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Friday, August 07, 2020

Friday Links

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.

Floods, Viruses, and Volcanoes: Managing Supply Chain in Uncertain Times - very cool report on how Backblaze manages to maintain to have a constant supply of new hard drives for their backup / S3 clone business. I am so glad I don't have to deal with hardware at the moment. I was also very proud when I prepared for The Thing in February, but clearly others were even earlier on it.

6 inspiring teamwork rituals from around the globe - are they inspiring, or plain weird? And don't tell the Catalans that the human towers are Spanish!

HubSpot's Secret for Onboarding Engineering Leaders: Nadia Alramli (Engineering Director, HubSpot) [Podcast] - interesting way of onboarding leaders, which will be too expensive for most companies, but maybe we could use parts of it

Technology

Perl7 is a fork of values - besides tiny scripts I haven't used Perl in years. I also seem to be more interested in the Perl politics since the train-wreck of Perl 6 (or whatever it is called at the moment) then the actual language which is probably telling.

Firefox 79 includes protections against redirect tracking - this will probably break stuff, but for a good cause

Changes to SameSite Cookie Behavior – A Call to Action for Web Developers - more breakage for good 

Introduction to Ruby on Rails Patterns and Anti-patterns - if you love anti-patterns, you are going to love Rails!

An update on Exposure Notifications - still basically unused in Spain, but good to see that at least the technology is improving

Urbanism

An Urban Planner’s Trick to Making Bike-able Cities - There are many things wrong with the articles, but I hope some of the correct things are pointing to a good future. 

Barcelona was never an obvious candidate to be a bike-friendly city. Much of it is built on the foothills of the Collserola mountain range and seven smaller hills. Cycling in the Catalan capital often means pedalling up steep inclines and sweating under the Mediterranean sun.

Barcelona is mostly flat and has is only really hot in July and August. If you are on a hill get fit or an e-bike. The climate is ideal for cycling all year around. Distances are usually very short and manageable for most people. What we don't have is a well connected network of good bike lanes.

Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge - these design competitions never lead to anything, but all the finalists are showing a trend away from cars and towards people, bikes and mass transit. 

Desert urbanism, algorithms, and inebriated emus [Podcast] - a bit more about zoning and architecture 

Other Link Collections

Tim Bray: Long Links - OK! So his links are better and so are is insights. Stop it already.  

rjp: Wednesday roundup for 2020-08-05 - I see what he is doing there, releasing his collection a bit earlier, good stuff in their as usual.
 

Random Tea and Biscuits

Tea in a microwave? New research says it could be the perfect cuppa - clearly this is sponsored by the all powerful Chinese microwave lobby  
 
Adam Richman's Biscuit Reviews EP 3: Hobnob
- first warning: it is a chocolate Hobnob, second: he dunks them also in milk

The UX of LEGO Interface Panels - we didn't have these back in the day, but they look brilliant 

NIME – algorithmic pattern - Alex doing his thing. My favourite thing about live coding is how you can watch the track slowly building up from nothing to something rather complex and beautiful.  

Lifestyle changes could delay or prevent 40% of dementia cases – probably to late for me and younger people might be quite happy to forget the life that they inherit. But please give healthier living a go.

Pessimist Archive: What Will We Fear Next? [Podcast] - whatever comes next

The Endless Doomscroller - I leave you with this depressing messages and also these: Let's do a quick recap

 

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.

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