Friday Links

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

More Uninterrupted Time At Work for You and Your Organization - good summary about what you and your organization can do to reduce interruptions

When your coworker does great work, tell their manager  - tell everybody!

Antifragile - Manage Your Team Under Pressure: Adam Wolff (VP of Engineering, Robinhood) [Podcast]

Empowering Your Team to Lead Fulfilling Lives with Vlad Magdalin, CEO of Webflow [Podcast]

Technology

The State of Ruby 3 Typing - Is it just me or does this look awful and awkward?

A long list of GRUB2 secure-boot holes - this looks painful and you might not want to update your CentOS / RHEL yet.

Mycroft: an open-source voice assistant - this doesn't seem to fix the privacy issues and there are seem to be some problems with the company as whole

Highlights from Git 2.28 - default branch can be something besides 'master' now, speed ups with bloom filters and small feature improvements  

Remote working

The Implications of Working Without an Office - “What impact has working from home had on productivity and creativity?”

Google employees will work from home until at least summer 2021 - with the state the States are in at the moment this is not really surprising, it will be interesting to see how this will shape Silicon Valley in the future. 

Our remote work future is going to suck - it will probably suck, for some people more than others and the jury is still out if it will suck more or less than office work

Urbanism

A COVID-19 story in Amsterdam written by bike - Lot of photos. I love the one titled "Heavy Police presence during COVID-19"

Sant Cugat finançarà el 50% de la compra de bicicletes - small city close to Barcelona is supporting bike purchases, they also used the opportunity of the current crisis to expand their cycling network

Dutch city redraws its layout to prepare for global heating effects - with governments doing not a lot it is up to cities to react, this is happening all over the world

France to ban heated terraces in cafes and bars - I think they are also regulating air conditioning, but I can't find it now.

There seems to be a change coming in the UK with a new "cycling revolution", though this doesn't seem to be backed up with new money.

• Cycling ambitions for England move up a gear with No 10 plans
• Residents to get new decision-making powers in cycling ‘revolution’
• What do Highway Code proposals mean for pedestrians and cyclists?

Random Flights

Microsoft’s Flight Simulator is a ticket to explore the world again - I used to play this on the Amiga back in the day. When I say "play" I mean: lift off, fly for ages over a landscape that always looks the same and then crash into the ground when trying to land. I wonder if this runs on anything i have.

Tim Bray: Not an Amazon Problem

Amazon is a perfectly OK company, to the extent that planetary-scale sprawling corporate behemoths can be perfectly OK in 2020. Which is to say, not OK at all.

Garmin was targeted by a ransomware attack. Nobody is quite sure if they handled it well or not. There was a definitely a lack of communication during the outage from Thursday to Monday! It is also not clear if they paid the ransom, which would be illegal in the US.

• Garmin outage caused by confirmed WastedLocker ransomware attack
• Garmin obtains decryption key after ransomware attack
• Garmin Hack’s $10M Ransom Payment, $10M Tax Deduction

Schneier: Images in Eye Reflections

In Japan, a cyberstalker located his victim by enhancing the reflections in her eye, and using that information to establish a location.

Friday Links Disclaimer

Inclusion of links does not imply that I agree with the content of linked articles or podcasts. I am just interested in all kind of perspectives. If you follow the link posts over time you might notice common themes though.

More about the links in a separate post: About Friday Links.

My Workspace

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.

Desk

My basic desk set-up is always the same. This is the first time I have two big screens, but I always have the same keyboard, headphones and mouse.

I think this goes back to at least 2000.

In our currently closed office I have the same again and when I start a new job I usually bring the devices with me as not every company lets you freely choose.

The computer is always running the current version of Fedora Linux, often upgraded over many years.

1. Dell Monitor U2719DC UltraSharp. I really just wanted one of these as I still had another very old monitor. This one came with a pixel error and Amazon send a replacement, but never managed to get the pick-up of the broken one sorted. So now I have two and use the one with the broken pixel for the not important stuff, like Slack. I think the broken pixel is not even a broken pixel, but an insect stuck between the layers - a real bug.

2. Dell Monitor U2719DC UltraSharp - the nice one, which has my browser, shell and Emacs.

3. Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 GB layout - while I am always looking for new fancy hacker keyboards I have stuck with this one. I have another one in storage in case this one breaks.

4. Logitech Mouse G502 Hero - my mice and keyboard are always wired, which limits choice a bit. I have pretty big hands and like a mouse that fills them.

5. Logitech Mousepad G440 - matchy-matchy with the mouse. I could do with a smaller one, because of the hight DPI of the mouse.
6. Sony Headphones MDR-1RBT - I am a bit addicted to headphones. I have three different Sony MDR-1 versions (RBT, ABT and R). I love the fit and sound.

7. PC AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB, 1TB, build up recently, also has a cheap fanless graphics card

8. Chair - from my first job/start-up, still works

9. APC BX1400U-GR Back-UPS BX, power outages and brownouts are quite common in Spain and even more so in the countryside. This protects the computer, there is another one for the routers and NAS.

a. Fleximounts F6 monitor arm for laptop - it works, not a lot of movement

b. Fleximounts F6D monitor arms for screens - same for two devices

c. Logitech C920 HD Pro - I am lucky I ordered this in time, it works, I probably won't upgrade any time soon. The Logitech Brio is also silly expensive.

Support

Not directly related to work, but supporting the main computer.

d. Thinkpad T430s on a arm and T470s on the floor - laptops from work, I use them in the office and here when I need another small screen or different device. One of them also has Windows on a partition for devices that require Windows for firmware upgrades

e. AmazonBasics paper shredder - goes together with the messy GTD stack on my desk, everything that I don't file goes into this one.

f. Synology DS218+ - backup of the computer, Syncthing backup, all my music and films.

g. USB Charging station (with Raspbery Pi running Syncthing on top), with various USB-A, micro-usb, and USB-C connectors and one for Garmin watches

h. Rubbish router from provider

i. AmpliFi HD Router - super simple set-up, annoyingly only with a mobile, supports multiple mesh repeaters that are all over the house

j. HP OfficeJet Pro 9010 - maybe I should have gone for a laser? I don't really print a lot

k. Thermometer / Barometer - it is way too hot in my office

Sound

I like my old school Hi-Fi components. If I had unlimited money I would just be buying this stuff on ebay the whole day.

The combination of the Sony amplifier and JBL speakers gives a sound I love.

The amplifier is also connected to a Chromecast Audio for multiroom sound, computer and headphones.

l. Tape deck Sony TC-K790ES - needs some work, the rubber transport bands disintegrated and need replacement, which is a bit tricky

m. Tuner Sony SA3ES - I never use it, but it is pretty!

n. Amplifier Sony TA-542E - this must be pretty old too, still works fine

o. JBL Control 1 Pro speakers - come with mounts for the wall and look sleek

Art & Memories

Since we bought the house and I have no further move is planned I made some effort to finally put all kind of stuff on the wall.

p. Sven Vaeth & Paul Cooper flyer 17-7-93 Warehouse Cologne

q. Photo from the Space Shuttle signed by Astronaut Robert Crippen

r. family

s. My dad and myself on our last holiday together. I have no idea why we shake hands.

t. family

u. X-Ray Cyclist by Nick Veasey sold by IKEA. Nick is one of my favourite artists and this is the cheapest way to get a great quality print.

v. Newton MessagePad 130 - I really did use this back in the days. It is a bit bulky.

w. Palm V, Palm Tungsten T, Ericsson t39 with extra antenna and calculator from school - this was my "smartphone" back in the days when phones got smaller every year. I sometimes connected it with bluetooth to the Palm for connectivity on the go. I miss small phones.

x. random memories box: old business cards, passport, party flyer, motorcycle key

y. Curves Calendar - don't google that. It has photos of mountain roads for each month to remind me of cycling. I just get a new one every year and replace it.

Friday Links

cyberpunk

Product Managment

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.

GPT-3 Is Amazing—And Overhyped - the uber regex strikes back

hacker-laws -  all of them on one place. I discovered them through the Changelog:  Laws for hackers to live by [Podcast]

Engineering Management

In search of higher engineering productivity: A data first remote working perspective - nice to see some numbers put to it. It is really just about progamming, it doesn't track the difference in remote meetings.

Build vs buy decisions in the age of software abundance - this is getting worse very day. It is not even "buy" even more, with so many ready made open source libraries and projects out there.

Uber: Introducing Domain-Oriented Microservice Architecture - I am not sure if this will help in the mess that are microservices, but good luck to them. It is a good article though with some tips for different company sizes:

In small organizations, the operational benefit likely does not offset the increase in architectural complexity. Furthermore, microservice architectures often require dedicated engineering resources to support which may be out of budget for an early stage company or else suboptimal from a prioritization perspective.

Team Objectives – Overview - good long read critique of OKRs for teams. Jump to the summary if you like.

COVID-19

#SmartDevelopmentHack: Germany searches for COVID-19 solutions - "Are hackathons the solution?" ... in my experience probably not.

Coronavirus: The great contact-tracing apps mystery - The main mystery for me is why we don't have one in Spain yet, or ideally one that works across Europe. There are multiple open-source versions out there (from Ireland & Germany for example) that could be used, but every country needs to reinvent the wheel and sometime in the future they all will have to be linked up. Also check out the Europe COVID-19 Tracing App Tracker.

Returning to the Office Safely - pretty guide from the OmnicomGroup for their offices.

COVID19aldiaBCN - all the Barcelona COVID-19 stats and maps you will ever need

Over half of coronavirus patients in Spain have developed neurological problems, studies show

Radiolab: Dispatches from 1918 [Podcast]

It’s hard to imagine what the world will look like when COVID-19 has passed. So in this episode, we look back to the years after 1918, at the political, artistic, and viral aftermath of the flu pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people and left our world permanently transformed.

 

Security

Garmin services and production go down after ransomware attack - this is probably the worst nightmare for any company. They are still down as I am writing this.

Password Book (Multi-coloured) - at least you are not loosing it to ransom-ware.

The sad, slow-motion death of Do Not Track - kind of expected, the pressure from the other side is too strong.

Schneier: On the Twitter Hack - no comment

Maybe this hack will serve as a wake-up call. But if past incidents involving Twitter and other companies are any indication, it won't. Underspending on security, and letting society pay the eventual price, is far more profitable. I don't blame the tech companies. Their corporate mandate is to make as much money as is legally possible. Fixing this requires changes in the law, not changes in the hearts of the company's leaders.

 

Urbanism

“Silent majority” of Britons back active travel infrastructure – but vocal minority drown them out - you only need some loud voices to stop progress

Ride easy with new biking features in Google Maps - Google is making routing for cycling better. It was already pretty good where it is available, but it is good to see that they are constantly improving it.

'We Heard Birds.' Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo on How Lockdown Offered a Glimpse at a Greener City

Episode #250 – In conversation with the rock star of parking, Donald Shoup - He is mostly about proper charging for parking. I agree, but we should also reduce parking and give it back to the people.

Keeping Journals

After coming across one article about journaling recently I decided it might be worth a try. Of course I started with a bit of research first.

There are many articles that say it is probably as good idea. Possibly bordering at being a bit pushy / passive aggressive.

• To Be An Effective Leader Keep A Leadership Journal
• Why You Should Start a Journaling Habit + How to BeginThe More Senior Your Job Title, the More You Need to Keep a Journal
• Want to Be an Outstanding Leader? Keep a Journal.
• To Be An Effective Leader Keep A Leadership Journal
• Transform Your Effectiveness with a Leadership Journal
• This is how journaling can make you a more effective leader

There are some common formats and sometimes people who sell you preformatted notebooks.

• The Clear Habit Journal
• Bullet Journal
• Morning Pages
• BestSelf - Self Journal

In the end I decided to be agile and just start something with the stack of Moleskins and pens I already own.

 

Random Lawrence

Polishing Lawrence - I remember when I still found editing Wikipedia pages fun. Now there is are so many rules and politics involved that I can't be bothered any more. "Lawrence of Arabia" is a topic by my heart though.

Which productivity method is right for you? - Spoiler alert: it might have to do with Todoist.

JWZ: Recent Movies and TV - jwz watches stuff so I don't have too. Looks like there are some good shows on at the moment though.

Pointless Job Requirements - maybe we have to rethink job ads

What We Learn When Humans Race Against Horses - I listened to a podcast about this once. Humans are amazing, so are horses.

Classical Fix: Nadine Shah - no idea who she is, but this was fun. I also discovered Scott Walker (Scott Walker: Farmer In The City [YouTube]), which made it worth it already. 

Friday Links Disclaimer

Inclusion of links does not imply that I agree with the content of linked articles or podcasts. I am just interested in all kind of perspectives. If you follow the link posts over time you might notice common themes though.

More about the links in a separate post: About Friday Links.

Friday Links

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.

Announcing Rust 1.45.0 - more toys I have no time to play with

Data Structures & Algorithms I Actually Used Working at Tech Companies - algorithms: good, algorithms in interviews: bad, just look them up when needed or use libraries

Tech firms like Facebook must restrict data sent from EU to US, court rules - as usual this will be painful for small businesses and worked around by the big ones

Ron Jeffries is posting his adventures in programming classic video games. He just finished Asteroids and is now working on Space Invaders.

Testing sync at Dropbox - nice in depth look at testing at Dropbox and how they improved it through a rewrite.

Testing on the Toilet: Don’t Mock Types You Don’t Own - Interesting, as I would do exactly that. Solving it with a fake provided by the third party is obviously nicer or having a wrapper class.

P vs NP (Summer Repeat) - In Our Time is one of my favourite BBC podcasts with diverse topics. I usually skip the history ones, but this is an older gem which hits closer to my interests.

Product Management

The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever - Sometimes you still can ship late and be better, but usually shipping early is the right call.

productboard - I am somehow interested in product and idea management in companies. I tried various things from spreadsheets to Jira. This seems to be another feasible option. 

Engineering Management

Tech Sector Job Interviews Assess Anxiety, Not Software Skills - I kind of knew that. I am really bad at interviews myself, thankfully I haven't have to solve any weird programming problems in interviews for a long time.

Business Erotica "Dumb books your boss likes" ... yes, yes I do

The Pursuit of Perfection: Dominant Architectures, Structure, and Dynamics: A Conversation With Dr. Steve Spear [Podcast] - the usual Toyota Production System example, but also some good other anecdotes.

The other thing

Fernando Simón: dissecting the public face of Spain’s coronavirus crisis - nice profile of the Spanish guy dealing with our health crisis.

COVID Risk Chart - helpful stuff by xkcd

Environment

Six Months on a Planet in Crisis: Greta Thunberg's Travel Diary from the U.S. to Davos - our whole inactivity regarding the climate crisis is very depressing. I have given up hope already, but it is glad to see people like Greta pushing everybody to do better. This is also available as podcast from the BBC: Summer with Greta [Podcast]

Car tyres are major source of ocean microplastics – study - electric cars won't save us from this. Cars tires are a major source of pollution in cities and now we know what they are doing to the environment globally too.

Car Dependency Baked Into Joe Biden’s $2 Trillion Climate Plan - Maybe I am ageist, but choosing ancient leaders might be one of the problems. He really doesn't have to care about the future any more.

#FaceTheClimateEmergency​ - if you do anything, sign this letter of demands to the EU

Random hot dogs

Competitive hotdog eaters nearing limit of human performance - it is amazing what people can do, it is also amazing what people think is a sensible thing to do

The Post-Meritocracy Manifesto - what he said: "But meritocracy has consistently shown itself to mainly benefit those with privilege, to the exclusion of underrepresented people in technology." and not only in technology.

The More Senior Your Job Title, the More You Need to Keep a Journal - this has been on my to-do list for years. I just haven't found a way to make it a habit yet.

Infrequent Roundup, part N - I stole some of rjp's links already

Google continues to move towards YouTube Music, sadly the first upload efforts aren’t great - Google has a habit of annoying all of their users, especially in the media area. I love the upload functionality of Play Music and as far as I know no other service provides something similar. I mostly listen to Techno mixes and this is a good way to share them between devices. With the switch from Play Music to YouTube Music (why?) some of the functionality is being messed up. And Play Music is pretty minimal already.

Banksy creates mask-themed work on London Underground - this has already been cleaned up :-)

Good Meetings are Jazz - good tips for video conferencing from home. I am still looking for a good microphone set-up, but the lightning tip is also good. I am definitely not going €200+ Euro camera or SLR for the video though. My background needs some tidying too.

Blindboy Podcast: Clancys Pancake [Podcast] "How 1990s professional wrestling predicted the 2020s". There really is no hope for the Land Of The Free.

Friday Links Disclaimer

Inclusion of links does not imply that I agree with the content of linked articles or podcasts. I am just interested in all kind of perspectives. If you follow the link posts over time you might notice common themes though.

More about the links in a separate post: About Friday Links.

Friday Links

#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.

Should companies rush headlong into permanent remote work? ... No?

Compensation in the new Remote Colonialism. Salaries in a more remote world are going to be interesting. Perks like a nice office, team events or living in Barcelona are not going to mean as much in the future. Companies whose main perk was remote work will also struggle. How this will effect star-ups and start-ups hubs all over the world will be interesting to watch. Will salaries drop in Silicon Valley or rise everywhere else. Will people be able to attract the best talent with the big technology giants being suddenly in every market?

Technology

From Docker Straight to AWS Docker is adding AWS ECS support to docker-compose to easily launch docker setups in the cloud.

Introducing the GitHub Availability Report GitHub is now unstable enough that it warrants a monthly report about it :-) For daily usage like "Is it me? Is it GitHub? Must be Friday" I usually just go to the status page.

The Rust Compilation Model Calamity. Apparently Rust is slow to compile. My toy programs never were big enough to notice. This is part of a three part series that goes really into depth of the reasons for the slowness.

Painless Rails upgrades. There are many things wrong with Rails, but upgrades are certainly very high on the list of annoyances.

The intersection of coding and fonts [Podcast] I am always on the lookout for interesting programming fonts, but I stayed away from fonts with fancy ligatures so far.

One thing or another

Cloudflare is trying a petition based approach to allow people back into the office. Every company is struggling with this in their own way. I think this is a good start, while you also should watch the local situation and government advice. 

Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale. While I find it still too early to draw conclusions, Sweden certainly has made some "interesting" decisions that have been used as an example by Covid-19 deniers all over the world. In my opinion they probably made the wrong decision. (I am not a doctor!)

Urbanism

More space for walking, cycling and getting around on public transport in Barcelona. We shouldn't need a global pandemic for these kind of changes.

Special extensions to bar terraces to remain in place throughout 2021. This is great, maybe by the end of 2021 people realize that the city is much better with more space for people than for cars.

Some 60% of applications are for terraces on road surfaces. According to estimates based on the number of authorised requests, some 25,000 square metres of public space so far used by cars and motorcycles will be transformed into social space for bars and restaurants.

Episode #249 – This is not white gentrification, this is active travel infrastructure for everybody [Podcast] About the transformation of Waltham Forest with the "Mini-Holland" project. The opening was dominated by people predicting the death of the area. Spoiler alert: the opposite happened.

Random Stuff

Good list of long reads from Tim Bray. I haven't gone through all of them, but there is some are very interesting.

How three conspiracy theorists took 'Q' and sparked Qanon. It's weird out there people.

‘Living legend’ Linton Kwesi Johnson wins PEN Pinter prize. My favourite poet, mostly because I can't think of another at the moment and I also love his music.

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines. It is a small step, but also symbolic and worthwhile.

How to manage your new Slack notification schedules - about bloody time!

Former UN expert decries Spain's 'utterly inadequate' social protection system. Not great obviously. But there is some hope.

Unmapped world. [Podcast] I remember when the OpenStreetMap project started. I was working at a start-up and we were trying to implement our own mapping solution, which was a stupid Idea. I also though that OpenStreetMap will never gain traction. If I remember correctly they just had a few roads in London in the beginning. Now they really map most of the earth and are becoming super important in the parts of the world that Google and Apple don't deem important enough to map.

# 87 Hannah Fry: The Role of Algorithms [Podcast]

Mathematician and author of Hello World and The Mathematics of Love, Hannah Fry discusses the role of maths in society, the dating world and we explore what it means to be human in the age of algorithms.

Friday Links Disclaimer

Inclusion of links does not imply that I agree with the content of linked articles or podcasts. I am just interested in all kind of perspectives. If you follow the link posts over time you might notice common themes though.

More about the links in a separate post: About Friday Links.

Friday Links

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.

Technology

Btrfs at Facebook is a good article by LWN going into the details why and how Facebook is using Btrfs. I am always amazed by scale of Facebook, also mentioned in one of the links of the Fedora 33 article below.

Josef Bacik:

Consider the web tier for example, we push the entire website to every box in the web tier (measured in hundreds of thousands of machines) probably 6-10 times a day. This is roughly 40 gib of data, getting written to these truly terrible consumer grade flash drives (along with some spinning rust), 6-10 times a day.

More Topfew Fun Tim Bray on a mission to prove that Go is in fact not slower than Rust. Seems to be true, but we also find out that regex libraries are slow (surprise!).

They want to be small, they want to be big: thoughts on code reviews and the power of patch series - everybody has a different taste for code reviews. Nicolai  Hähnle likes the git email workflow. I can't say I agree, but still an interesting perspective.

Worrying about the npm ecosystem - Who doesn't? If you think CPAN, Rubygems or Packagist are bad, you haven't seen anything yet.

First PHP 8 alpha released I haven't worked with PHP for a while and sometimes it is depressing how fast it moves compared to for example Ruby.

Skateboarding and the mindset of a programmer - Everything is like skateboarding and also like programming.

Docker and Fedora 32
This article helped me to get rid of the docker-ce packages provided by Docker and move to moby packages included in Fedora, which makes updating them a lot easier. I was basically missing the firewall bit, the CGroups part you have to fix for either version.

Engineering Management

The Security Value of Inefficiency Bruce Schneier makes the point that when you are 100% efficient, you don't have any margin for error. He is talking about the problems COVID-19 is creating in hospitals and supply chains.
This applies equally to engineering teams. The goal should never be to utilize your team to 100% (or ideally 110% as Americans like to say). Without any headroom there is no margin for mistakes, creativity and agility. 

Pretty good list of company handbooks - the usual suspects like Valve, Gitlab and Basecamp, but many more. 

All Hands on Deck describes the incident response to A Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day at Slack. As we recently worked on our incident response at Devex this was an interesting read, both from the technical and the management side.

Tech Migrations, the Spotify Way Upgrades, migrations, rewrites and changing technologies are one part of technical debt. Interesting to see how Spotify prioritizes and visualizes these.

Why Transparent Email Stopped Working For Us and What We Do Instead - the best thing of Buffer being transparent is that we all can learn from them. Transparent Email sounds scary, but secretive emails or private Slack channels are equally so.

Software developers: We won't take a pay cut just to work remotely With all the virus fun the world is having a lot of companies are going remote or distributed. This will have an interesting effect on salaries. Some companies are paying localized salaries, others are paying the ones in the headquarter location, which might be as expensive as Silicon Valley. This might destroy some of the startups in low income locations, as they won't be able to keep up with the well funded US companies.

The Art of Leadership: 1-on-1s, Staff Meetings, and Manager READMEs with Michael Lopp, Rands in Repose [Podcast] I guess Rands is on a book tour at the moment, still enjoyable as always and a good overview of the book in case you haven't read it yet.

Urbanism

The Pedestrian Strikes Back "Officials in several countries are getting the message: Cities are about people, not cars." says the NY Times

The Lively & Liveable Neighbourhoods that are Illegal in North America [Podcast] Zoning ... do I need to say more?

StreetRidersNYC [Podcast] Random group of cyclists organizing protests on bikes in New York. Reminded me of the local Critial Mass protests. Also a good insight into why bicycles are so great in cities.

Random

Ten years of the sun in one hour – Nasa releases mesmerising space film

nothing to add to the title. Or go directly to the film on YouTube: A Decade of Sun [Video]

Off their heads: the shocking return of the rave I am clearly too old for this stuff, but even if I wasn't I probably would wait a little bit, with One Thing Or Another going around.

‘I bought these items and I couldn’t stand them’: inside the mind of a Batman collector I am fascinated with collectors. The need to complete a set of things seems to be so human, but also so unnecessary. I have some tiny collections, but so far I have stopped myself from collecting ice cream. Or ice cream stopped me. I do love Batman though and have some graphic novels and various collectables.

Hype and hope: Wearables in the covid era I use a Garmin Fenix 5 sports-watch 24/7. I am expecting that Garmin will figure out some way to use all the data of their users to see some trends regarding COVID-19 and possibly provide some early warning system.

“I’m happy coming back, as long as nobody else does” Someone writing about their experience in going back to the "new normal" office. It will be different for everybody, but also strange for all of us.

The Mystery of the Shared Earbuds [Podcast] Great story about two different and interesting people getting together because of music.

Friday Links Disclaimer

Inclusion of links does not imply that I agree with the content of linked articles or podcasts. I am just interested in all kind of perspectives. If you follow the link posts over time you might notice common themes though.

More about the links in a separate post: About Friday Links.