Friday, March 19, 2021

Friday Links 21-11

Country Centered Map Projections
Country Centered Map Projections
I have been looking into remote compensation structures a bit ... it is complicated. 

Also some good long posts and podcasts about managing and teams. 

I was quite distracted by animal life this week, so I am quite proud of the amount of blogs and podcasts I got through. 

Current podcast backlog: 30h 28m

Management

Owning the Manager Role: How to Set Expectations and be “Super F*cking Clear” with Melissa and Johnathan Nightingale (founders of Raw Signal Group) [Podcast] - I often fall into the trying to be a peer trap, but then I hope this makes me also more approachable. 

Why Senior Engineers Hate Coding Interviews - see other recent links: they also hate take home challenges

EMPOWERED Review: I Needed This Book 4 Years Ago - great, another book for my too long to-read list!

Compaas has good resources on salaries. I have been looking in compensation for remote employees a bit. 

Team Charters - I like that ... will I be able to convince all teams to have one? Probably not.

You are Going on a Quest - Rands on career choices

The Tech Debt Playbook - everybody loves some good tech debt! This includes some approaches to dealing with it. 

How should our company structure our data team? - did I post this already? never mind, here it is again, because it is good.

Engineering interviews: refining our process - at Medium

Introspection and Adjustments: Achieving the Impossible by Maximizing Learning with Simon Stanlake, SVP Engineering at Procurify [Podcast] - difference between a good and a charismatic leader ... thankfully I am not charismatic, so I must be good!

Stable teams or non stable teams? What brings more agility and value to a product? - can I just say: stable please! If you like to mix it up, just employ only freelancers and see how far you get with that.

Engineering

How we found and fixed a rare race condition in our session handling - this reminds me about the time the same thing happened to me in the 90s with mod_perl. 

Exploiting Spectre Over the Internet - so cool, so scary

What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34 - is it just me, or is every release of Fedora like Christmas? Oh, and I hate Flatpak, there I said it!

CUPID – the back story - or "Why SOLID is wrong" ... what a set up for the next post

Uber’s Journey Toward Better Data Culture From First Principles - it is amazing what kind of data set up these companies have and they still are able to revamp it

Happy Birthday, Backstage: Spotify’s Biggest Open Source Project Grows Up Fast - on my list of "things we are too small for"

Rethinking site capacity projections with Capacity Analyzer - LinkedIn also has some very specialised teams

Improving large monorepo performance on GitHub - more problems that nobody else has

Highlights from Git 2.31 - some cool stuff also solving problems I don't have

Premature optimization is the root of all evil - I ordered one of their bird feeders, cool to see their transparency on the project

Exploring my doorbell - so ... doorbells also run Linux, and lighttpd, netcat, ...

Fedora Council Update: The New Logo is Here! [YouTube] - a bit of an insight into the Logo process at Fedora

Capturing Every Change From Shopify’s Sharded Monolith - going Kafka 

#92 – Brian Christian on the alignment problem [Podcast] - great introduction and overview into the state of AI & machine learning 

Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You - related to the Python/Rust thing, but generally good points

Urbanism

Should Traffic Lights Be Abolished? [Podcast] - yes!

Via lliure a la connexió del tramvia per la Diagonal [Catalan] - the connection of the tram line through Barcelona is still work in progress. Have a look at the map in the article, this is just a silly current state. It is like they forgot a bit in the middle.  The transformation will also improve walking and cycling, while removing car lanes (hence the opposition)

Europe doubles down on cycling in post-Covid recovery plans - can't wait until I see these changes in Barcelona in person

Spanien probt den Verkehrsaufstand [German] - parents, children and teachers are protesting for better cities and against noise and pollution cause by cars. This is a country wide protest in many cities.

Cycling

Three Million Meters on e-Wheels - nothing to see here, just a guy and his bicycle

International Women's Day Special - CyclingTips special on women in cycling, so frustrating to hear what kind of shit they have to deal with.  

Have cyclists resorted to stealing cassettes and rear mechs due to component shortages? - side effects of Brexit & pandemic 

Random Maps

Country Centered Map Projections - this is great, all maps are lies

Right Up Our Alley [YouTube] - flight of a drone through a bowling alley, so good it looks fake

Warum Chile schneller impft als jedes andere Land [German] - buy enough vaccines, have vaccination strategy without bureaucracy ...  win! 

Recent Movies and TV - I enjoy these by jwz, there are often good shows that I haven't heard of.

Mapping My Mind - Kent Beck doing mind mapping. I use it once in a while, but only recently really got into iterations, before it was more a brain dump and hoping for the best

Illegal Content and the Blockchain - every single thing about bitcoin & co is bad

Spain to launch trial of four-day working week - me too please?

I am the Mayor of this receipt for a 64 digit hash! - NFTs still being rubbish 

Bitcoin mine cargo container literally incinerating planet - did I mention that Bitcoin is bad? 

Mark Strong, actor [Podcast] - I do listen to Desert Island Discs every week, but rarely post them. Mark has a good taste in music though and an interesting story

Nerdy Dog Names – Awesome Names for Your Pup - we are expecting some puppies. I thought I had the brilliant idea to use nerdy names. You know like "Sudo" or "Emacs" ... I am not the first. Reddit is also full of threads like that.

Long Covid: How Bungle Reporting on a Thorny Topic - I think we can all agree that news reporting is a big part of the mess we are in with Covid-19.

Other Links


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, March 12, 2021

Friday Links 21-10

Tape Deck
I am addicted to tape decks
This week I suggest you look into the article about the passive listening at technology companies and how wrong it went and the coaching podcast about feedback.

Management

Priority guideline - sometimes I dream of a company with only one team, one product and one backlog ... I am not sure this does even exist any more

Onboarding to Flexport as a remote engineer - onboarding remotely is certainly different for everybody

Geek Incentives Manifesto Expanded - more from Kent Beck on incentives

Reboot Extra: The Value of Feedback - with Andy Crissinger & Jen Cody [Podcast] - great episode, good feedback is one of the hardest things

Inside Our Engineering Mentorship Program and How It Helps Our Engineers Grow - sounds great to formalise this once you have a reasonable sized team

My door is open if you want to talk about power - pretty awful what has been uncovered in those organisations, but this post has some ideas on how to avoid this in the future

Of course, listening alone can’t fix an unhealthy culture, and there’s no harm in making office hours part of a wider listening strategy. But as long as tech companies keep relying on passive listening, leaders will continue to get most of their feedback from a vocal minority, and all they’ll see is the tip of the iceberg.
The Remote Work Playbook: Global Hiring, Documentation, and Culture with Job Van der Voort, CEO at Remote.com [Podcast] - a bit of an advertisement podcast, but some interesting points on how companies are handling remote

Engineering

Police raids across Europe after encrypted phone network shut down - never trust a criminal?

On Not Fixing Old Vulnerabilities - we are all doomed

Urbanism

The Houses that Can't be Built in America - The Missing Middle [YouTube] - I am sure this awful zoning also exists in parts of Europe, but over the pond they manage to do it especially bad

Streets that put people first, not cars - Superblocks vs Boston

Random Tapes

Lou Ottens, inventor of the audio cassette tape, has died - did I mention that I am a tape nerd?

2018/0332(COD) Seasonal changes of time - Europe wants to stop doing winter/summer time, but the process has been stuck for a year

Worl Adventure - old school virtual world

Renegades: Born in the USA [Podcast] - usually I skip any podcast that is specific to US politics, because I kind have given up on them. But these chats between Obama and Springsteen are pretty good (also on other podcast sources)

Covid-19: why are we feeling burnt out? [Podcast] - I managed to survive this very long March 2020 pretty well, but in the few weeks it has been getting to me. I need something to change. 

Beats - kind of a randomized pomodoro technique for creativity 

#105 Seth Godin: Failing On Our Way To Mastery [Podcast] - random bag of (good) points

Here Is The Article You Can Send To People When They Say “But The Environmental Issues With Cryptoart Will Be Solved Soon, Right?” - NFTs haven't died yet

Other Links

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, March 05, 2021

Friday Links 21-09

The Nothing Line by Rob Manuel
The all fun pandemic section is back. This week I got flooded by good links. Lots of good stuff going on in cities all over the world and people in my bubble seem to be more aware of what we do to the environment.

Engineering Management 

4 Steps to Remote Success: Hiring, Decision Making, Collaborating and Managing with Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering at Buffer [Podcast]  - lots of of good stuff about remote teams ... which most of us still are 

Collaboration Incentives - more from Kent Beck about geek incentives 

4 Tips for Shipping Data Products Fast - these also apply to all kind of products

Hack-Week: Embedding Our Values and Causes in Our Product - cool theme for a hackweek and great projects too

Someone noticed that my manager README vanished from GitHub. I already added a note to the old post. I am still considering what to do about it.

The Seven Domains of Transformation - I just scratched the surface of this, but it seems to be an interesting framework for transformations 

Steal this micro-feedback strategy from one of the world’s top cycling teams - marginal gains example from cycling applied to management 

You're not just a manager, you're also a boss - annoyingly yes

Measures of engineering impact - some ideas and examples from companies trying to measure this

Engineering 

Four Microsoft Exchange Zero-Days Exploited by China - a bit worrying the amount of zero-days recently 

Mysterious Macintosh Malware - I wonder if they forgot the payload

Running Emacs with systemd - this is so simple. I probably should done this earlier. 

New Feature: Searching Through Samples in AppSignal - another nice feature for people using AppSignal for application monitoring 

Software evolution: the lifetime of fine-grained elements - paper on the life-cycle of lines of code. "Statistical analysis shows that code lines are durable, with a median lifespan of about 2.4 years"

Design Better Avatars - more inclusive!

UX inspiration from history: Sony Walkman - I am a bit cassette nostalgic, this looks into the UX of them

Pandemic

How Garmin Users Prioritize Movement in a Global Pandemic - Garmin looked at the data of what people have been up to in 2020

Yuval Noah Harari: Lessons from a year of Covid | Free to read  - long read

If Covid-19 nevertheless continues to spread in 2021 and kill millions, or if an even more deadly pandemic hits humankind in 2030, this will be neither an uncontrollable natural calamity nor a punishment from God. It will be a human failure and — more precisely — a political failure

Will Spain be able to vaccinate 70% of the adult population by the end of summer? - probably not

Double March - stuck here forever

Almost over! It will never be over. Almost over! It will never be over. - at least stuck here for this year

Environment

Fitbit Sense review: a good smartwatch that fails on sustainability - I don't care about the watch, but The Guardian now includes sustainability in reviews, which is great.

The problem of CryptoArt - it is the energy wasted 

Crypto Fart - jwz also doesn't like it

Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by 'entire countries' - nobody seems to care

Urbanism

La superilla de l’Eixample: carrers per a vianants, sense asfalt i amb més vegetació [Catalan] - this looks promising, now I wished I bought a flat in those streets 

Berlin’s Rent Controls Are Proving to Be a Disaster - it is still early, but I expect it to be

Cycling across Europe in the pandemic - BBC World Service [YouTube]

Low-traffic schemes benefit most-deprived Londoners, study finds - it turns out that it isn't for the rich, so the rich protesting can stop pretending to care for the rest of the city

Neuer Verkehrsplan: Berliner sollen häufiger Rad als Auto fahren [German] - Berlin has a lot of cyclists, not because of the support of the city, but in spite of

Los carriles bici de Via Augusta y paseo de Maragall, operativos en 2023 [Spanish] - in 2023! I could have used these five years ago

The City Where Cars Are Not Welcome - Heidelberg apparently. 

“We all know we have to go in this direction,” he said. “It’s just a question of how fast.”

Where the Bicycle was Invented (and Forgotten): Coventry [Guest Video] [YouTube] - nice report from Coventry, British cities are so pretty

Cycling

Adidas launches Velosamba SPD cycling shoes for city cyclists - oh, nice

Are Electric Bikes Dangerous? - probably not

Immoral and irrational cyclists? Exploring the practice of cycling on the pavement - research paper about pavement cycling ... mostly because infrastructure is a bit rubbish

Random Noise

The Nothing Line - I recorded the sound of an empty Underground train and it made me feel a bit weird and spooky [Audio] - this is brilliant, great for background noise

Roxy Music - In Every Dream Home a Heartache [Audio, YouTube] - I discovered this today. TODAY!

Galician noir: how a rainy corner of Spain spawned a new TV genre - I am mostly into Nordic Noire, but maybe I should give these a try

Building the future of work with Google Workspace - some stuff to look forward to. I am using workarounds for most of these at the moment (also on The Verge: Google Workspace picks up new features designed for remote work)

La ausencia de viajeros acelera el abandono de la terminal 2 de El Prat [Spanish] - the older Barcelona airport terminal is basically abandoned 

The Nothing Line - I recorded the sound of an empty Underground train and it made me feel a bit weird and spooky - this is brilliant, great for background noise

Benefits of microdosing LSD might be placebo effect, study finds - it is basically the homoeopathy of drugs

Why you should be playing Valheim - I got spammed about Valheim from all directions. I am going to give it a try, but my computer is probably not powerful enough. 

Vintage technology: 'It sounds so much cleaner' - when did Psion 5 and mini disk became vintage? I am too old. 

Radio Hour with Björk [Audio] - a mix set by the Islandic weirdo 

Other Links

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.