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.