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Friday, September 17, 2021

Friday Links 21-31

ZX81 and Michael K Williams generated by Neurlblender AI
ZX81 and Michael K Williams
Sad news about Michael K. Williams and Sir Clive Sinclair passing away. People who influenced me in quite different but profound ways. 

Of course you also get the my usual link dump, again from the last two weeks. 

Environment news are frustrating as always and I don't think COP26 is going to cheer me up.

Management 

Engineering Progression Framework v2 - another engineering career path, this time from Monzo

Enough With Must-Have Features - "must haves" or "table stakes" are the opposite of lean

Bias For Action - do instead of planning, then learn and do more

Ok. So, You Can’t Decide. - sometimes you just have to make any decision

Decision Making at Netflix - spoiler: it is A/B testing 

The Five Meetings Every CEO Should Lead - good advice for every manager. I am pretty bad at the "celebrating wins" bit

Stay Curious For a Bit Longer: How to Get to the Root of Issues and Set Goals That Inspire Bold Action with Dave Bailey (Coach & Mentor to Scale-up CEOs) [Podcast] - lots of good advice in there.

Wohin mit den Ideen, wenn nicht ins Product Backlog? [Podcast, German] - where should ideas go, if not into the backlog. I really would like to have a separate too, but just having a Kanban project is also a good idea.

How to build silos and decrease collaboration (on purpose) - the most expensive thing employees can do is communicate, you have to make it count.

Engineering

Accessible Palette: Stop using HSL for color systems - I am colour-blind, but this is pretty cool anyway 

CPU Steal Time: A Crucial Metric for Cloud Servers and VMs - shared servers and CPUs are tricky

Ship / Show / Ask - I don't know. Maybe to hard to make the decision on which part to take?

Increasing developer happiness with GitHub code scanning  - using custom CodeQL to find common code problems

Technology 

What’s the Diff: SSD vs. NVMe vs. M.2 Drives - well, that cleared that up

The most inspiring Apple Event announcement - I didn't realise browser were so bad on iPhones

Google Supports Open Source Technology Improvement Fund - $100 million! (in total)

ProtonMail Now Keeps IP Logs - stuff is secure until it isn't 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service and Supports OpenSearch 1.0 - my hope is that this creates a real alternative to ElasticSearch with is bumpy upgrade paths. But it is more likely that the Amazon fork will stagnate. 

Launching Public Status Pages for Uptime Monitoring on AppSignal - did I mention I like AppSignal? This is another nice feature. 

Best email forwarding service for 2021 (free and premium) - I am trying to get rid of my own EC2 server, this is part of the solution. Currently testing Pobox

Remote Work

Microsoft indefinitely postpones return to U.S. offices as Covid cases surge - "postponed", but it will happen with 30 days notice, so don't move too far away

Just say hybrid because nobody knows - yes, but we still go hybrid 

‘My Boss Doesn’t Want Me to Go Back to the Office’ - this sounds made up, but there are the weirdest bosses around

Environment

Outcry over killing of almost 1,500 dolphins on Faroe Islands - in 2021! Traditions are a killer.

Most plans for new coal plants scrapped since Paris agreement - emphasis on "most" and "new"

Netherlands proposes radical plans to cut livestock numbers by almost a third - now the question is why this is happening only in the Netherlands

World’s biggest machine capturing carbon from air turned on in Iceland - the equivalent of scrapping 870 cars a year, which might be cheaper.

Piaggio, KTM, Honda and Yamaha set up swappable batteries consortium - this could be interesting, unless they expect me to swap them at petrol stations

air / aria /aire - pretty visualisation of pollution in Barcelona 

Long term exposure to low level air pollution and mortality in eight European cohorts within the ELAPSE project: pooled analysis [Paper] - "Our study contributes to the evidence that outdoor air pollution is associated with mortality even at low pollution levels below the current European and North American standards and WHO guideline values. These findings are therefore an important contribution to the debate about revision of air quality limits, guidelines, and standards, and future assessments by the Global Burden of Disease."

Urbanism

Murderbots - autonomous cars ... not the solution

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo to run for French presidency - good news for France, bad news for Paris?

London's Oyster card: Are its days numbered? - £553 million left on cards! I think Barcelona is skipping the cards and going mobile directly? 

Transport noise linked to increased risk of dementia, study finds - transport is killing people (annoyingly this includes rail)

Forget Low Traffic Neighborhoods, Planet Needs No Traffic Neighborhoods - hear hear

The Wrong Way to Set Speed Limits [ST06] [YouTube] - the US way is as weird as the German way "allow speed limits when too many people get injured"

A Conversation with Anni Sinnemäki - Deputy Mayor of Helsinki - Ep15 [Podcast] - there seems to be something about female city mayors. I put Helsinki on my list of urbanism envy 

Random Home Computers

Home computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair dies aged 81 - I never had a Sinclair, but a few people in my home computer gang had them. And the story of the C5 is also great. 

Commodore 64 ads from the 1980s still make me want a C64 in 2021 - I have still some old Byte magazines. Computer ads used to be fun.

5 things I learned from Google’s productivity expert - annoyingly you have to give your details to get the report, but this is a summary

NEW: lots of news recently on waning immunity against infection, but a study has now landed from Public Health England on how vaccines are faring against *severe disease & death* - I link to the thread, because the FT source is pay-walled. Great data and good to know that Biontech shots are probably going to be good for a bit longer.

Police catch close-pass drivers by joining group ride, and upload to Strava - nice initiative. I wish they would do stuff like this in Spain and Germany. 

biorower - the indoor rower I want, but can't afford

The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world’s first cryptocurrency cruise ship - this cheered me up more than it should have

Michael K Williams, star of The Wire, dies aged 54 - RIP

‘I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase’ – how The Wire’s Omar changed TV - the best character in the best TV show

Top street artists paint decks in aid of rural skatepark - if it wasn't in the UK I might bid, some pretty stuff there. "Happy Feelings" is lovely (currently at £450)

Fit in my 40s: phew, a group bike ride that stops often enough for me to catch up - "They’ll stop if they see an unseasonably large toad" ... that's me

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, September 03, 2021

Friday Links 21-30

Catalan Cricket
Back from my holiday and catching up with the news. 

New section on Agile this time as something at work required a bit of research into this.

Management

What’s going on with the ‘Great Resignation’?  - I have heard this term in different contexts a few times now. I guess this will continue for a bit more.

Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story - example story about how this could happen and what to expect

4-day workweek: which day should you take off? - it depends

These statistics prove the value of the 4-day workweek - I am all for it, but I am pretty sure my productivity would go down by roughly 20% 

Performance Review: Build Your Process and Master Feedback Delivery [Podcast] - Lara Hogan on reviews

#118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity [Podcast] - very down to earth discussion from a very high level CEO

Agile

The Four Agile Values and Slack - it is really difficult to complain about the agile manifesto

How to Deal With Tech Debt Effectively - we are using a mix of 20%, fix as you go and large clean-ups.

Software Development Waste - results of a study of projects

An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage - cool presentation, it includes a link to the talk

How I Failed As A Scrum Master For My Most Prestigious Team - not really a fail, more of a small correction

Autonomous Scrum Teams are like powerful responsibility magnets - but tricky to get right

Remote Work 

How remote work is bringing life back to Spain’s rural villages - fast internet is definitely a game changer and Spain seems to be doing a good job.

Spanish companies divided over employees’ return to the workplace - the same as everywhere

How to Understand How Things Ever Got This Bad [Comic] - "Technology was supposed to set us free, but it really just made it harder to escape"

Extending our voluntary return to office - for a tiny bit

Introducing Horizon Workrooms: Remote Collaboration Reimagined - this is worrying

Environment 

Der Bulli wird zum Pkw [German] - small buses are really not better than SUVs

Leaded petrol era ‘officially over’ as Algeria ends pump sales - it only took 50 years, this doesn't make me hopeful about tackling the climate crisis or fine particles

Air pollution linked to more severe mental illness – study - a bit like lead?

Urbanism

Tolls scrapped on more than 550 kilometers of Spain’s freeways - this is so frustrating. Apparently they are doing it for "sustainability" and "safety". But see next link...

Spain plans to introduce tolls on all state and regional highways - right

Should jaywalking be legal? [YouTube] - should it ever have been illegal? 

Vehicle/cycle conflict halves in Glasgow trial of bike-activated traffic signs - never heard of systems like this before and it is a bit sad that we need them

How to move things on a bike - pretty pictures from Amsterdam

Walking Places Is Part of the Culture Wars Now - I for one am glad that isn't just about cyclists now

Ten social benefits of walkable places - I bet there are more

Warum ein Lastenrad-Bonus nicht nur hippen Großstädtern nützt [German] - today's argument from the right: cargo bikes are for hipsters and upper middle class

Todesfalle Landstraße [German] - lowering speed limits is good for motorways and country roads ... only the German's think they drive better than everyone else

Random Sports

Imported sports: Catalonia goes cricket crazy - nice, now I can watch it locally without understanding it

#109 – Holden Karnofsky on the most important century [Podcast] - a bit weird, but a good conversation

#110 – Holden Karnofsky on building aptitudes and kicking ass [Podcast] - more weird

What personality are you? How the Myers-Briggs test took over the world - horoscopes for business

Catalonia: Squatters, eviction and extortion [Podcast] - I didn't realise how much of a business this is

As demand for bikes surged, Amazon got in the way - a bad fit for this bicycle part company

Genetics and the longer arm of the law [Podcast] - it seems this fight has been lost, at least in the US. Your gene fingerprint is some database and the police will access it

Dear Diary: how keeping a journal can bring you daily peace - pretty much my experience. I am still sticking to it.

SUMMER MUSINGS: No... Not all amplifiers sound the same (but many do! ;-). - I am a fan of 90s Sony amplifiers, but I don't think I would notice a difference nowadays

Next Steps for Chia, in Their Own Words - burn the planet with hard disks

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.