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?
