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Friday, August 21, 2020

Friday Links

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

Theoretical vs. practical cryptography in the kernel - in the bigger picture this discussion also happens in all projects about other aspects than security. It is the idealists fighting the pragmatists. The idealists can never win, because their goals are too lofty.

11 Ways I Visualize Product Development Work  - nice overview 

How to Find Your Zone of Genius with Alex MacCaw, CEO at Clearbit [Podcast] - work on weaknesses or strength, do what you love or what you are good at, ...

The Manager's Handbook - I found this through the above podcast and have it on my to-read list. They also have an interesting podcast, definitely worth listening. Lots of good tips for managing, most of them I even agree with.
Some episodes from the podcast:

Company values aren’t actionable. Here’s how you can change that.  - never heard about "even over", sounds weird

Why Write ADRs  -  "Architecture decision records" - good idea ... seems a lot of work

Navigating Change With Facebook’s Engineering Leadership Team - I was hoping they would go a bit more into detail :-) 

Why don’t we reward good managers? -  don't we? I mean I can always use more money, but especially higher level managers seem to be rewarded quite a bit.

Gary Hamel: Battling bureaucracy - the big fix for broken work [Podcast] - some good points. I still believe in a hierachy in companies, but that doesn't mean you have to do all the decisions from the top. It is more about supporting the teams. I just wish he wouldn't shout at me the whole time.

Technology

RustConf 2020 [YouTube] - nearly eight hours about free Rust content. Nice!

Laying the foundation for Rust's future - kicking of the Rust Foundation, with the recent lay-offs at Mozilla this news was kind of needed.


Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q2 2020
- I have a weird fascination with these posts (Not as much as with tz-announce though. I mean, what is going on in Morocco!) . Nowadays most hard drives are good enough for private NAS use, you don't have them in desktops any more and nobody cares what the cloud runs.

A more detailed, colorful map - another fascination of mine: maps. Google probably have one of the most beautiful on-line and mobile maps. Now it is even more pretty and nicer to plan cycling routes. Also great what they are doing to improve cycling and walking navigation in cities.

Kinesis Advantage2 - Review after three years of use - Martin Fowler's long term review of this keyboard. Maybe I am forced to switch from my trusty Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 at some point. I am not sure I will go quite as weird as this one though. Pedals are a neat idea though. 

Why I switched from Vim to Emacs - I used Emacs for a very long time, switched to Eclipse for a few years and now I am back and happy on Emacs. I use vi for small file changes, but never for projects.

A college student used GPT-3 to write fake blog posts and ended up at the top of Hacker News
- (disclaimer: I don't usually read hackernews. I think it is the worst side of the technology community) The article is already is pretty funny, but it is definitely worth looking into the comments on hackernews.  

Metabase: Business Intelligence Open Source with Sameer Al-Sakran [Podcast] - we use Metabase quite a bit at Devex, good to hear the inside story

Urbanism

How Portland’s Landmark Zoning Reform Could Work - this seems to be mostly about multi family homes. I wonder if they also allow restaurants and small shops in these zones to make them liveable and walkable

Portable Parklet in Stuttgart (in German) - I love Parklets, they make it so obvious what a waste of space on-street parking is. More pictures on the Facebook page.

20 offices turned into 2,000 individual pods for post-Covid working - a lot of people seem to hate open plan offices ... well, they all can take work in pods! 

Random Games

HIGH SCORE | The First Computer Graphics Game | Netflix [YouTube] - This looks promising. I love old computer game history ... because I am old. 

Germans must walk their dogs twice a day, new law will say - I think I mentioned it last week: laws about pets have to change, it is good to see this is very slowly moving forward. 
 
Dog gone: rescue pet shelters emptied by surge in demand during pandemic - there is a positive side of this, but mostly people keep "pets" for selfish reasons 
Electric conversion gives old Land Rover Defenders a 200-mile range - I have to wait a few more years until this gets cheaper  

The Bigger the Tos - another visualization of Terms Of Service by different companies. Spotify wins! Or looses.

Is Economic Growth the Wrong Goal? [Podcast] - yes

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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