Friday Links

Vegan Burger (or Disc)

Urbanism bonanza today. Coronavirus has made people think more about their environment, walking and cycling. 

Also some good long read technology articles about how people approach big projects in various companies.

Engineering Management

Can agile pods help your team win big at scale? - agile in marketing. If you have a marketing of 500+ people it does seem to make sense.

They Write the Right Stuff - from 1996, apparently a classic that I haven't encountered before. About the software development for the Space Shuttle and how it was pretty much free of bugs 

What Silicon Valley "Gets" about Software Engineers that Traditional Companies Do Not - what Silicon Valley doesn't get is that there is a whole world outside of it

Managing technical quality in a codebase. - good long read about how to achieve and maintain quality in your code from the management side  

Community 3: How our rituals can forge our culture [Podcast] - I didn't really enjoy 1+2, but this one is a nice perspective into communities and culture

Software Engineer Career Ladder: Don’t Copy-Paste, Make Your Own! [Podcast] - I don't agree. Find one that you like and modify it. Don't start from scratch. Working a couple of months on something like this and then coming up with a result that is 90% like the others doesn't make sense. Still a good interview.

Technology 

Improving our design system through Dark Mode - I still believe the Dark Mode is the biggest conspiracy to create developer and designer jobs over recent years, but I guess everybody has to do it now 

Under the hood: Updating LinkedIn's UI - another thing everybody has to suffer through at some point

What is coming in PHP 8 [LWN] - I still miss PHP sometimes, but not so much the language then the ecosystem  

PHP 8: before and after - another good summary of some of the nicer changes

Activists Build Facial Recognition to ID Cops Who Hide Their Badges - (original article is in the NY Times, but it is paywalled). Good initiative. I hope activists in other countries are picking this up 

Backblaze Hard Drive Stats Q3 2020 - 18TB disks available now and everything is so much more reliable

The accelerating adoption of Julia [LWN] - I never used Julia, could this be an alternative to R or Python for data analytic tasks?

Split-Second Phantom Images Fool Autopilots - computers are pretty dumb, especially the ones with artificial intelligence  

Presenting v7.0.0 of the npm CLI  - seems like they are trying to get people back from yarn, after they messed up dependencies a while back 

Top 4 Dying Programming Languages of 2020 - never believe these lists 

Fixing Linux filesystem performance regressions - it probably has been 20 years since I had to worry about the Linux kernel, but with great scale come great problems

A parable about problem solving in software development - that made my microservice skeptical and monorepo loving heart happy 

Spotify's open platform for shipping at scale [Podcast] - good interview about Backstage and Spotify in general

Remote Work

my company is issuing new work-from-home standards because we should have the hang of it by now - what is wrong with companies? Who comes up with these rules?  

Remote working? No, we prefer to keep it close to home  - there is a reason why most people move to cities, it isn't just about the work 

How to Use Your DSLR Camera as a Webcam in Linux - turns out that this isn't that hard. I have a Sony RX100M6 and it is supported by gphoto2 and was pretty easy to set up. But really Logitech should come up with better cameras with a similar quality now that people are using 500+ Euro cameras as a webcam 

Urbanism

9 Reasons to Eliminate Jaywalking Laws Now - everybody outside of the US is now googling what "Jaywalking" is, then scratches their head and mutters something about "Americans!"

Barcelona to host EuroVelo and Cycling Tourism Conference in Autumn 2021 - lets hope anything will be hosted by then, but good to see it coming to Barcelona

Designing Temporary Urbanism - A New Reading Garden in Copenhagen [YouTube] - Mikael talking to an architect about a new public space in Copenhagen.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo To Make Good On Pledge To Remove Half Of City’s Car Parking Spaces -  “Only three in ten Parisians still own a car today," this is the amazing fact, but the drivers are just so vocal compared the pedestrians and cyclists. I might secretly planning a move to Paris, it looks like it will be the Amsterdam of the future 

La Rambla: plans to transform Barcelona's tourist rat run into a cultural hub - I can't see how to get rid of the tourists again, unless you build a wall around it

How Oslo Achieved Zero Pedestrian and Bicycle Fatalities, and How Others Can Apply What Worked - every city has a long term "Vision Zero" plan and then Oslo just does it 

Study reveals world’s most walkable cities  - the usual supects, Barcelona is mentioned. One city you will never find on these lists: Manila, just don't even try to walk there

Is New York City Over? [Podcast] - probably not, but cities will change 

Why Are Cities (Still) So Expensive? [Podcast] - because we can't or want to build more or bigger houses. And we value city centres, instead of making cities more distributed and local to living.

Random Burgers (or Discs)

Veggie Burger or Veggie ‘Disc’ on Menu? EU Vote Will Decide - for me a burger or a sausage is about the shape and not the content. I have completely switched to vegetarian/vegan burgers now, with the selection of "Impossible" style patties it is easy and I even prefer them to meat. 

Pope Francis backs same-sex civil unions  - this must be utterly confusing for a lot of hard core Christians.

Google Antitrust Notes - whatever happens, it will be worse for the user and better for advertisers. But it will take many more years for this to happen. 

Alan Moore Gives Rare Interview: ‘Watchmen’ Creator Talks New Project ‘The Show’, How Superhero Movies Have “Blighted Culture” & Why He Wants Nothing To Do With Comics - sad to not have future comics, but we still have the old ones. 

Covid-19: The global crisis — in data - great summary again by the ft.com team

9 Books That Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett Think You Should Read - Bezos choices kind of surprised me

Top 2000 a gogo [YouTube] - great channel with interviews of musicians explaining the process of some of their famous songs. TIL: Fatboy Slim was in the Housemartins!

 

Other Links

• Bruce Lawson: Reading List 266 - always good stuff from Bruce
  

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.