Friday Links 24-01

New year, new links! 

It has been fairly quiet on the blogs and podcasts recently, and I am focusing on some books at the moment. 

For some fun, have a look at the Jungle & Tetris posts in the random section.

Leadership

Productivity Measurement as a Tradeoff - good view from Kent Beck. 

Questionable Advice: “My boss says we don’t need any engineering managers. Is he right?” - I hope not! It's a good summary of the purpose of managers.

My Diverse Hiring Playbook - improving your hiring pipeline for DEI.

the goal-setting conundrum - why it is hard, and what you can do about it. 

Predictability. - you want predictability, and you should also be predictable. Work is exciting enough.

More Harm Than Good: The Truth About Performance Reviews - this article triggered plenty of useful conversations. I think most of them are indeed bad.

Engineering 

Evolution of Developer Productivity at Square - Part One - I like the high-level strategy: CI, platform, tools, reliability & tests.

systemd through the eyes of a musl distribution maintainer - I used to hate systemd, now I quite like it. As the author, I am not so sure about the other things.

Smuggling email inside of email - that is a pretty silly bug to have, and a not so great response overall.

The case for containers on Lambda (with benchmarks) - I didn't realise you could use containers for Lambda, and it seems they are pretty performant too. 

BASIC was not just a programming language - BASIC was my first language/IDE, and I am thankful that computers used to directly boot into a programming language prompt.

Urbanism

Ministers prioritised driving in England partly due to conspiracy theories - great. 

The Global Bike Bus Movement - Barcelona was a later adopter.

Many Torontonians are parking their cars in favour of bikes. Here's why - it's more social, more healthy, makes nicer cities, …

Random Jungle

Jungle - easy mistake to make … 30 years later.

Vim Adventures - this is a fun way to learn. I wonder if the final level is :q.

Notes on Emacs Org mode - by now, I am a pretty addicted to org-roam.

"Fine for off-the-cuff sequencer basslines, otherwise you have to plan what you're going to do before even switching it on": Here's what the reviews said when the dance-music-defining Roland TB-303 was released in 1981 - only, 10000 produced?

After 34 Years, Someone Finally Beat Tetris [YouTube] - amazing and good behind the scene look at why it is possible to "beat" Tetris. 

Ideal monitor rotation for programmers - funny.

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 kinds 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.