Friday Links 21-08

Keanu plays with puppies

Back on the podcast train! Some interesting management stuff this week and a big bag of random puppies links.

Management

 

Influencing, Inspiring, & Failing? with Sophie Weston [Podcast] - great interview with a senior devops about management, agile and devops  

How to Tell Your Boss You’re Burned Out - please do 

Follow the Incentives, Waze Edition - Kent Beck started a new blog. Good points about incentives for people at companies. 

The State of Remote Work from Gitlab, Buffer and Spotify - great summary from different companies 

Measure Software Delivery Performance with Four Key Metrics - I haven't read the book yet, but everybody seems just to summarise it in these four metrics

Engineering

Troubleshooting ActiveRecord Performance - AppSignal continues to promote their product with nice blog articles! 

XScreenSaver version 6 beta 1 - the best useless app and now more secure!

How Etsy Prepared for Historic Volumes of Holiday Traffic in 2020 - I miss regular Code As Craft posts, this one shows how much you can do with historic data to prepare your infrastructure for future peaks 

Beyond REST - Netflix doing GraphQL

Environment

#91 – Lewis Bollard on big wins against factory farming and how they happened [Podcast] - great interview about factory farming, meat replacement and more

Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart - another form of pollution we often don't think about

Study finds ‘new car smell’ contains high levels of carcinogens - oops

Urbanism

Set children free: are playgrounds a form of incarceration? - playgrounds were invented because of cars, not for children

Howl's Moving Victorian Time-Lapse - everybody has seen the moving house in SF, this has a nice video. I am just fascinated by how zoning laws and financial incentives make this a good idea 

From our correspondent in Barcelona - a very positive view on Barcelona changes in cycling infrastructure  

Neues Fahrrad vergeblich gesucht [German] - bicycles are sold out in Germany too 

The WORST Bike Lane In The WORLD ? ( Analysis of Gambetta Avenue - bicycle route, the return) [YouTube] - this went a bit viral. It is awful and needs some work

Japanese website maps neighbourhoods that have noisy children - useful! :-)

Random Puppies

Dead Puppies [YouTube] - old video I cam across again ... sometimes you just can't put the finger on the problem 

#104 Nir Eyal: Mastering Indistraction [Podcast] - about distraction in life and work

Before You Pay for Spotify's "HiFi," Test Your Hearing - thankfully I am so old that sound quality doesn't matter any more

Save and rave! How a compilation of pirate radio adverts captures a lost Britain - blast from the past!

Daft Punk, French electronic music duo, split up after 28 years - sad, but I couldn't remember when and what they did last

It's a Sin: a nurse reflects on the Aids crisis of the 80s [Podcast] - Aids was and still is one of the biggest pandemics ever affecting humans. And we handled it so badly in the beginning.

Koffein: Wie Heike Le Ker gesund wach bleibt [Podcast, German] - about caffeine by an addict. For fun try replacing caffeine with cigarettes, alcohol or other drugs while listening

Sideways: Siding with the Enemy [Podcast] - about Stockholm Syndrome. I didn't know much more about the name, this is more critical about the origin and how we use it now

Ways For Introverts to Get Their Energy Back When Other Humans Suck It Out of Them - I got reminded to take care of myself more

Coronavirus vaccination: Live data tracker - there is another one from FT

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.

Friday Links 21-7

Amiga Boing Ball

I'm still behind with my podcast backlog and even my reading. Some fun engineering links this week. Make sure you check out Morph in random.

Management

4-Day Work Weeks: Results From 2020 and Our Plan for 2021 - it sounds brilliant and probably work especially for creative work like programming. I am not quite sure how it would work for other jobs that are closely linked to time on seat.

Take-home Coding Assignments are a Waste of Time - I think last week I had the opposite :-) It is hard to make them good

Engineering

Mitigating Memory Safety Issues in Open Source Software - Google is converting parts of open source projects to Rust to make them more secure 

Virginia is about to get a major California-style data privacy law - the GDPR is infectious

Shadow Jobs - Slack using CI to test pre release version of build tools in their build chain

Using Webpacker in Your Ruby on Rails Application — a Deep Dive - in my experience great for new projects and super annoying to migrate to

Malware in open-source web extensions [LWN] - great story about how software can taken over by bad actors when changing owners. And there is no practical way to track this

US Cyber Command Valentine’s Day Cryptography Puzzles - for someone more bright than myself

Facebook's Linux Desktop Choice Is Fedora But Ramping Up CentOS Stream - this makes sense obviously, but I didn't realise they were using CentOS 

Tim Bray: Recent Code - never heard of GML - but I also miss coding 

How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You - unlikely

Urbanism

Hackney anti-LTN group fails to secure judicial review of emergency active travel measures - as often with this kind of opposition it turns out to missing real support

Barcelona: 1986-1992. Transformació d'una ciutat olímpica. [YouTube] - The Barcelona Olympics are always mentioned as the big transformation of Barcelona for the better ... turns out a lot of it is destroying green spaces for roads 

Pop-Up Cycleways And Low Traffic Neighborhoods Not Delaying Ambulances, Say NHS Trusts - this argument comes up every time, mostly from people who don't care about ambulances. Nice to just ask the people affected :-) 

Commentary: Use Physics, Not Plastic, for Safety - plastic is only one step up from paint

Environment

Wood burning at home now biggest cause of UK particle pollution - this is super annoying since I really enjoy an open fire! Not so much a problem in the country side, except for my own health 

Bill Gates on the climate crisis: ‘I can't deny being a rich guy with an opinion’ - Mr. Gates has a book out. It is great that people like him are engaging in this now. He is a bit of a realist and not a dreamer like myself.

Random Balls

Morph - this is a the kind of art I enjoy. And written in Rust.

100 British Words for Rain - useful! My favourite is still "drizzle" 

Moonlander - one day I make the expensive step to a split keyboard ... and learn to touch-type 

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.

Friday Links 21-6

No podcasts at all this week and very light on random links, which gives me the opportunity to post this pretty spring photo of our almond blossom getting going.

Management

Performance reviews should be unsurprising, fair, and motivating - nothing to add really. I wouldn't say I am 100% there yet, but this should be the goal.

The 2021 State of Remote Work - Buffer asks remote workers about remote work ... 2.4% don't like it and 3% wouldn't recommended it. Possibly some selection bias.

Nails in the Coffin: Why a Flat Organizational Structure Fails - flat organizations probably never really exists, there is always a power and communication hierarchy 

Why take-home assignments might not be as bad as their reputation - as long as they are lightweight they are probably ok

Engineering

org-mind-map - in my mission to do everything in Emacs (not really) I looked into doing mind maps. This really just converts org-mode to a pdf graph and is not quite what I want. 

Visiting another world [LWN] - a new gopher! I completely forgot about gopher, but that is how I started to get into the browsing the internet

Python cryptography, Rust, and Gentoo [LWN] - building Rust is annoying and having it as a dependency will mess up the life of a lot of people

Ruby on Rails View Patterns and Anti-patterns - more tips from AppSignal, not advanced, but still interesting and I see these mistakes a lot 

Internet Archive's book scanning - insight into how they do it, low tech, but cool 

UOMF: My Emacs Key Binding Strategy - Number #831 on things I don't have: an Emacs Key Binding Strategy 

Growth Engineering at Netflix — Automated Imagery Generation - pretty cool to personalise spam content 

Growth Engineering at Netflix- Creating a Scalable Offers Platform - from an XML file to a couple of services 

Minesweeper automates root cause analysis as a first-line defense against bugs - finding bugs at scale

Google joins the Rust Foundation - so does Microsoft. I wonder how these companies decide on doing projects in different languages.

8 Bits Are Enough for a Version Number... - stable kernel is too stable for 255 minor versions 

The imminent stable-version apocalypse [LWN] - more on the kernel versions from LWN

Launching OSV - Better vulnerability triage for open source - vulnerability database from Google using fuzzing  

Disqus, the dark commenting system - this is depressing ... I guess we have to own our own comments again

Your legacy database is outgrowing itself - scaling MySQL at chess.com  

Presidential Cybersecurity and Pelotons - he might have to use a dumb trainer and a personal coach

Urbanism

#VisionaryCities Series – Helsinki commits to more cycling with development of new Kaisa bicycle tunnel

How Sweden is taking back parking spaces to improve urban living - nicer cities in Sweden ... lots of renderings only

Six in ten users of pop-up bike lanes in Paris are new to cycling, says city’s government - build it and they will come

Cycling

The MigraCode Gran Fondo - cycling is great, MigraCode is a brilliant organization, so my only worry is about having an event like this in 2021

How to ride a bike in the city when it snows - not a problem we have in Barcelona, but the pictures are nice

Cyclists Break Far Fewer Road Rules Than Motorists, Finds New Video Study - old article, but it resurfaced again. We obviously knew this already. 

Environment 

Climate action could save 'millions of lives' through clean air, diet and exercise - and make cities nicer

'Invisible killer': fossil fuels caused 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, research finds - this is roughly on the same level as smoking

Random Few

The directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibility - this is so funny. I hope they extend it. Germans do use "Spanish" too.  

1-7 February 2021 - nice weekly notes, but please if you blog use something that provides an RSS/Atom feed. Maybe I should do weekly notes? Or monthly?

Other Links

• Ben Crowder - Links #36 

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.

Friday Links 21-05

Warehouse flyer from 1993

Some cool insights into the engineering of GitHub and Slack and the sudo vulnerability. Short one this week.

Management

Meetup Apps Team’s Virtual Onsite (and why your team should have one too) - some nice ideas for your virtual onsites or offsites 

Fertile Mid-Stations - I like to work with people for a long time, but I also realise that all companies are just one station in the working life of most people

The surprising root of resilience [Podcast] - spoiler: teams bound by experiences

Engineering

Deployment reliability at GitHub - I really love the recent blog posts about building GitHub, they are not very technical, but give a high level view of their efforts

Making GitHub’s new homepage fast and performant - more from GitHub on their fancy globe that probably nobody sees

Slack’s Outage on January 4th 2021 - scaling issues with AWS and monitoring closely linked to production systems

Buffer overflow in command line unescaping - I always found sudo a bit weird, turns out it also has been insecure for a while 

10-year-old Sudo bug lets Linux users gain root-level access - more on sudo local security issue

Urbanism

Tesla Pays Employees To Bike To Work After Slew Of Parking Problems - electric cars are also cars, they won't solve the problems of cities

Bat boxes, 'greened' streets and bug hotels: Barcelona embraces its wild side - a bit of green-washing, but still nice to see 

Random Väth

Sven Väth (Alemania) @ BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix 30.01.2021 [YouTube] - nice, this is my first studio Väth set in ages!

The Relentless Jeff Bezos - fanboy view of Jeff, Amazon and AWS.  

The Bit Short: Inside Crypto’s Doomsday Machine - it is amazing that this is still going on, but some people obviously are making a lot of money of other people and the environment 

JENKEM - Discussing Skateboarding with Filmmaker Werner Herzog [YouTube] - spoiler: he doesn't skate 

Rapid Response: Aggressive sustainability, w/Lynn Jurich, CEO of Sunrun [Podcast] - cool insights into the solar business in the USA

Other Links

• Tim Bray - good stuff at usual. I stole "The Bit Short" from him
• Bruce Lawson Reading List 270 
  

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.