Friday Links

Oriol Ferrer Mesià

Good stuff on management and random stuff today. And a new section "Environment", which is just depressing.

Management

Optimize Your Time with The Balanced Calendar - good tips on creating free space or focused time 

Meeting Rooms Are Now Free -  but meetings are still expensive

Summarized – Tech and business books I read in 2020 - Daniel Bartholomae's book tips

Recommended Engineering Management Books - good collection. I probably should write one of these lists at some point

Leadership Principles  - Amazon leadership principles 

Crafting a Support Network as a Founder and CEO - I think this is true for all leaders, just so bloody hard.  

What can you offer as a manager to Software Engineers that will last? - mostly about engineering ladder and career development 

#100 Matt Mullenweg: Collaboration Is Key [Podcast] - co-founder of WordPress talking about open-source, distributed teams and management 

Feedback Loops and Speed: How to Optimize for Learning and Build Efficient Teams with Farhan Thawar, Vice President of Engineering at Shopify [Podcast] - Shopify VPoE about still coding as a leader and how to build teams

Engineering

How well Rails developers actually test their apps - interesting survey. I still don't understand why Ruby people can't just use xUnit style testing like the rest of the world 

Introducing the In-the-Wild Series - six part series from Google about in the wild and zero day exploits. Six parts!

Introducing Google News performance report - I think all of this was visible before, but now it is easier to access 

The Cost of Javascript Frameworks - cool research about performance and size of different frameworks

Urbanism

How America Bankrupted its Cities - The Growth Ponzi Scheme [YouTube] - will they notice? ever? 

Paris agrees to turn Champs-Élysées into 'extraordinary garden' - Looks like Paris will be the most liveable future European city

Environment

Toxic ‘forever chemicals’ more common in tap water than thought, report says - so I learned about PFAS ... another thing to worry about. It is apparently in a lot of greases and cleaning products for bicycles. Luckily not in the brand I am using: Muc-Off

2020, the hottest year in Catalonia since 1950 - it felt pretty warm. I also seem to have moved to an even hotter are than Barcelona

Biodiversity declining in Catalonia with 25% fall in animal populations in 18 years - this is fine

Random Computers

Modern Retro Computer Terminals - so pretty! I don't seem to have any use for these though, or a 3d printer

Wikipedia at 20: The encyclopedia in five articles - in case I needed to be reminded that I am old. There are many people alive now that don't know a world without Wikipedia. I am not contributing any more, because it is a silly fight with their moderators, especially in the German version. 

The Catalan cyclist who visited 43 countries during the Covid-19 pandemic - I am envious, but I probably wouldn't be up for this even if I had the time. 

The man who destroyed all his belongings - I was listening to a podcast about minimalism, which reminded me about this brilliant art

The Lies that can Undermine Democracy - Martin Fowler putting it into better words than I could 

Why it's time to stop pursuing happiness - I am getting more and more suspiscous about this whole well-being and happiness movements  

Kristen Bell Chooses Her Lane [Podcast] - "staying in your lane" or knowing what you are good at is a good idea for a lot of people

Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump - better late than never, no that isn't even true, it was way too late. And Jack is already backpeddling.

The Great Gatsby [Podcast] - I saw the movie, does that count? 

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.