, but because of some confusion we ended up in the yellow room. I suggest you book early and get the red room, because our room contained some kind of boiler which was extremely annoying. And bring backpacks instead of a suitcase, because the stairs really are steep. Otherwise the B&B was perfect, the rooms was nicely decorated, the bed comfy, the breakfast was very good with home made jams and fruit yogurt. Our host Carlos was also very nice, even though we annoyed him on the first day by getting up at eleven for a very late breakfast.

eZ winter conference

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:26:00 +0000

Today I went to the eZ International Winter Conference here in Barcelona. Mainly because it was local, free and I quite liked the last PHP conference I went to. The location was the old centre of commerce near the Estacion Francia. It is a beautiful location and I am glad I was able to see it from the inside once. The conference room was certainly fit for the G7 or signing of peace treaties. (I will try to find some pictures on flickr later).

Snowboarding Laax

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:22:00 +0000

Yesterday Cat and I returned from our week long snowboard trip to Laax.

First we flew to Stuttgart and visited Marion and Bernd in Balingen, where we met up with the other guys who took us by car and van to Laax. The weather on the way looked a bit disappointing, with not much snow until the last corner to Laax.

We were staying at the same hostel as last time, it is the Mountain Hostel Laax. It is situated in the middle of the ski area at the first stop of the cable car. The accommodation and food is basic, but you don’t really need much more anyway. This time we had a two bed room, which was a lot nicer than the sharing with four people of last year. The room could have done with more changes of towels or linnen though.

Weired conversations

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:07:00 +0000

Strange conversation on yahoo messenger. I used Eliza for the replies, but the guy gave up too quickly.

(1:58:24 PM) hidden: I’m really sorry that I said those things, honey, but I just lost control of myself. You know as well as I do that I have struggled with anger since my childhood, when my mom died and my dad started to abuse me. I just want you to know that I’m sorry, and that you should take me back. And if your answer is no, then you’re a giant bitch. (2:01:23 PM) cdamian: Do you wish that my answer is no then your’re a giant bitch? (2:01:50 PM) hidden: porn (2:02:06 PM) cdamian: Please go on. (2:02:34 PM) hidden: no (2:02:47 PM) cdamian: You are being a bit negative.

New Year's resolutions (Part 2)

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:47:00 +0000

I forgot one:

Take more advantage of Barcelona I did not spend enough time in the Zoo and the Park or the Beach this year. And I did not use the Chiringuitos, museums or open air cinema. There is a lot of stuff to do and I don’t want it to be like London where I did everything in the last two months.

New Year's resolutions

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 08:32:00 +0000

One of the traditions of celebrating the New Year (besides getting drunk and making a fool of yourself) are of course the resolutions for the next twelve months. So here are mine:

loose weight as a rule this always have to come first and I don’t want to be the one breaking it. As I think I am eating healthy enough and I am probably not going to be able to change much of it this has to be achieved with more exercise, so more cycling and the gym. I will also reduce the amount of alcohol I consume.

Sonar 2009 - krass.com

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:44:00 +0000

The Sonar 2009 - krass.com pages are up. This is probably the last time I do this, as it is just too much work and nobody else is helping me with the wiki.

Sonar is doing a special offer of 125 EUR for the general pass for the three days. The normal price is 140, which is the same as last year. Maybe they realize that they can’t raise it every year. Some of the parties were very empty last year.

more server tuning

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 11:29:00 +0000

In my quest to try out new things and make my rented virtual server run a bit smoother I tried two (for me) new tools:

memcached: I never had a need to use it, because at work we just do websites which nobody looks at. We could really have used this at guideguide, where we basically used mysql to cache some often used data which didn’t work too well.

Installation was very easy on CentOS and mediawiki and Django have direct support for memcached. I just had to enable it and change the code for api.bicingwatch.com to make use of the cache.

Paris Condal - Restaurant Libanese

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:57:00 +0000

View Larger Map

Another lunchtime restaurant review. I ventured over the Gran Via again on the look out for a new restaurant choice for our lunches at work.

Paris Condal is a small restaurant with an attached snack bar. They got pictures of some food in the window, which usually puts me off, but I had a good experience in Andorra so I went in anyway. The restaurant has maybe ten tables and smoking is allowed. I don’t understand why anyone would have smokers in a restaurant, but there you go. The bathrooms are dirty like a dark corner in Raval.

System administration sucks

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 22:29:00 +0000

This weekend I moved more websites away from my old dedicated server. The site of my girlfriend moved from mediawiki to a blogger.com account. Our family website is now a planet running on the new virtual server.

And today I moved http://krass.com/ also to the virtual server. This turned out to be a major hassle, because the mediawiki version was pretty old and the mysql server changed from 4.1 to 5.0. As usual with these things I run into charset troubles. After playing for ages with various combinations of iconv and mysqldump I gave up and put a ‘SET names latin1’ after the connect in the mediawiki code. This is obviously not a good solution, but I can’t be bothered at the moment.

Snowboarding in Andorra

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:41:00 +0000

Last week Cat had the brilliant idea to go snowboarding in Andorra for the weekend. The snow conditions were just turning right and the Grand Valira snow resort was opening the lifts for the first time this year. So we booked a car, hotel and the ski passes and left for Andorra on Friday evening. To our surprise it was a very quick trip because there was not a single traffic jam.

New computer and Fedora 10

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 19:12:00 +0000

My new computer has finally arrived and last weekend I had time to put it together. With the Fedora 10 release this week I should be having a good time now. Here is what I got:

Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe AMD 790FX / SB600
4GB RAM
AMD Phenom X4 9350e
Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate
2 * Western Digital Caviar WD10EADS 1TB
a couple of new Papst fans

I tried to order things which save a little bit of power and are easier to cool so I can run them quieter. I also decided on a ATI graphics card because they are releasing information about their hardware and are not stuck in the past like Nvidia.

my first python website

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:06:00 +0000

api.bicingwatch.com has now been up for two weeks. It is a small site with just a handful of html views and some JSON views.

I also use python now to scrape the bicing.com website and store the results in a mysql database. This does not include the data I had already collected over the last year, which I will import soon.

Today I also enabled disqus commenting on the station pages. I originally planned to write this myself, but this is way quicker and I can always change to the django commenting system later.

Han In - Korean

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:05:00 +0000

View Larger Map

Because my last restaurant review was so successful here is another one. It was also mentioned on the Python Meetup that it is a bit difficult to find good restaurants in Barcelona, because most of them are mediocre, especially for the lunch menu.

I have been there now four times and the food was always good and the service excellent. The lunch menu is very good value for money. For about 10 Euro you get a good sized starter, a main, dessert and a soft drink or wine.

Paella

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:41:00 +0000

This is my recipe for paella. The picture was the most recent one I made. It was not perfect because it is my largest pan and it gets a bit difficult. I used two other recipes I found on-line and combined them.

olive oil
2 chicken breasts cut in dices
2 onions diced
300 g paella rice
750 ml chicken stock
saffron
handful frozen peas
1/2 green pepper
1/2 red pepper
mixed seafood: squid, prawns, octopus, mussels, shrimps, fish
parsley
dry white wine
lemon

Heat a paella or other big flat pan. Add olive oil and fry chicken for 2-3 minutes. Push to the side of the pan, add onions and fry until golden. Season with salt and pepper, but not too much as the stock is probably seasoned too.

A clean desk is the sign of a sick mind!

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:26:00 +0000

My current home office setup. The newest addition is the Samsung 245b 24" 1920x1200 TFT display. It is probably not the best one around, but is pretty good for the stuff which I do, which is mostly programming.

The main computer is an old Athlon XP 2400. I am currently waiting for replacement parts. I brought most of the stuff with me from London, which means it is from 2003 or older. At the moment the machine is running Fedora 9, but will be upgraded to Fedora 10 once it is out and the parts arrive. I think the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 is the only Microsoft product I use. It is the UK version, because I can’t get used to the local versions. The mouse is a Logitech G9, just upgraded from a G5. I am not sure about the G9 just yet, the previous mouse somehow feels better in my hand.

The free world has a new leader (elect)

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 08:32:00 +0000

I am glad about the result and this shows that the USA can be a leader in democracy. My guess is that will take a long time until we see a president in a European country who is not white.

The news also speak about the amazing high turnout in this election. This might be high for the US, but does not seem so high for the rest of the world.

La Generalitat estudia obligar a los usuarios del Bicing a llevar casco | El Periódico de Catalunya | Barcelona

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:50:00 +0000

La Generalitat estudia obligar a los usuarios del Bicing a llevar casco | El Periódico de Catalunya | Barcelona: “El conseller de Interior, Joan Saura, ha manifestado hoy que en ’estos momentos’ el Govern mantiene conversaciones con el Ayuntamiento de Barcelona para hacer balance del servicio del Bicing, y ‘considerar la posibilidad’ de obligar a los usuarios a llevar casco.” – That should put a stop at the problem of too many users at least.

tapetransfer

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:05:00 +0000

Even though my good tape decks are broken at the moment I have started on the software to transfer my techno and house mix tapes to the computer.

I have written the software before in C++. It basically waits for a sound on the input and then writes the music to a file until it notices a long quiet section at the end of the tape and stops writing. The software was using threads and used the lame lib to do on the fly mp3 encoding, to make it even quicker to digitize tape. It also notified the user of any buffer underflows and clipped samples.

Everything breaks

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:37:00 +0000

First my nice 32" LCD TV broke, which is annoying. But the TV is easily replaceable, it just takes some money. At the moment I am just using an old 21" CRT TV monitor instead, because it is no good to work on any more.

But now my beloved Sony TC-KA6ES tape deck broke. It was the best tape deck Sony ever produced. A three motor, three head and Dolby B/C/S monster with manual tape calibration and a weight of half a ton.

eee pc 901

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 07:20:00 +0000

I progressed a step further in my quest to upgrade my computer systems at home from the outdated and unusable ones I am have at the moment. My workstation is way to slow and has a broken CRT and I have nothing portable at all.

Thursday before the phpconference I bought a Eee PC 901 (Linux version of course). As I am planning to get a proper desktop computer with a big screen for my home desk, I just needed something to take to conferences, on trips and maybe sometimes into town. I also use it at home to browse the web, when I don’t want to sit on my desk.

green&wich

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:15:00 +0000

I tried a new restaurant for lunch today to expand the current set of choices. (not everything on there is good)

It is called green&wich, located at C/Villaroel and Gran Via, they don’t seem to have a website yet. The location is nice, the space is open to the busy street, the design is minimal and the chairs and tables are a bit wobbly.

They have two menus. I went for the 7.90 one, which gives you a salad, a sandwich, drink and a coffee. I had a rocket, tomato and parmesan salad, which was soggy but still had hard stems in it. A pretty awful combination. The “asia” sandwich was ok, but not much better than the packaged ones you get in the supermarket. Barcelona really does need a Pret-A-Manger to show the locals what fresh a sandwich looks like. I had a cortado for coffee, which still contained coffee powder.

comparing class syntax in C++, Java, PHP, Perl and Python

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:08:00 +0000

As I recently started learning Python one of the things I noticed which I didn’t like is the class syntax. So I wrote some minimal hello world programs in the languages I recently used to show the difference:

C++ hello.cc

#include <iostream>

class Hello {
private:
    char *value;

public:
    Hello(char *newvalue) {
        value = newvalue;
    }

    void hello() {
        std::cout << this->value;
    }
};

int main() {
    Hello hello("hello\n");
    hello.hello();
}

I like the C++ syntax, it is the language which introduced me to OOP and it clearly states what bits are what without too wordy syntax.

phpconference.es

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:33:00 +0000

I just returned from the Barcelona phpconference.es . It was a small on day conference, with just a few talks and not many big names. It was also really cheap at 20€. The organization was very good, especially for Spain. It was held at citilab in Cornellà Centre, which is at the very end of one of the metro lines. There were two rooms with parallel talks. The talks were all in english, which was a change from the last PHP conference. Wifi was available everywhere and there were free drinks and food.

My music podcast selection

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:48:00 +0000

This are the music podcasts I am listening too at the moment. It is mostly techno, but also house and some dub. And whatever last.fm thinks I would enjoy.


dailysession	http://dailysession.com/?feed=podcast
DE:BUG POD - a netaudio podcast	http://www.de-bug.de/pod/wp-rss2.php
electro house & house & techno mix	http://djbene.podspot.de/rss
Galaktika Records Podcast: Minimal, Electro and House hottests tunes!	http://www.galaktikarecords.com/podcast.xml
Ibiza Voice Music Box	http://www.ibiza-voice.com/music/rss_podcast.php
Last.fm free recommended downloads for cdamian’s	http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/cdamian/podcast.xml
Minimal(maximal) Techno DJ mixes by Louis de Bourbon	http://www.graphicjuice.co.uk/podcast/podcast.xml
MinimalNet	http://www.minimalnet.org/feed
Minus Podcast:	http://m-nus.com/podcast.xml
NetAudio Russia	http://www.netaudio.ru/feed
Resident Advisor podcast	http://www.residentadvisor.net/xml/podcast.xml
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Acid	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/acid/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Breaks	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/breaks/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - DJ-Mix	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/dj_mix/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Drum and Bass	http://starfrosch.chdownload_music/drum_and_bass/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Dub	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/dub/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Electronic	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/electronic/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - House	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/house/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Minimal	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/minimal/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Techno	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/techno/feed
the fabric podcast	http://feeds.fabriclondon.com/fabricpodcast

I would upload the OPML file, but blogger.com doesn’t allow attachments.

Staying with Linux

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:10:00 +0000

Recently I was affected by the Steve Job Reality Distortion Field. After watching the demonstration of the iPhone developer kit and the iPhone in general I wanted one too.

I thought I get myself a nice Apple Power Book or maybe an Air plus the iPhone and start developing. As it is also very much UNIX based I could still go to the command line if I want too and most of the tools I use every day are available on Max OS X and work very well.

M_NUS @ BAM

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 15:06:00 +0000

Went to see Magda, Gaiser and Richie Hawtin at the Red Bull Music Academy M_NUS @ BAM.

It started at midnight, which is a more civilised time than the usual 3:00 we get here in Barcelona.

Magda was very good, Gaiser was ok and Hawtin had his good moments. I think Hawtin now has the same problem as Sven Vaeth, he is just too popular and his productions and studio mix sessions are way better than his live sets. It is a pity, because I remember a lot of good parties with him a few years ago.

moving wikicalendar

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 17:26:00 +0000

I haven’t updated it for ages. To prepare for some small changes I moved it to google code. This also gives me subversion, which takes another bit of work of me.

The sandbox on krass.com will still serve as a testing area.

learning something new

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:50:00 +0000

I decided that it is about time to learn something new. For some reason I decided on python and django.

It might have something to do with the google app engine and because fedora uses a lot of python.

I made up a small project, which is easy to start, but can grow into something bigger later.

At my day job I use mainly php, including the cakephp framework. One thing which I am always missing is a proper ORM. I used to do a lot of perl coding and we developed our own ORM, which was very similar to Class::DBI.

learning something new

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:50:00 +0000

I decided that it is about time to learn something new. For some reason I decided on python and django.

It might have something to do with the google app engine and because fedora uses a lot of python.

I made up a small project, which is easy to start, but can grow into something bigger later.

Youscope (oscilloscope demo)

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 08:13:00 +0000

fix push

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:56:00 +0000

barcelona skate spots & shops

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 13:22:00 +0000

View Larger Map

are spanish rude?

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 18:46:00 +0000

After reading in other blogs about the apparent rudeness of the Spanish, I started thinking about this too. They seem to bump into you at every possible opportunity, they invade your personal space in queues, the beach, bars and restaurants.

But if you watch them in their cars or on their bikes you realize there might be another reason. They obviously spend a lot of money on their cars and keep them clean and tidy as this is an important status symbol. But they also have scratches and bumps all over them. So, if they are not doing this on purpose it has to be something else.

they got me

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:56:00 +0000

After living in Barcelona for three years the thieves finally got me. My wallet got stolen in a bar and I lost a few things, but nothing irreplaceable. But it gave me good idea how difficult it is to get certain cards replaced.

bicing card (did I mention that I love bicing?): easy to block and replace online. cost: 4 euro - Zoo Club Barcelona card: you have to go there and get a replacement. cost: 1 euro - La Caixa credit card: a call to block and replace, you have to go there and pick it up. cost: free - Gym card – not replaced yet

Next time I try to have even less cards with me.

my first gyoza

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 12:38:00 +0000

Very easy and very nice. You get the wrappers from an asia market. The filling consists of beef, spring onions, cabbage, sake, soy sauce, litte bit of sesame oil, pepper. The sauce is: soy souce, sake, rice vinegar, ginger and red chili. Put some oil in a cold pan, add the gyozas, a glass of water, cover it, put on the heat and wait till they look good.

6000 km on a skateboard

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 16:27:00 +0000

Dave Cornthwaite rode 6000 km on a carbon fibre skateboard through Australia. I probably would have fallen on my face roughly 600 times.

Numero De Seguridad Social

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 08:35:00 +0000

Picked up my social security number today. Nobody in the office could remember how they got theirs, so I had to google a bit around:

find your next “Administraciones de la Seguridad Social ” office - bring passport - bring N.I.E.

I went to my local office at C/Mercader 5, Barcelona. The lady at the desk was very nice and even spoke english. She was a bit surprised that I had a two year old N.I.E. and no social security number.

employed again

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 07:11:00 +0000

I see I have been really keeping up with this during my unemployment. Well, I did some freelance work.

I started a new job yesterday. The job is splitted between two companies one standard web design company, where I will be technical director and one open-source startup, where I will be just programming. The programming language is tcl, which I never worked with before, but seems to be the choice of the openacs system, which we use as the base for the system.

unemployed

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 09:08:00 +0000

First day of unemployment! Though it didn’t feel like it, because I had to scan & sort flyers for krass.com, maybe I really skip that service next year.

The weather isn’t nice today, I hope that this clears up for the sake of all the beach parties.

Sonar 2006

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 07:17:00 +0000

The parties for Sonar 2006 line up nicely. The krass.com sonar party listing contains again too much choice and will make this weekend rather unhealty.

This year I will concentrate on the beach and free parties, the only sonar party I will attend is the friday sonar by day event.

Today also some more details for the m_nus & bugged out! beach party on sunday showed up, with Richie Hawtin and Villalobos in the evening lineup.

prophet5

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 14:34:00 +0000

As always it is bloody difficult to make up a nice name for anything on this internet thing.

Finally I went for prophet5 which is a classic synth by Sequential Circuits (wikipedia page, hyperreal machines page).

In my old company we named all our workstations after the synths from the hyperreal list, so we got prophet5, tr606, tr808, sixtrak and so on. The only one who has survived (including name) is stratus. Our main web servers were called Vaeth and Hawtin BTW.

burocrazy in barca

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 14:23:00 +0000

Today I went to my local “Ajunament de Barcelona” office, the one for the “Districte de l’Eixample” to get my “Empadronamiento”.

It is a paper which says that I live where I live, which I need to register my motorcycle here. The motorcycle is still registered in the UK.

For this paper you’ll need (well, I did): * passport / id card * NIE paper * rental agreement * some current gas/water/electricity/rent bill

Another go at bloggin

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 13:59:00 +0000

Ok, I thought I have another go at blogging.

This time I have good reason though: I will be unemployed for the first time in my life after being employed by my first and only company for nearly ten years.

And I want to talk a bit about livin in Barcelona and stuff I do and find on the net.

So… lets see if this stays the only entry.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m an Engineering Leader with start-up experience, currently based in Barcelona. Previously I lived in London, and I’m originally from Germany.

On this blog I write about engineering leadership, urbanism, environment, cycling, food, and whatever else catches my attention — including a weekly Friday Links post with things I’ve been reading and listening to.

Find me online:

my CV
christof@damian.net
@cdamian@rls.social on Mastodon
LinkedIn
GitHub — open-source tools for automation, integrations, and home lab projects
Strava

Outside of work I spend my time road cycling and mountain biking, cooking, and listening to electronic music. I also read a lot — see my podcast roll, blog roll, and yearly book round-ups.

Blog Roll

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Art

Comic

Cycling

Engineering

Food

Leadership

Linux

Miscellaneous

Music

News

Retrocomputing

Zarf Updates

Tools

Urbanism

Podcast Roll

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cycling

Urbanism

Tech & Engineering

CoRecursive: Coding Stories
Distributed.
Internet Archive - Collection: famous-computer-cafe (inactive, last: 2024-08)
The Pragmatic Engineer
Thoughtworks Technology Podcast