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

- 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]( 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]( 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

- scaling MySQL at chess.com

- 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]( 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]( 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?