Friday, December 30, 2022

Friday Links 22-41

beagle resting his head on the armrest of a sofa
"A collection of links on various topics, including overcoming disillusionment with the executive team, handling feedback, creating incentives for managers to grow, the pitfalls of using microservices, reflections on the state of Ruby and Rails, retaining high performing employees, closing a company for a week, transportation and urban planning in various cities around the world, tourism in Spain, a Netflix episode featuring David Letterman and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the LastPass breach, and the rescue of abused beagles, as well as several collections of links on various topics."

(summary generated by ChatGPT

Last Friday Links of the year, 41 of 52 Fridays. Mostly skipping for holidays or sickness.

All the best for 2023!

Leadership

How Do I Overcome My Disillusionment with the Executive Team? [Podcasts] - as a coach, it makes sense to help the listener to find a way to a better place. Some of it sounded mostly about avoidance. 

What to do when my feedback doesn’t land? - is it just about feedback to help or do you need to set boundaries 

Team Matching Creates Incentives - for managers to grow. I never worked in an organisation that applied team matching. I, personally, like to give hiring managers more autonomy on whom they hire.

Engineering 

The Pitfalls of Treating Microservices as a Blanket Solution - definitely fit them to your teams, products, and organisation capabilities

Year in Review 2022: Tenderlove's Ruby and Rails Reflections and Predictions - Ruby is still sticking around (Rails doesn't get mentioned much)

Work

How to hold on to your high performing employees, with Fresia Jackson. [Podcast] - interesting insights into performance rating systems and reviews 

Why and How We Close Buffer For The Last Week Of The Year - at Devex we did this twice a year and it is brilliant to have everybody away at the same time

Urbanism

Traffic wars: who will win the battle for city streets? - it is not a "war". It is about restoring the balance again. 

Driving Through Paris? That’s Going to Get a Lot Tougher in 2024 - Paris still leading the way of transformation.

London’s lost mega-motorway: the eight-lane ring road that would have destroyed much of the city - narrow escape 

Shifting gears: why US cities are falling out of love with the parking lot - slowly ... very slowly

The Lifesaving Tech Drivers Hate [YouTube] - drivers want to break the law without punishment

Cyclist clears way with homemade bicycle snowplow  [YouTube] - this looks like so much fun, possibly a bit dangerous 

Copenhagen is a City of WEIRD Bicycle Bridges (and some don’t work well) [YouTube] - clearly overrated city, while still being better than most

Vienna Straddles the Danube with Modern TRAINS and Sleek TRAMS [YouTube] - TIL: second-largest German-speaking city! 

Barcelona 'systematically' breached EU air quality directive, rules European Court of Justice - they don't care 

Spain allowed NO2 levels to exceed limits in Madrid and Barcelona, EU court rules - I hope there will be meaningful punishment  

Japan To Introduce Mandatory Helmet Law For People On Bicycles - this is stupid 

Exklusiv Einigung beim Mobilitätsgesetz: Senat will Autoverkehr in Berlin reduzieren und Lieferzonen schaffen [German] - Berlin wants to reduce parking and space for cars ... I believe it when I see it

Random Beagles

‘We did not stop’: How rescue groups saved 3,776 abused beagles - too cute!

Spain tops world’s best tourist villages ranking with three awards - avoid these for a while 

My Next Guest with David Letterman and Volodymyr Zelenskyy | Full Episode | Netflix [YouTube] - he is just remarkable, and Letterman is pretty good too. 

Our country of the year for 2022 can only be Ukraine - "For the heroism of its people, and for standing up to a bully"

LastPass Breach - if you are using LastPass, you might want to switch now. 

Why 70% of Spain is Empty [YouTube] - history and hills 

Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub [LWN] - it's not only Mastodon

The 50 best TV shows of 2022 - time for best-of lists!

Other Links 

  • A bit of a link traffic jam from Ben Crowder. It's probably best if you just subscribe to his blog
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, December 16, 2022

Friday Links 22-40

Abstract AI 3D render
Catching up with my podcasts. The Heroko one was fun and so was the one about retrospectives.

If you want to see something impossible, watch the making-of series by Danny McAskill.

Leadership 

Radical Candor S4, Ep. 16: What Do Managers of Managers Do? (The Crank Call From Kim) [Podcast] - goes off the topic a bit at the end :-) 

How Retrospectives, Public Channels, and Asynchronous Meetings Foster Inclusive & Culturally-Diverse Teams (with Alexandra Sunderland, Sr Engineering Manager at Fellow)  [Podcast] - I am a big fan of retrospectives, even if you don't do anything agile, do retrospectives 

Ep - 16 - Leading through change; where do you start? feat. Ryan Tomlinson (VP of Engineering at Healx) [Podcast] - change is tricky.

The story of Heroku [Podcast] - I never used Heroko, but I can see the allure. The backstory is pretty interesting too. 

Reckoning with the force of Conway's Law [Podcast] - what it says on the tin 

Performance Review Incentives - I am not in favour of performance reviews. I like the idea, but I have never seen them implemented in a useful way.

The “tech lead” title is turmoil. Is it worth it? - I have seen this problem in most companies I worked for. I think it is time to reframe it or get rid of the idea.

How to build an apprenticeship program for engineering managers - how to grow your people to EMs

Engineering 

Accelerating Code Delivery By 97% With Yarn Workspaces - monorepos 

Shopify Embraces Rust for Systems Programming - nice, but the migration must be a pain.

Five stars code reviews - another try at defining good code reviews

Work

The current state of mental health in the workplace, with Dr Nick Taylor [Podcast] - this became much less abstract for me recently 

EU institutions prepare to close on pay transparency negotiations - this is taking forever!

TBM 53/52: "Are All Companies Messed Up?" - yes, but some are trying to get better

Urbanism

How the Parking Garage Conquered the City - better than parking lots, but they also bring too many cars into cities

Budapest has the busiest and longest TRAMS in the world! | Trailer: City Unboxed [YouTube] - great public transport. Walking and cycling is a bit meh.

Why Amsterdam is Removing 10,000 Parking Spaces [YouTube] - on-street parking, which is great. Replacing them with underground parking … not so great. 

Rethinking the Mobility Paradigm | FULL Keynote | Marco te Brömmelstroet [YouTube] - framing is important 

Environment

Mapped: Carbon Dioxide Emissions Around the World - go Germany!

Random Electronic Music

‘It was a gateway for people to get into electronic music’: 30 years of Warp Records’ Artificial Intelligence  - I know all the songs, but didn't know the album.

Airport security 100ml liquid rule to be scrapped - about time 

The Next Chapter of Reader: Public Beta - a feed reader with all the features from Readwise. I have been trying it out for a while, but the app is just too slow for me at the moment.

2019 - 2022 reading recap. - something for my reading list

Don't buy me this! Gifts not to buy for cyclists this Christmas to avoid a festive faux pas - yearly reminder!

The Continuity of Splines  [YouTube] - this is beautiful 

Danny MacAskill’s Postcard from San Francisco [YouTube] - the making-of the Red Bull video. 

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, December 09, 2022

Friday Links 22-39

AI painting of a woman spy in front of a city
I was out for two weeks with holiday and then a Covid-19 episode.

Today I enjoyed the long read about female British spies.  

Furthermore, some good articles about leadership and how Etsy is scaling. The whole remote work / return to the office discussion hasn't been resolved either.

Leadership

Lessons from a 5x CTO: How to Retain Talent and Run Skip Level 1:1s Through Rapid Growth (with Rob Zuber, Chief Technology Officer at CircleCI) [Podcast] - clearly this was before they let many people go, but still good insights 

Introducing a product delivery culture at Etsy - interesting to see Etsy using ThoughtWorks to help them

TBM 51/52: Shaky Foundations (and Planning Escalation) - going from being reactive to creating a foundation 

Company, team, self.  - starts off about priorities, but really is about how much you value adhering to a plan. 

Three Common PM Role Antipatterns - I had PMs reporting to me in the past, there were some good things about this, but it wasn't ideal. 

The Rands Test - measure where you are in an organisation.

Engineering

Exploring the Basal Cost of software [Podcast] - the baseline costs, like complexity and maintenance

Experiment: The hidden costs of waiting on slow build times - I find these calculations always a bit one-sided. There clearly is a goldilocks point of build speed and costs. 

Password policy: updating your approach - "Don't enforce regular password expiry" "Do not use complexity requirements"  

The cloudy layers of modern-day programming - starts general about "VendorOps", but gets a bit to specific later. 

Peer-Programming a Buggy World with ChatGPT AI - using ChatGPT to create software from scratch. This is pretty cool. I am not worried about engineering jobs yet.

Using the cloud to scale Etsy - more about scaling Etsy. 

Retrofitting null-safety onto Java at Meta - this could be useful for more languages. 

Hanami 2.0: Better, Faster, Stronger - I really hope more people consider this as an alternative to Rails.

Work

520. The Unintended Consequences of Working from Home [Podcast] - what it means for companies and cities 

Raising the Bar from Day 1: Why Talent Acquisition and DEI Go Hand in Hand (with Jackye Clayton, VP of Talent Acquisition and DEI at Textio) [Podcast] - improving the hiring experience 

The Scoop: A Return to the Office (RTO) wave? - I still think there will be just different types of companies and people pick what they like. Or we might find out that one type is simply much more successful eventually.

Three Essential Remote Work Practices for Engineering Teams - structure, communication, and work/life balance. 

Can we finally kill off cheap, disposable conference swag?  - and company swag in general! 

Twitter’s ongoing cruel treatment of software engineers - this is a wonderful train crash to watch. 

My Digital Productivity System for 2022 - I like reading about other people's systems

My Analog Productivity System for 2022 - second part

Mastodon

Bye, Twitter - Tim Bray leaves

Microblogging with ActivityPub  - LWN about the Fediverse. 

PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet - switching from Twitter to another walled garden can't be the solution. 

Mastodon stampede - this is a problem and will get worse when people start up more and more small instances 

Experimenting with Federation and Migrating Accounts - Mastodon needs to scale better in general 

On Running a Mastodon Instance - mostly about the admin part.

Environment 

It's official: France bans short haul domestic flights in favour of train travel  - nice. 

New drought restrictions in Barcelona area and northeastern Catalonia from Friday - there are restrictions in my hood since start of the summer.

Urbanism

*RAVE SHUTS DOWN 7 LANES OF TRAFFIC* Drum & Bass On The Bike - BARCELONA [YouTube] - it is a shame that I missed this! Imagine having a city where this would be possible every day. 

Barcelona introduces 'Amazon tax' on delivery companies - "This world and this city cannot cope with receiving a 300g parcel to your home brought by a 1.5-tonne vehicle"

Elon Musk’s Boring Company Ghosts Cities Across America - number of people being surprised: zero

Neighborhood Walkability in Relation to Knee and Low Back Pain in Older People: A Multilevel Cross-Sectional Study from the JAGES [Paper] - turns out walking is good for you 

Neighborhoods with walkability enhanced by good access to parks and sidewalks and fresh food stores, easy walking without slopes or stairs, and high population densities, had lower prevalences of knee and low back pain among older people.

The Exceptionally American Problem of Rising Roadway Deaths - increasing again in Germany too.

Random Spies

The secret lives of MI6’s top female spies - brilliant long read about spies. 

PFC bans are set to change the face of all waterproof garments - good to see the cycling industry removing some of these pollutants. Gore-Tex Shakedry is magic, though. 

Literature Clock - a new quote for every minute 

A brand new Linux DRM display driver – for a 1992 computer - keeping m68k alive! 

Blockchains, What Are They Good For? - nothing! 

AWS and Blockchain - also not useful.

Telegram repossesses usernames so they can sell them as NFTs - I guess that is Telegram dead for me too?

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.