Friday, July 30, 2021

Friday Links 21-26

"Break-Dance Olympics" - AI generated image
Break-Dance Olympics
Because I am travelling at the moment we have another double pack. 
Good stuff on management this week and depressing on the environment as usual.

I haven't decided if I'll add a anti-cryptocurrency section or if I just leave it out. For now it is in random.

Management

The 25 Micro-Habits of High-Impact Managers - I am not sure what is so micro about them, but still not bad for a list like this 

Ask for Help - I wonder if this is one thing that is easier in offices

New research reveals employees value well-being over climbing the ladder - about time?

Is it Safe to Speak Up at Work? [Podcast] - about psychological safety

How we’ve built and evolved our habit of giving back at Buffer - Buffer still doing so much right

Strong Opinions Loosely Held Might be the Worst Idea in Tech - hold your opinions a bit more tight

The Science of Storytelling: Entering Conversations with Curiosity and Defaulting to the Uncomfortable with Karen Eber (CEO of Eber Leadership Group) [Podcast] - she is a good story teller

Making retrospectives effective — and fun [Podcast] - the most important team meeting, now with added fun

Mitchell's New Role at HashiCorp - I have days when I want to switch to IC again!

Engineering

The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox - cloud is relative expensive and from a certain size it might make sense to host yourself 

Analyzing Customer Issues to Improve User Experience - if you have so many issues that you need big data 

What is Code Review? – Guidelines and Best Practices - good summary, especially of the benefits (mostly not about finding bugs)

Patterns of Legacy Displacement - Martin Fowler on strategies to replace legacy systems

Frustrating Design Patterns: Broken Filters - this is a great series and filters can be so broken

A Guide to Running an Engineering Program - interesting, if you have the man power 

Extract Product Lines - pattern of legacy displacement 

Three Ways We Share Context at Shopify Engineering - handbook, talks, podcasts

Joy, or Not - Ron Jeffries muses about programming

Remote Work

Let’s switch ‘working from home’ to ‘working near home’ - mixing working and living in cities will be key to solving a lot of our problems

Why introverts excelled at working from home - some introverts maybe. It sounds like this could have been written in April 2020

The Case for Location-Independent Salaries - I guess this decision is easier in SF

Gabe Newell Says Remote Work Reduced Valve Productivity By 25% - focus productivity up, team productivity down

Technology 

Releasing Org-roam v2 - upgrade was a medium hassle, but now everything works again

This beach does not exit - fake dream beaches 

REvil is Off-Line - good news for some companies 

fullstaqruby - do we need another Ruby distribution? and was the correct spelling taken?

NSO Group Hacked - or possibly leaked 

NDA Expired - let's spill the beans on a weird startup - weird indeed

Environment 

The lurking threat to solar power’s growth - this doesn't seem to take home solar cells and batteries in account. Maybe commercial solar plants just don't make sense any more once everybody is using "free" energy. Power usage will also increase with more electric cars and factories.

100 Dinge, die bei der CO₂-Wende schieflaufen [German] - nothing will change until the government changes in Germany

One of the biggest myths about EVs is busted in new study - surprise: EVs cleaner as ICE. And they are getting even cleaner as the grid does.

How does the human body cope with extreme heat? (part two) [Podcast] - where is part one?

Critical measures of global heating reaching tipping point, study finds - meanwhile politicians are still trying to avoid change

Queen secretly lobbied Scottish ministers for climate law exemption - Queens avoiding change too

Three Americans create enough carbon emissions to kill one person, study finds 

“My view is that people shouldn’t take their per-person mortality emissions too personally,” he said. “Our emissions are very much a function of the technology and culture of the place that we live.”

Dell pulls energy-hungry gaming PCs in six US states after failing efficiency rules - my computer is no game rig, but I bet it is also not super energy efficient

Cycling

Big rise in UK weekend cycling amid calls for more investment - change is so slow

Americans Are Ready to Embrace Bicycles, but There’s One Thing Standing in Their Way - I could list a long list of things, but this wasn't on my radar 

German cycling director sent home over racial slur during Tokyo time trial - someone visiting from the 1970s

Urbanism

How I Got Into Urban Planning (and Why I Hate Houston) [YouTube] - Houston seems pretty bad, but there are more Houstons around 

The History of Barcelona, in 26 Interactive Maps - great maps of the development of Barcelona

Barcelona’s Connectivity with the World - connectivity visualized 

The Power of Getting Paid Not to Park at Work - subsidised parking is everything you don't want in cities

Low-traffic schemes halve number of road injuries, study shows - life is full of surprises

Random Breaks

Breaking through [Podcasts] - some history of break-dance and an outlook of having it at the Olympics

Hi-res audio is much ado about not very much (for most people) - also pointless if you are older than 30 or so

Loneliness: coping with the gap where friends used to be - friendships are tricky

Eco and organic cycling apparel is MÃÄD - hand made custom sustainable bike clothes from Barcelona!

Basic Instructions: How to recast a superhero [Comic] - helpful 

Lockdowns do not harm health more than Covid, say researchers - there goes another excuse of the anti-lockdown crowd. Not that they ever really cared.

Wo früh Masken getragen wurden, gab es deutlich weniger Covid-19-Tote  [German] - turns out masks help

The Renault R5 Turbo is smoking hot | Revelations with Jason Cammisa | Ep. 01 [YouTube] - still one of my favourite cars. I had models and pictures on the wall of the R5 Turbo when I was in school


Tobacco firm Philip Morris calls for ban on cigarettes within decade - they still have all the alternatives though and want to go into health 

Barcelona cannabis clubs face closure in new legal setback - there are some black sheep

‘They had a date to kill the cow. So I stole her’: how vegan activists are saving Spain’s farm animals - they saved a few cows in my village

Cryotocurrencies

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, July 16, 2021

Friday Links 21-25

Lots of technology links and longer reads today.

Management

The Planning Fallacy - what to do about underestimating

Limits to one Product Backlog - 3 - continuation, but I am slowly loosing interest

Windmills: Can Scrum be fixed? - Ron is still on a mission

Sharing our Engineering Career Framework with the world  - another one. It has a lot of different roles, which is nice

Why 'bring solutions not problems' doesn’t work - I recently started wondering about this and some other common advice too

Engineering

Shopify-Made Patterns in Our Rails Apps - overview of some of the bigger things Shopify implemented

Adding support for cross-cluster associations to Rails 7 - GitHub actively shaping Rails future

Technology 

Deploying Server-Side Google Tag Manager on Cloud Run - never heard of this, seems like another thing to put on the to-do list

Planning the CentOS 8 endgame [LWN] - it is amazing how much I lost interest in CentOS since they messed it up

GitHub Copilot 

CVE-2021-22555: Turning \x00\x00 into 10000$ - long article about discovering and exploiting a security issue in Linux Netfilter

Transliterating Old-School BASIC - not super interesting, but I enjoyed seeing BASIC again

Analysis of the FBI’s Anom Phone - that must have been such a fun project 

Chia Analysis: To Farm, or Not to Farm? - turns out it is probably not a good idea, even if you have disks around. And some of your employees might oppose it generally. 

Announcing Arti, a pure-Rust Tor implementation (Tor blog) [LWN] - after the rewriting everything in Go phase, we are no in the rewriting everything in Rust phase

Syncing all the things [LWN] - I love Syncthing. After being annoyed by having to switch from btsync I am not happy I had to. 

Details of the REvil Ransomware Attack - Schneier about the recent attack

Twitter verifies bot accounts - meanwhile real people have problems getting verified

Environment

Carbon removal hype is becoming a dangerous distraction - like hydrogen and carbon offsets 

Animals farmed: EU cage-ban moves closer, magic of horse power and ‘egg-mageddon’ - Nice, can we tackle pets living conditions next? 

EU’s green deal plans launched with ‘make-or-break decade’ warning - Germany is already planning to tone it down

Urbanism

Asphalt, Gridlock and Common Sense - "It’s clear that adding lanes to urban expressways or building new ones doesn’t reduce congestion. Sometimes it makes things worse. So why do we keep doing it?"

The Road Home - "The Texas department of transportation intends to spend $25 billion widening highways to fix traffic in Texas cities. What if we tore them down instead?"

How to design streets for everyone (Universal Design) [YouTube]  - improving pavements and roads is good for everybody  

City Ratings Goes Global - how the heck did Barcelona make it to #8 

Paris to extend 30 kph speed limit to most streets - how long until Paris makes it to the top of most city lists?

Random Defenders

Tesla-powered Defenders review - blasted off-road and timed 0-60mph! [YouTube] - did I mention I want mine converted? I don't need this much power though

Pro-onion faction triumphs in Spain’s great omelette debate - the good side won!

The Truth Behind the Amazon Mystery Seeds - Amazon Amnesia ... I am also affected sometimes 

Texas cyclist shoots driver who deliberately crashed into his riding partner - Texas of course

Making a social impact through sports: the 2021 MC Gran Fondo Cycling Fundraiser - great event. I am on some photos.

Murderbot Diaries - I made it through the first few books, but now I am stuck. I think it was more fun when Murderbot was still learning. 

The digital nomad dream is over - my main critique of digital nomads was the environmental impact, but there are other issues

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, July 09, 2021

Friday Links 21-24

Photo of Supperclub DJ desk
Supperclub DJ Area
This weeks ransomware attack shines another light on the dumpster fire of cryptocurrencies. Some banks are waking up, but it is probably too late for a lot of people. 

On the other hand some positive posts on management, engineering and urbanism.

Management

Leadership Stories from Slack by Michael Lopp [Podcast] - Rands telling stories about his experiences in various companies

do archeology on ONE product initiative ... even something small. visualize the journey. - nice timeline of a product initiative by John Cutler

Infographic: The rise of the 4-day workweek - why not 3-days ... asking for a friend

Limits to one Product Backlog - 2 - continuing from last week, looking at Nokia as an example

Engineering

prefers-reduced-motion and browser defaults  - I am so glad I don't have to know everything about the browser any more

cycletim.es - Scott Burns talking about parallels between cycling and software, not much to see yet, but I am curious where this is going

Pockets of rest enable careers. - a career usually is not a straight line

Ron is unhappy about the scrum alliance

The foundations of Continuous Delivery [Podcast] - Dace Farley interview

Technology  

News: Tether printer on hold, China’s crypto crackdown, the world hates Binance, El Salvador’s Chivo wallet - the whole cryptocurrency thing is going well

The Ransomware Problem Is a Bitcoin Problem - ban it already

The Non-Innovation of Cryptocurrency - "nothing would be lost by a blanket cryptocurrency ban"

Kaspersky Password Manager: All your passwords are belong to us - security is hard, even for "security" companies

Cybereason: 80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again - surprise!

The Untold Story of SQLite [Podcast] - great story and SQLite is a great product. Richard is suffering from a strong case of NIH syndrome though

Massive Ransomware Attack May Impact Thousands of Victims - guess how they get paid? 

What Happened in the Kaseya VSA Incident? - more on the ransomware attack

"Monero is a cryptocurrency that provides money laundering as a first-class primitive, unlike Bitcoin where additional steps are required to obscure the origin of funds. Yet basically nobody uses Monero for legitimate payments; and as “altcoins” (alternative cryptocurrencies) go, it is significantly smaller, ranking only 26th in market capitalization among all altcoins."

Remote work

How remote work changed the way companies think about where to keep offices - maybe having an office in Barcelona is not so bad

Revealed: rise in stress among those working from home - summary of a paper

Opinion: Working from home is great — except for productivity - I think this really depends on your work 

Covid-19 briefing: working from home and worker productivity - more on this

Urbanism

The Streetsblog review of Fastererer and Furiouserer is great - I really enjoy jwz getting into Urbanism :-)

The Downtown Office District Was Vulnerable. Even Before Covid. - we need places with mixed use to avoid long trips and make cities nice to live in

City-Maut und autofreie Innenstädte – erst gehasst, dann geliebt [German] about the hate of making cities nicer before it happens and the love thereafter 

Barcelona’s superblock will have a ‘more sustainable’ pavement - more information of the new superblocks (pretty video)

Mehrere Städte fordern flächendeckend Tempo 30 [German] - in Germany cities can't decide to introduce speed limits, it is pretty silly

It’s True: The Typical Car Is Parked 95 Percent of the Time - everybody knew this already

War on cars? Woo the public, or this will be a battle zone - it is really a War For People

How Milan is reinventing itself as a cycle city - cool things happening in Italy and France at the moment 

Hannover verwandelt Straßen in Spielplätze [German] - a tiny bit is changing in Germany too

Random Music

The Woman-Machine [Podcast] - women as one driver of electronic music

Sixty years of climate change warnings: the signs that were missed (and ignored) - depressing, while politicians are currently talking about "lets not make hasty decisions"

“Wearing a mask” [Comic] 

The Flemish Scrollers, 2021 - people are doing the best things with image recognition


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, July 02, 2021

Friday Links 21-23

Old map from OpenStreetMap of Worcester
Old OSM of Worcester ~2008
Sorry for the long post, but this is again for two weeks.

A few podcasts and lots of blog posts about the usual topics. The random selection also got a bit out of hand.

Managment

Limits to one Product Backlog - 1 - PO on team or feature

There’s no ‘I’ in burnout "How do you give someone new work even as they’re drowning under the existing work?"

Will Larson (Calm) [Podcast] - Will talking about Staff Engineering and personal experience in his leadership roles

An Honest Look into our Engineering Team Engagement Survey - Buffer also uses Lattice. Good to see this kind of transparency. 

Ist das noch Scrum oder kann das weg? [Podcast, German] "Scrum by the book" or do we care?

Is Scrum Dying...? with David Pereira [Podcast] - no

Double Down: Scrum v Devs - Ron still unappy with the Scrum Alliance

Ask vs. Guess Culture: Encouraging Disagreement and Praising Courage with Danielle Leong, Director of Engineering at GitHub [Podcast] - great podcast about fostering honest discussions, suggestions and feedback

The Post-Incident Review - nice summary on why and how to do these

Does Trust Contribute to Biased Hiring? - amazing post and analysis on choosing a job, referrals rule in looking for a job 

" 4-9 of the interview process" - even worse experience in the comments

How many interviews does it take to hire a Googler? - Google optimized the number of interviews with data

Using engineering principles to create autonomous teams at scale - 10 principles!

How Do You Nurture Product Discovery as a Leader? Interview with Teresa Torres [Podcast]

Engineering

Testing Objects and Relationships - good overview of cases

Adding Kubernetes Metadata to Your AppSignal Errors - another nice new feature

16 New ML Gems for Ruby - nice, even more linked

Technology

The Smart Home Isn't Worth It - I can kind of relate 

LinkedIn breach reportedly exposes data of 92% of users, including inferred salaries [U] - they seemed to have just scraped the API, but I still would like to have my data

Why aren’t more girls in the UK choosing to study computing and technology? - probably a worldwide problem, but you have to try to get them young

The Next Backblaze Storage Pod - aka when to build and when to buy

Binance: Watchdog clamps down on cryptocurrency exchange - can we just stop with this madness? 

Cheat Sheet: Google extends cookie execution deadline until late 2023, will pause FLoC testing in July - FLoC is dead

Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC — and that could seriously weaken the fledgling tracking system - definitely dead

Google Launches a New Medical App—Outside the US - looking forward to this

Galaxy Tab S7+ - I bought one of these in the hope that it will last a while, but if it is like my previous tablets it will slow down soon

Bumper Crop: Scaling a Chia SaaS Project on B2 Cloud Storage - I hope this is a joke

Rocky Linux 8.4 GA Available Now - that was quick

Remote Work

Remote working v the office: four company bosses have their say - anecdotes

Announcing location-agnostic pay - not picking SF salaries, interesting 

Facebook Lets More Employees Choose Full-Time Remote Work or Return to the Office 

Your work from home salary won't be same as your office pay. How Google is paying - they are using a calculator, more here

Environment 

It’s a hot one: How heat waves have trended over time - Google looking at scorcher searches

Wet Bulb Temperature - read the comments too

El nou mapa de contaminació en temps real de betevé permet comparar NO2 i PM10 [Catalan] - new NO2 and PM10 map for Barcelona

Is the Future of Farming in the Ocean? [Podcast] - TIL: you get the omega 3 stuff from kelp, you don't need fish 

Welsh government suspends all future road-building plans - (read fine print), still nice

Chia Power - Estimate of total energy consumption in the Chia network - lets stop with this madness

Head of Independent Sage to launch international climate change group - good luck :-)

Belgium’s climate failures violate human rights, court rules - if the government does do anything you have to go through the courts, even if it won't change anything

Cycling

Cycling associations claim victory: E-bikes will be excluded from compulsory insurance - thank god for that, this was a pretty ridiculous proposal from the European Commission 

Biking with your dog - I hope our new dogs are going cycling with me 

Portugal Is Riding a Boom in Bicycles - local production helps with the current bicycle shortage, but you still have to deal with the lack of parts

Urbanism

Bicycling facility inequalities and the causality dilemma with socioeconomic/sociodemographic change - bike lanes follow after gentrification, not the other way around 

Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud [YouTube] - I wish people would care more about this. The loudest sound here in the countryside are the people racing cars and motorbikes on a road 5km away. 

Distracted Driving [Podcast] - this is pretty scary, even using a hands-free kit you are way to distracted to drive

Spain is planning low emission zones for all towns with over 50,000 residents - older news, but this is being discussed more now. 

Government tells councils it won’t fund painted cycle lanes - because they are not cycle lanes

What happens after a city removes a freeway? [YouTube] - roads along the water in cities are basically a waste of resources

Random

OpenStreetMap looks to relocate to EU due to Brexit limitations - welcome!

#114 Noreena Hertz: The Crisis of Loneliness [Podcast] - more about loneliness, not only during the pandemic and why it might be increasing

Data from 45 countries show containing COVID vs saving the economy is a false dichotomy - good to know for the next pandemic!

Spain backs bill allowing teenagers to change official gender without medical checks - nice step and really not difficult at all

Stepping Back from Speaking - public speaking seems to be difficult for everybody 

Shorting Bitcoin - really shortening Bitcoin companies, but still. Also see: Investing Intro

Mapped: Global Happiness Levels in 2021 - Spain more grumpy than Germany? 

Neuer Nachtzug verbindet Deutschland und Skandinavien [German] - new night train between Germany and Scandinavia. Sweden is helping, Germany can't be bothered buying sleeper trains.

John McAfee obituary - are all rich people evil overlords? 

Blue: Pain and Pleasure [Podcast] - Joni Mitchell is one of the artist where I like the songs, but prefer cover versions

Farming Robot Kills 100,000 Weeds per Hour With Lasers - I need this for my garden in Roomba size and price

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich - slowly we realise this is just another cult

Tim Berners-Lee defends auction of NFT representing web’s source code - I lost all respect for him

*EPIC* 450hp Tesla Powered 'Spectre' Defender - Driven up a Mountain ! [YouTube] - I am looking forward to a conversion kit for my 90. I would be happy with 150hp with reasonable range and no other improvements

Taken for Granted: John Green Wants You to Pay Attention to Your Attention [Podcast] - Maybe I should do some stats on my Friday post topices :-)

‘I put my life savings in crypto’: how a generation of amateurs got hooked on high-risk trading - this will be the next financial crisis 

Douglas Coupland on Generation X at 30: ‘Generational trashing is eternal’ - but today's kids really only listen to noise!

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.