Posts

This week I am not even going to pretend that there is any theme to these. In Grudging Defense of Structure https://avdi.codes/in-grudging-defense-of-structure/ Why the developers who use Rust love it so much https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/06/05/why-the-developers-who-use-rust-love-it-so-much/ We love individual responsibility more than we would admit https://blog.odd-e.com/yilv/2020/06/we-love-individual-responsibility-more-than-we-would-admit.html As Diners Flock to Delivery Apps, Restaurants Fear for Their Future https://www.worldnewj.com/as-diners-flock-to-delivery-apps-restaurants-fear-for-their-future/ Rain Alarm https://www.rain-alarm.com/ Creating a Decision Journal: Template And Example Included https://fs.blog/2014/02/decision-journal/ Performance and N+1 Queries: Explained, Spotted, and Solved https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/06/09/n-plus-one-queries-explained.html The RuboCop Name Drama Redux https://metaredux.com/posts/2020/06/08/the-rubocop-name-drama-redux.html 5 Engineering Manager Archetypes https://www.patkua.com/blog/5-engineering-manager-archetypes/ Adopted dogs being returned to Animal Shelters https://www.majorcadailybulletin.com/news/local/2020/06/09/68183/adopted-dogs-being-returned-animal-shelters-majorca.html An open letter of advice to CEOs https://www.ft.com/content/7216ad9e-aa30-11ea-abfc-5d8dc4dd86f9 Marmite says pub shutdown means no larger jars for now https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53005434 To highlight the importance of colorists in comics, we asked artists to put their colors on a page by DC artist @stephenbyrne86 https://twitter.com/cred_art/status/1265282176053940225 Another Intel Speculative Execution Vulnerability https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/06/another_intel_s.html Celebrating 3 million accounts (fewer) https://m.signalvnoise.com/celebrating-3-million-accounts-fewer/ Reimagining Justice: A Primer on Defunding the Police and Prison Abolition https://blog.getpocket.com/2020/06/reimagining-justice-a-primer-on-defunding-the-police-and-prison-abolition/ Podcasts The Wellness Phenomenon https://pca.st/5obn9w1i Absolute Zero https://pca.st/q55opyxh #79 - A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles https://pca.st/enjb06f4 Helium https://pca.st/rqhqb2yy Why We Hate Being Told What To Do https://pca.st/9425y7gn ...

Black Lives Matter. About Friday Links/2020/06/about-friday-links.html Sawfish phishing campaign targets GitHub users https://github.blog/2020-04-14-sawfish-phishing-campaign-targets-github-users/ How the new normal will change company culture for good https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/lessons-of-pandemic-change-company-culture/ The Definitive Answer: Who Really Owns a 1 on 1 Meeting? https://getlighthouse.com/blog/who-owns-1-on-1-meeting/ Black Lives Matter. https://lethain.com/black-lives-matter/ Skip Level Meetings for Interns https://managingdev.com/skip-level-meetings-interns/ Political Songs | Dub journalism, a cultural weapon https://www.newframe.com/political-songs-dub-journalism-cultural-weapon/ Poet on the front line https://theguardian.com/books/2002/may/04/poetry.books List of cognitive biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change https://medium.com/@BarackObama/how-to-make-this-moment-the-turning-point-for-real-change-9fa209806067 recommendmeabook.comhttps://recommendmeabook.com/ 80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/01/linux_5_7/ No More Requirements https://zef.me/2020/05/29/no-more-requirements/ Podcasts Zeno's Paradoxes https://pca.st/lr5owrp0 How to Implement Operational Frameworks and Hire Great Leaders with Sam Zaid, CEO of Getaround https://pca.st/m0axw73h 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.

Since Summer 2018 I have been posting Friday Links on my blog. There are now nearly a hundred posts of these and I thought I write a little bit about these. I picked this habit up at my job at Splendia. I can’t remember where it originated from. The idea is to collect interesting links to share with your team and post them all together on a Friday so people have some reading material for the weekend. Other team members would then add their own links in the same thread. By posting these together in one email, blog post or Slack message you avoid the constant stream of notifications you would get if everybody posts these during the week. None of these are urgent reads and they shouldn’t pull you out of your zone to check Slack and then maybe even follow them and read the articles. Allowing to consume these posts asynchronous was one of the main goals. Another goal is to inform my team about my general thinking. Not everybody will read all the links of course, but because there are some themes that are going through all the posts it gives some insight into my sources and topics I am interested in. I also have been accused of using these to subversively spread certain messages in the company. I can’t confirm or deny this. Originally I just emailed these to my team. This started in 2013 when I joined Devex. Once we began to use Slack I also started posting a shortened version to our #random channel. I removed all the very technical links to make them more useful for the whole company. In 2018 someone who left the company asked if he could still find them somewhere once he lost access to company email and Slack, that is when I started including them in my blog. So currently there are always three versions of these posts. I was hesitant to include them between my usual posts, but the alternatives were also not brilliant. Recently I also included a section with podcasts and videos, because people were interested in these. The content is quite random. It is a selection from everything interesting that comes across my screen / headphones from one Friday to the next one. Currently it very much focused on engineering management, remote working and agile development. I often include posts about my hobbies, like Linux, cycling, electronic music or programming languages. To make it into the list it has to be standing out in some way. I don’t necessarily have to agree with the content, but it still might inform my thinking about topics. I really should include some disclaimer in the posts, because sometimes people assume that I agree fully with all of these. One good example is the Buffer blog, which is from a company very interested in fully remote companies and is pushing that message in a lot of their posts. I personally don’t believe that fully remote companies are as productive as companies with offices. But it is interesting to see how they are dealing with the problems a remote company creates, these solutions can help all companies that have some remote element in their workforce. Their posts about transparency are also very good. Most of the links I find come through one of the about 200 blogs I subscribe through in Tiny Tiny RSS. I star all the articles for possible inclusion. This has an RSS feed that creates Pocket entries via IFTTT. Stuff I find randomly through social media or Google I add directly to Pocket. Podcasts get starred in Pocketcasts and I copy the shareable links from there. Every Friday morning I have 30 minutes booked in my calendar to work on the posts. I use pocket-reader in Emacs to create the final list and the three versions I post. It is some manual work and some Emacs macros. I hope these are sometimes useful for you too.

Working from home, working remote, dealing with the pandemic-era, product management and random fun. Ergodox Keyboardhttps://ergodox-ez.com/ LinkedIn’s approach to automated accessibility (A11y) testing https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2020/automated-accessibility-testing Netflix to automatically cancel ‘hundreds of thousands’ of inactive accounts https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/netflix-account-cancel-delete-subscribe-renew-email-a9527626.html Why Kotlin Multiplatform Is A Great Alternative To React Native https://mobilejazz.com/blog/why-kotlin-multiplatform-is-a-great-alternative-to-react-native/ Why GitLab pays local rates https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/ From Germany to Detroit and back: how Kraftwerk forged an industrial exchange https://theguardian.com/music/2020/may/25/from-germany-to-detroit-and-back-how-kraftwerk-forged-an-industrial-exchange Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/can-remote-work-be-fixed/ A Guide to Threat Modelling for Developers https://martinfowler.com/articles/agile-threat-modelling.html Tesco begins selling white eggs for the first time in 40 years following increased demand during lockdown https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/eggs-white-shelled-tesco-40-years-uk-supermarkets-lockdown-a9531716.html GT Bike V https://www.gta5-mods.com/scripts/gt-bike-v Adidas Face Cover Large 3-Pack https://www.adidas.co.uk/face-cover-large-3-pack/H08836.html Working from home and the officehttps://blog.google/inside-google/working-google/working-from-home-and-office/ Attracting great people starts with how you position your company https://wildbit.com/blog/2020/05/27/attracting-great-people Websites Conducting Port Scans https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/05/websites_conduc.html Snowmelt Meetings: Why I’m Meeting With My Team Even More Right Now https://open.buffer.com/snowmelt-meetings/ Keeping Customers Streaming — The Centralized Site Reliability Practice at Netflix https://netflixtechblog.com/keeping-customers-streaming-the-centralized-site-reliability-practice-at-netflix-205cc37aa9fb A pandemic-era LWN update https://lwn.net/Articles/821561/ OpenSSH 8.3 released (and ssh-rsa deprecation notice) https://lwn.net/Articles/821544/ The Problem with Org Charts https://itrevolution.com/the-problem-with-org-charts/ The big story behind a little Blue Dot https://blog.google/inside-google/working-google/big-story-behind-little-blue-dot/ DevOps Enterprise Summit London – Virtual: What to Expect, And Why I’m So Excited About It https://itrevolution.com/london-virtual-what-to-expect/ Videos / Podcasts Reunited Apart Makes a SPLASH - with Tom Hanks, Daryl Hannah, and more! https://youtu.be/MbFIgQoHSJM (Dispatch from the Scenius) Dr. Mik Kersten’s 2018 DOES TALK, Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework, with commentary from Gene https://pca.st/30hwb7iu

Today free from "one thing or another", some software news, working from home, making product decisions and fun video from the past. TBM 21/53: "Vision" and Prescriptive Roadmapshttps://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-2153-vision-and-prescriptive The Cave Essentials https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-cave-essentials/ Developer Dilemmas Are Now Online https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/05/20/developer-dilemmas-are-now-online.html Architecture Jams: a Collaborative Way of Designing Software https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-architecture-jams/ The state of the AWK https://lwn.net/Articles/820829/ Introducing Piranha: An Open Source Tool to Automatically Delete Stale Code https://eng.uber.com/piranha/ Digital Transformation Is About Talent, Not Technology https://hbr.org/amp/2020/05/digital-transformation-is-about-talent-not-technology New controls for how you share albums in Google Photos https://blog.google/products/photos/new-controls-how-you-share-albums-google-photos/ Prototyping at Slack https://slack.engineering/prototyping-at-slack-b1ec3a298226 Some tips and tricks for a remote-friendly communication https://tech.xing.com/some-tips-and-tricks-for-a-remote-friendly-communication-ae6af600cd26 King shares the Defold game engine source code and invites collaborators and partners https://defold.com/2020/05/19/Defold-is-now-open-source/ Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage https://themargins.substack.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage What Thomas Edison actually invented in 1880 https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/what-thomas-edison-actually-invented-in-1880/amp On Making Decisions https://medium.com/@cgroom/on-making-decisions-579354de3166 The Great CoffeeScript to Typescript Migration of 2017 https://dropbox.tech/frontend/the-great-coffeescript-to-typescript-migration-of-2017 Spotify vs. Fitbit https://svpg.com/spotify-vs-fitbit/ Five Years of Rust https://blog.rust-lang.org/2020/05/15/five-years-of-rust.html A Message from Co-Founder and CEO Brian Chesky https://news.airbnb.com/a-message-from-co-founder-and-ceo-brian-chesky/ Videos / Podcasts Microsoft demo of automatic code generation by language models https://www.pscp.tv/Microsoft/1OyKAYWPRrWKb?t=28m15s Plato AMA: Learn with live AMAs with senior engineering leaders https://www.platohq.com/webinars It's Time to go BACK TO THE FUTURE! | Reunited Apart with Josh Gad https://youtu.be/crdYIUdUOhc Developing Leaders on a Team with Jill Wetzler https://pca.st/nj5tje2q