Double Friday Links

Old Rave Flyer

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

It Doesn’t Matter What You Say - TLDR; it is about what they hear

Engineering

Getting Postmark’s Lighthouse Performance Score to 100 - let us just say that we are not quite there yet

Very short functions are a code smell – an overview of the science on function length - I like small functions, but this gives another perspective 

Ron Jeffries: Some Suggested Reading - also related to small functions, but giving a different perspective

Workflows in AWS and GCP - most interesting is to see how the two big ones are designing the same thing in different ways that both make sense 

Monitoring Any System with StatsD and AppSignal's Standalone Agent - I have to confess I never used Statsd myself, but I always loved the idea since I first saw it in an Etsy talk or blog post 

Building the Next Evolution of Cloud Networks at Slack - how to keep engineers happy: do stuff different and weird

Robinhood Engineering with Jaren Glover - down to earth describtion on how Robinhood moved from http/cron to a stream architecture and some other decisions they made

Technology

Toward a "modern" Emacs [LWN] - questionable suggestions. I wonder if someone is working on a "modern" vi 

LVFS tames firmware updates [LWN] - When LVFS first came out I didn't believe it would be as great as it is today. If you have supported hardware like it is the best thing in the world. I used to keep a Windows partition on my ThinkPads just for firmware updates, there is no need for this any more. 

The one-millionth commit: The search for the lucky Linux kernel contributor - congrats Ricardo Neri!

Linux Journal is Back - nice! also: Slashdot is still a thing?

This is a pretty dire assessment of Mozilla - :-(

Removing run-time disabling for SELinux in Fedora - I am in the acceptance phase with SELinux

OpenPGP in Thunderbird - this is nice, but apparently also not that useful for people already using PGP 

PostgreSQL 13 released - at least PostgreSQL upgrades on RDS are not so painful

 

Our work to move data portability forward - this is work by Google is so great and is just not mentioned enough. Even the Takeout feature is already brilliant. (Facebook's is also not bad)

New open source robots.txt projects - I am not quite sure why I would parse these, but it is nice to know that I can do it in Rust now

Documented Death from a Ransomware Attack - first of many to come

Nihilistic Password Security Questions - brilliant! "On what street did you lose your childlike sense of wonder?"

Remote Work

Spanish cabinet approves working from home bill: How will it work?  - nobody knows...or I don't at least

Many Google staff may never return to office full-time post-Covid  - very different from going fully remote and more reasonable in my opinion

Rapid Response: Healthy offices and the myth of remote-work productivity, w/Diane Hoskins (Gensler) [Podcast] - clearly Diane has a horse in the race, but it is still an interesting perspective 

 

Cycling

Cyclist alleges police botched investigation into crash that killed ultra-endurance racer Mike Hall - as I said in another place: "I was affected a lot by Mike Hall's death, probably because this is how I will die if I die on the bicycle"

Do these 27 old ‘rules’ of professional cycling stand up to the science? - ice cream!

Urbanism

The New Human-Powered Era - free Strave Metro data for cities ... this is great and I hope people take advantage of this. So far it was apparently too expensive for cities like Barcelona. (Also covered here: Strava Metro Data Service Gifted To Cities To Boost Bicycling)

Invisible Bicycle Infrastructure of the Netherlands (Hoofdnetten) [YouTube] - bloody Dutch having all the fun

Why we need media reporting guidelines for road safety - there are no accidents by cars on the road, only crashes caused by drivers

You Only Have 25 Places in Your Life! [Y- I am pretty sure I have fewer places, especially at the moment. Also check the article and research.

Random Raves

Aciiiiid! Rave's first 30 years – in pictures - some nostalgia

Designed in Minecraft, built IRL - Gaza imagined in Minecraft

Is It Too Late To Stop Climate Change? Well, it's Complicated. [YouTube] - I personally think it is too late, not because we are running out of time, but because nobody cares

"False Hope? Alternative Cancer Cures"  

I listened to this and it scary and frustrating at the same time. Having experience with cancer in my family and friends I can't imagine having someone choosing the "alternative" way.

At the same time I also have a lot of friends who believe in alternative medicine, like homoeopathy, chiropractic, traditional Chinese medicine or acupuncture. This is fine as long you just use it in addition to best practices, then the only thing hurt will be your wallet.

The danger lies in "if you believe in some lie, you believe in any lie" and this is where it can go as wrong as shown in this three part podcast.

 
Here's when blurred backgrounds, hand-raising, and more are coming to Google Meet - good to see these much needed improvements and reduce reliance on Zoom in our company

Martin Fowler: Vote Against Trump, Again - it is great to see some people with large audiences using their platform to influence politics, especially if I agree with them 

 

Won’t Subscribe - so true. I only subscribe to a few sites and I am not going to expand that. Flattr was a good idea, but they failed. Maybe we have some common micro-payment system at some point, but I fear it has to come from the likes of Google or PayPal. 

報復性熬夜 - “revenge bedtime procrastination”

The rise and fall and rise again of “now more than ever” - I always forget about Ngram Viewer. It is such a fun tool.

 

Don't Compare Averages - such a great post! I am sure I made this mistake so many times 

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater remake reflects the changing culture of skateboarding 

 - still no points for an ollie! 

Long Way Up: Ewan McGregor, Charley Boorman deliver another engrossing ride - great to see that they are back. They are cheating a bit with fossil fuel support vehicles, but it is still a great effort. Also watch their previous trips if you haven't yet

Billionaire Chuck Feeney achieves goal of giving away his fortune - turns out it is possible if you really want to  

#166 Country of Liars [Podcast] - a look at the possible origin of Q-Anon, which makes sense and makes me question the whole movement sanity even more

The growing influence of the QAnon conspiracy theory [Podcast] - some people really believe anything 

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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