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Friday, May 27, 2022

Friday Links 22-17

Library in  Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
I have a new job. You can expect more about hiring and communication here in the coming weeks.

My weird hobby topics will continue. 

Leadership

Leading your engineering team through an unexpected product pivot - Code as Craft is back and it is good. I really liked this one. Pivots are tricky, the ground shifts below you.

Octoverse Spotlight 2021: The Good Day Project—Personal analytics to make your work days better - nothing really news, but using surveys and data to figure out developer happiness 

When Everything is Important But Nothing is Getting Done - a common problem and a good long read about how to fix it

It is not my job - "Glue work vs gap filling" is a great way of describing Staff+ roles 

21 secrets the Scrum Guide doesn’t tell you - "How we cripple Scrum to fit the broken system" - I am not a Scrum purists, but there a lot of good stuff here 

Everything You Need to Know About Answering Behavioral Interview Questions - this is more for the interviewee, but a good introduction to behavioural questions 

Asynchronous Communication is the Great Leveler in Engineering - not much new, just a good summary

Technology 

Stupid RCU Tricks: Is RCU Watching? - I can't stop myself from reading posts about Linux internals! (til: Livejournal is still a thing)

What happened to Perl 7? - I did forget about it! I really don't use Perl much any more. It is such a fun language though. 

747 Hackathon - security researches are clearly having too much fun!

Schneier on security for tomorrow’s software [Podcast] - Bruce Schneier is great. This is the first time I hear him in a podcast and I like how down to earth and humble he is.

Environment 

Toxic particles from brakes to be included in ‘Euro 7’ emission rules - still missing tires 

Urbanism

Crash Course - words matter

Random Books

a book like {foo} - book recommender and recommender for books outside your bubble: Break the Bubble!

Bikes4Ukraine - crowdfunding sends bikes to Lviv, Ukraine [YouTube] - cool initiatives, but it doesn't look like the crowd funding is going anywhere

layoffs.fyi - well, that's depressing

Classic Desert Island Discs - George Michael [Podcast] - I don't think I listed to this one the first time around, really good and what a guy!

How can we live an ethical life? [Podcast] - great interview with the Philosopher Peter Singer

The 6 Horizons of Focus - it has been a long time since I read GTD and I completely forgot about the horizons, this is a good reminder

More 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, May 20, 2022

Friday Links 22-16

Cassette mix desk with Japanese caption
Cassette Mix Deck
I skipped last week because I was on the bicycle. 

Sorry about the length today and the many podcasts. I had a lot of listening time.

Leadership

TBM 22/52: The Perfect Manager/Leader - "I see people putting themselves under so much pressure to be the perfect manager or leader."

Radical Candor S4. Ep 7: Radically Candid Conversations — Kim Scott & Russ Laraway [Podcast] - this was a good episode of that podcast. I like that he doesn't care about the difference between leadership and management any more :-)

From PayPal Mafia to Viral Startups: How David Sacks Leads Growth at Iconic Companies (with David Sacks, General Partner at Craft Ventures) - some really good tips on leadership and what not to worry about 

The great tech hiring slowdown - it hasn't quite reached Europe yet

Resources for leading through crises - collection of Lara Hogan's post related to this. Good to keep bookmarked as there will be more crises.

Productivity Focus - productivity should be only a tools towards another goal 

What do great engineering managers need to know about compensation and equity? - I have been in salary band & career path meetings again :-)

Engineering

Mitigating cognitive bias when coding [Podcast] - interesting to see how biases can change our approach to programming problems

Rust: A Critical Retrospective - my learning of Rust has sadly grind to a halt 

Using Scientist to Refactor Critical Ruby on Rails Code - apparently I landed at another Ruby shop ... expect more Ruby links

The 5 Categories of Engineering Metrics - quick overview

Episode #6: Paying Back Technical Debt With Help From Metrics - interesting to include "onboarding lead time" in there. I can definitely see that. 

Shopify Invests in Research for Ruby at Scale - good to see 

3 Reasons OKRs Are Great For Software Engineering Teams (And Some Drawbacks) - "Writing good OKRs is difficult" ... this is probably where most teams fail

Work

Are we in denial? is Work From Anywhere our destiny? [Podcast] - I am fully remote now, but Raj mentions how important seeing each other regularly is. Lets call it extreme hybrid. 

Bay View is open — the first campus built by Google - meanwhile in office news...

Environment

Saudi Aramco eclipses Apple to once again become the world's most valuable company - the climate crisis is going well

The ‘carbon bombs’ set to blow up the world’s climate pledges [Podcast] - we should just give ... or did we give up already?

Urbanism

Detective Superintendent Andy Cox [Podcast] - every city should have an Andy Cox. He does such a great job of communicating the problems of bad driving

Peaje Urbano - Barcelona '22 [Catalan] - a couple of organizations in Barcelona a lobbying for a city toll 

How to Learn About Other People's Obscure Interests [Comic] - crossover with Not Just Bikes :-)

Why Do So Many Motorists Feel Persecuted When In Reality They Rule The World? - two words: "entitlement" "privilege" 

Kidical Barcelona - just brilliant, now lets normalize it and let them cycle everywhere every day 

Urban Growth Boundaries: Effective or Worthless? [YouTube] - this comes up in London regularly if I remember correctly. I didn't know that some cities treat these boundaries as expandable 

The Gym of Life [YouTube] - if your city allows you to walk/cycle everywhere you don't need a gym

Car-free neighborhoods share simple patterns: key design tips [YouTube] - these look so cool

Can Sustainable Suburbs Save Southern California? - no

The Struggle of Living in NYC [YouTube] - partly applies to London too, though London is way better than NYC

Random Mixes

FULL CASSETTE | ALL GENRE MIX set | ooedotechnica [YouTube] - what is this brilliant piece of magic! A fricking cassette tape mix machine!

Is your identity keeping you from change? [Podcast] - turns out my coach has a podcast! This is a topic that I have been thinking about recently. I always introduce myself as "programmer", but that isn't even true any more. Times of change are also times to invent yourself. 

Is Emotional Intelligence Really So Important? | No Stupid Questions [Podcast] - I am a bit critical of EI, often it seems to be used to say "shut up and deal with it"

HMV No 11 Gramophone Pick-up Restoration [YouTube] - how has this guy only a 1000 subscribers? He is brilliant! 

How Vladimir Putin rejuvenated Nato [Podcast] - he is good for something!

Marcos’ myths: the dictator’s son rewriting history in the Philippines [Podcast] - I am so sorry for my friends in the Philippines. And the current president was awful too. 

RIP the iPod. I resisted you at first, but for 20 years, you were my musical life - I was very close to buy some mp3 player or a Walkman, but a mobile is just too convenient. I do hate streaming though.  

NFT sales plummet 92% as market ‘collapses’ - I hope this continues. I predicted it should have happened earlier ... so don't ask me for advice 

Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath [Podcast] - how Strava got to be

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, May 06, 2022

Friday Links 22-15

Renault R5 Turbo car
R5 Turbo
This week I loved the article about the Single Threaded Owner. 

Or if you want something to listen to: The Sistine Chapel discussed at In Our Time.

Leadership

Your migration probably isn’t failing due to insufficient staffing.  - there are so many things to go wrong that I question the wisdom of doing them at all. 

Dan Coyle can fix your culture [Podcast] - I quite like the book, this is good too

20 Things I've Learned as a Systems (Over) Thinker - nice list, for all over thinkers

Hold the Mirror, Don’t Paint the Picture: How to Lead an Experienced Team and Coach Underperformers (with David Hanrahan, Chief Human Resource Officer at Eventbrite) [Podcast] - "hire as senior as possible" - interesting

Implementing Amazon's single threaded owner model a retrospective - putting a name to it. I might go for a dual legged stool model (EM + PO) though.

Technology

Announcing the Hare programming language - apparently you can never have enough languages ... now they will have to create a whole new parallel ecosystem. again.

GCC 12.1 Released - 35 years! I was working on a hack to use GCC for parallel programming in university. I had no idea what I was doing. 

Backblaze Drive Stats for Q1 2022 - Star Wars Day edition 

The future of Linux: Fedora project leader Matthew Miller weighs in - interesting titbits, distributions are having a very difficult job today

Work 

Our design to live and work anywhere and Live and Work Anywhere initiative - AirBnB going hybrid

Urbanism

From August 30th, Paris, France, almost the whole city is restricted to 30km/h - Paris is doing everything right

#Autokorrektur: Katja Diehl über die Mobilitätswende, Menschen ohne Führerschein und Identitätspolitik [Podcast, German] - more from the author of Autokorrektur. I hope there will be an English translation soon 

‘It’s just more and more lanes’: the Texan revolt against giant new highways - one more will fix it!

Random Cars

Chris Harris Drives The Renault 5 Turbo 1 [YouTube] - this was my dream car growing up. They are a bit expensive now and not very practical.

On the Ground in Ukraine and Beyond [Podcast] - good stuff on Ukraine and one of the most depressing topics at the moment. (The ads are super annoying since they moved to iheart)

Michael Horvath: the Strava co-founder who’s pacing himself - it is such a great tool and company in my opinion. Especially since he took over the CEO role again.

One down, 39,136 to go: the explorers who walk every street in their city - completionism at its best

Why We Relaunched Code as Craft - good to see them back, this used to be one of my favourite blogs

‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music - more nostalgia

Personal Knowledge Management is Bullshit - yes, but it is better than my brain

The Sistine Chapel [Podcast] - I learned so many new things. Great episode.


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.