Christof Damian: 06.2023

Friday, June 30, 2023

Friday Links 23-20

A backpack and a bicycle travel bag at the airport.

Two great long reads this week: "The Case Against Travel" and "How to reduce the damage done by gentrification"

Leadership

Platform Engineering Hype - I am not a big fan of these kinds of teams either. Maybe there is a scale where it makes sense, but not for most of the companies.

climbing the leadership ladder: from manager to director to VP - interesting perspective about managing in different directions and "If the things that you love are communicating, unblocking, and coaching, you must do more of that at higher levels."

Senior Rotations - "The basic concept is that every Senior Engineer and above (back then that meant Staff, Principal, and Distinguished) was entitled to a 4 week rotation with a different team once a year."

Engineering

Meta developer tools: Working at scale - remember: you are not at Meta's scale

Emacs for Android [LWN] - this would be nice if I could get org-mode working and there were some reasonable way to work around the keyboard issues.

Disabling SELinux's runtime disable - this won't affect many people, there are still many options to turn it off.

Environment

546. Are E.S.G. Investors Actually Helping the Environment? [Podcast] - I don't buy the idea that one should invest in dirty companies in the hope to change them.

‘A war on nature’: rangers build mountain out of wildlife traps found in Uganda park - of how many which haven't been found?

Sweden abandons 100% renewable energy goal as EU reconsiders climate policies - adding more nuclear … good luck with that.

Urbanism

Is It Worth It To Confront Drivers? [Podcast] - no, it is frustrating, and you will just get more upset.

How to reduce the damage done by gentrification - "fairer housing, fairer public transport and fairer schooling"

I finally found a true Dutch bike in North America. Here's what you need to know [YouTube] - these are really only useful in cities and relatively flat areas. Cool initiative, though.

Still nurturing love and vines: the centenarian who built Barcelona’s first roof garden - this looks better than our proper garden.

Random Travel

The Case Against Travel - I am so off travelling.

Building atomic habits with James Clear [Podcast] - amazingly I still haven't read that book.

Biniam Girmay: Africa’s new cycling hero [Podcast] - one more reason to look forward to the Tour.

National Geographic reportedly lays off its last staff writers - :-(

McGrath: Red Hat’s commitment to open source - I am not happy.

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, June 23, 2023

Friday Links 23-19

The last two weeks I enjoyed the interview with S.A. Cosby (and his book) and the story about the right-wing looney on ecstasy.

Leadership

Honor the Past, Present, and People: Creating and Managing Positive Change (with Esther Derby, Consultant) [Podcast] - "See the role of the middle manager as connecting the contextual knowledge from the top of the organization with the day-to-day operations at the bottom."

Ep - 26 - Should I be using the SPACE framework? feat. Abi Noda (CEO and Co-Founder at DX) [Podcast] - about the shortcomings of DORA & SPACE.

Ask Questions, Repeat The Hard Parts, and Listen - I think the title already says it all.

Identify your controls. - relating different levels of control and alignment.

How We Connect Our Engineers Directly To Buffer Customers with Customer Engineering Days - bringing engineers closer to customers and other departments can only be good.

Engineering

New Approaches For Detecting AI-Generated Profile Photos - websites who live off user contributed content are pretty buggered.

An explosion in software engineers using AI coding tools? - I just dipped my toes into this, and not with a lot of success. This will change though, quickly.

Environment

Switzerland referendum: Voters back carbon cuts as glaciers melt - sadly this is an outlier.

Spain drought forces Fuente de Piedra flamingos to find new home - and so do the tourists.

Greta Thunberg takes part in her final school strike - warning: 'The fight has only just begun' - five years, 251 weeks! She probably learned more during this time than other people in a lifetime.

Urbanism

The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities [YouTube] - also good: "it's too new"

Neighborhood walkability as a remedy for childhood anxiety - I am uncertain if you should draw this conclusion, but I like the argument.

The Collboni Surprise - Barcelona's new mayor might not be as bad as expected, but still pretty bad. (see also: Socialist mayor in Barcelona for first time in 12 years after last-minute drama)

Can U.S. Cities Build Narrow European Streets? [YouTube] - spoiler: yes!

Bicycle theft and traffic nuisance: the main concerns faced by cyclists in Barcelona - surprise!

We Keep Losing The Battle Against Traffic. Is This Inevitable? [YouTube] - sadly, yes

Random Cyclists

Leah Goldstein: the cyclist who raced men across America … and won

S.A. Cosby [Podcast] - this made me buy and read "All The Sinners Bleed" right away.

Sperm counts [Podcast] - frozen peas on your testis?

Batman Reading Order - I was looking for inspiration, but this is too much.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability - I guess one should have seen this coming after the CentOS Stream debacle. Is Fedora next?

Stud Lane Book Nook - I love book nooks, sadly I have no real bookshelf.

‘Touch mic and shell it!’ How British freestyle rap videos became a global phenomenon - for some reason UK rap seems much more real to me. My time in London might be to blame.

BIKE24 invests 10 million euros for a robotic logistics center in Barcelona, creating 50 jobs - they are not specifically saying this is because of me, but it is because of me.

How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist - I bet things like these happened a lot in the 90s.

Rocky Horror at 50: ‘A place for the marginalised’ - I'll file this under "anniversaries that make me feel old"

Who needs the Metaverse? Meet the people still living on Second Life - every couple of years I go: "What happened to Second Life?"

The curse of the Nuon [YouTube] - another fun odyssey in an obsolete technology that I didn't know existed.

Friday, June 09, 2023

Friday Links 23-18

I am skipping every second week currently, with the result that today is a bit long.

I loved the podcast about the U-Cycle initiative in Ukraine and one about the climate-grandmas in Switzerland.

Leadership

Measuring Success & Performance of Managers - A Deep Dive [Podcast] - measuring individual contributors is already hard, measuring managers even more so.

Admiral Linda Fagan on servant leadership [Podcast] - I usually skip military leadership lessons, this is great, though.

An alternative to NPS for dev tools - NPS is questionable, this is another approach.

TBM 223: Why Aren't They Saying Anything? - there are many reasons, it's the leader's job to figure it out and avoid the obvious ones.

Continuous Code Reviews using Non-Blocking Reviews - a case study

Work

Should you optimize for all-cash compensation, if possible? - it depends.

Story: Quitting (And Then Rejoining) Stack Overflow [Podcast] - cool story about the site.

Work-Life Harmony: Karinna Briseno Shares Her Experience at Buffer - hmmm.

Technology

Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’ - about "AI"

Apple Vision Pro Impressions! [YouTube] - this is a very reasonable review. It sounds like a nice toy, that is too expensive for me.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice - not good news.

Open-Source LLMs - I haven't tried any of these, but I love to see projects built around them.

WezTerm - you can never have enough terminals, right?

Environment

The biggest climate case that ever was [Podcast] - older Swiss woman fighting to change climate laws.

Germany’s forests under threat [Podcast] - I didn't realise that it was this bleak.

BBC OS Conversations: Mount Everest [Podcast] - climbing this mountain is looking different as climate change happens.

Testing New York Apartments: How Dirty Is That Gas Stove, Really? - pretty dirty.

Drought-struck Barcelona quenches thirst with costly desalination - climate change is costing us already.

Water war: Why drought in Spain is getting political - these are very peaceful wars at the moment.

Urbanism

Paved Paradise with Henry Grabar [Podcast] - parking again.

Sadiq Khan [Podcast] - the Mayor of London about pollution in London and climate change. (also: Sadiq Khan Q&A [Podcast])

Stockholmer Radpolitik, ukrainischer Widerstand & Shimano CUES [Podcast, mostly German] - both, the interview with the minister for traffic of Stockholm (in German) and the interview with U-Cycle in Ukraine (in English) are great.

Car-Free Cities Are the Future, Biometrics Reveal - "sifting through these data we see that people do not like looking at cars"

Finnish businessman hit with €121,000 speeding fine - can we use this system worldwide, please?

Sex Work Bollards: Not Actually Bollards - better than nothing!

“Very conservative and unresponsive attitude towards bikes”: United Nations' delegates slam policy of allowing cars in HQ but not bikes - always the same.

Five easy ways to reduce bike theft in your community [YouTube] - easy if they let you do this.

Nick Offerman [Podcast] - just a pleasant chat.

Post-Colau Barcelona: Implications, ‘bikelash’ and opportunities - I am worried.

Minnesota Legislature passes $1.3B transportation deal with gas tax hike, sending it to Walz - take from the cars and give to everybody else.