Friday Links

This week Garmin exploded, the UK decided that cycling isn't so bad after all, remote working is still a thing Management When We Need to Move Quickly We Work in Task Forces. Here’s How We Set Them Up - Kind of common sense, but as usual it is interesting how Buffer approaches it. Zef’s Razor - I am going to spoil it: "People have good intentions" - this applies to live in general I guess More Uninterrupted Time At Work for You and Your Organization - good summary about what you and your organization can do to reduce interruptions When your coworker does great work, tell their manager - tell everybody! Antifragile - Manage Your Team Under Pressure: Adam Wolff (VP of Engineering, Robinhood) [Podcast] Empowering Your Team to Lead Fulfilling Lives with Vlad Magdalin, CEO of Webflow [Podcast] Technology The State of Ruby 3 Typing - Is it just me or does this look awful and awkward? A long list of GRUB2 secure-boot holes - this looks painful and you might not want to update your CentOS / RHEL yet. Mycroft: an open-source voice assistant - this doesn't seem to fix the privacy issues and there are seem to be some problems with the company as whole Highlights from Git 2.28 - default branch can be something besides 'master' now, speed ups with bloom filters and small feature improvements Remote working The Implications of Working Without an Office - “What impact has working from home had on productivity and creativity?” Google employees will work from home until at least summer 2021 - with the state the States are in at the moment this is not really surprising, it will be interesting to see how this will shape Silicon Valley in the future. Our remote work future is going to suck - it will probably suck, for some people more than others and the jury is still out if it will suck more or less than office work Urbanism A COVID-19 story in Amsterdam written by bike - Lot of photos. I love the one titled "Heavy Police presence during COVID-19" Sant Cugat finançarà el 50% de la compra de bicicletes - small city close to Barcelona is supporting bike purchases, they also used the opportunity of the current crisis to expand their cycling network Dutch city redraws its layout to prepare for global heating effects - with governments doing not a lot it is up to cities to react, this is happening all over the world France to ban heated terraces in cafes and bars - I think they are also regulating air conditioning, but I can't find it now. There seems to be a change coming in the UK with a new "cycling revolution", though this doesn't seem to be backed up with new money. Cycling ambitions for England move up a gear with No 10 plansResidents to get new decision-making powers in cycling ‘revolution’What do Highway Code proposals mean for pedestrians and cyclists? Random FlightsMicrosoft’s Flight Simulator is a ticket to explore the world again - I used to play this on the Amiga back in the day. When I say "play" I mean: lift off, fly for ages over a landscape that always looks the same and then crash into the ground when trying to land. I wonder if this runs on anything i have. Tim Bray: Not an Amazon ProblemAmazon is a perfectly OK company, to the extent that planetary-scale sprawling corporate behemoths can be perfectly OK in 2020. Which is to say, not OK at all.Garmin was targeted by a ransomware attack. Nobody is quite sure if they handled it well or not. There was a definitely a lack of communication during the outage from Thursday to Monday! It is also not clear if they paid the ransom, which would be illegal in the US. Garmin outage caused by confirmed WastedLocker ransomware attackGarmin obtains decryption key after ransomware attack Garmin Hack’s $10M Ransom Payment, $10M Tax DeductionSchneier: Images in Eye ReflectionsIn Japan, a cyberstalker located his victim by enhancing the reflections in her eye, and using that information to establish a location. 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.

rjp inspired me with his random roundups to put a bit more work in my Friday Links. This might have been a big mistake, as it takes me quite a bit more time to put this together and it might be even harder to read. I also merged the podcasts and videos into the other sections to provide more context. If you make it through this, please tell me if they are better or worse. Technology Btrfs at Facebook is a good article by LWN going into the details why and how Facebook is using Btrfs. I am always amazed by scale of Facebook, also mentioned in one of the links of the Fedora 33 article below. Josef Bacik: Consider the web tier for example, we push the entire website to every box in the web tier (measured in hundreds of thousands of machines) probably 6-10 times a day. This is roughly 40 gib of data, getting written to these truly terrible consumer grade flash drives (along with some spinning rust), 6-10 times a day.More Topfew Fun Tim Bray on a mission to prove that Go is in fact not slower than Rust. Seems to be true, but we also find out that regex libraries are slow (surprise!). They want to be small, they want to be big: thoughts on code reviews and the power of patch series - everybody has a different taste for code reviews. Nicolai Hähnle likes the git email workflow. I can't say I agree, but still an interesting perspective. Worrying about the npm ecosystem - Who doesn't? If you think CPAN, Rubygems or Packagist are bad, you haven't seen anything yet. First PHP 8 alpha released I haven't worked with PHP for a while and sometimes it is depressing how fast it moves compared to for example Ruby. Skateboarding and the mindset of a programmer - Everything is like skateboarding and also like programming. Docker and Fedora 32 This article helped me to get rid of the docker-ce packages provided by Docker and move to moby packages included in Fedora, which makes updating them a lot easier. I was basically missing the firewall bit, the CGroups part you have to fix for either version. Engineering ManagementThe Security Value of Inefficiency Bruce Schneier makes the point that when you are 100% efficient, you don't have any margin for error. He is talking about the problems COVID-19 is creating in hospitals and supply chains. This applies equally to engineering teams. The goal should never be to utilize your team to 100% (or ideally 110% as Americans like to say). Without any headroom there is no margin for mistakes, creativity and agility. Pretty good list of company handbooks - the usual suspects like Valve, Gitlab and Basecamp, but many more. All Hands on Deck describes the incident response to A Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day at Slack. As we recently worked on our incident response at Devex this was an interesting read, both from the technical and the management side. Tech Migrations, the Spotify Way Upgrades, migrations, rewrites and changing technologies are one part of technical debt. Interesting to see how Spotify prioritizes and visualizes these. Why Transparent Email Stopped Working For Us and What We Do Instead - the best thing of Buffer being transparent is that we all can learn from them. Transparent Email sounds scary, but secretive emails or private Slack channels are equally so. Software developers: We won't take a pay cut just to work remotely With all the virus fun the world is having a lot of companies are going remote or distributed. This will have an interesting effect on salaries. Some companies are paying localized salaries, others are paying the ones in the headquarter location, which might be as expensive as Silicon Valley. This might destroy some of the startups in low income locations, as they won't be able to keep up with the well funded US companies. The Art of Leadership: 1-on-1s, Staff Meetings, and Manager READMEs with Michael Lopp, Rands in Repose [Podcast] I guess Rands is on a book tour at the moment, still enjoyable as always and a good overview of the book in case you haven't read it yet. Urbanism The Pedestrian Strikes Back "Officials in several countries are getting the message: Cities are about people, not cars." says the NY Times The Lively & Liveable Neighbourhoods that are Illegal in North America [Podcast] Zoning ... do I need to say more? StreetRidersNYC [Podcast] Random group of cyclists organizing protests on bikes in New York. Reminded me of the local Critial Mass protests. Also a good insight into why bicycles are so great in cities. RandomTen years of the sun in one hour – Nasa releases mesmerising space filmnothing to add to the title. Or go directly to the film on YouTube: A Decade of Sun [Video] Off their heads: the shocking return of the rave I am clearly too old for this stuff, but even if I wasn't I probably would wait a little bit, with One Thing Or Another going around. ‘I bought these items and I couldn’t stand them’: inside the mind of a Batman collector I am fascinated with collectors. The need to complete a set of things seems to be so human, but also so unnecessary. I have some tiny collections, but so far I have stopped myself from collecting ice cream. Or ice cream stopped me. I do love Batman though and have some graphic novels and various collectables. Hype and hope: Wearables in the covid era I use a Garmin Fenix 5 sports-watch 24/7. I am expecting that Garmin will figure out some way to use all the data of their users to see some trends regarding COVID-19 and possibly provide some early warning system. “I’m happy coming back, as long as nobody else does” Someone writing about their experience in going back to the "new normal" office. It will be different for everybody, but also strange for all of us. The Mystery of the Shared Earbuds [Podcast] Great story about two different and interesting people getting together because of music. 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.

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