In the project model, the best you can really ask for is time-to-market. But in the product model, you can focus on the much more impactful time-to-money.

What is especially ironic is that you might think that a time-to-market project at least would get done faster than a time-to-money product team would achieve an outcome. But so often it is just the opposite.

All sports involve some kind of disabling impediment, in the form of rules that restrict the ways in which one can achieve the object of the game.

Writing better Action Mailers: Revisiting a core Rails concept

Let me requote Cat Hicks’ wonderful Twitter thread on this:

Doing research with developer teams, something that really strikes me is how much people look for ways to make complex problems easy rather than make it easy to work on complex problems

What I mean is, sometimes it’s really useful to admit we just are trying to accomplish tough things. Asking how we can support our teams who NEED the time and space to work through that, it’s often a much more tractable lever than trying to change the inherent nature of the work

I think it behooves me to say as a psychologist here that I think people are actually really excellent at working on complex problems! It’s one of the reasons research with developers is so great. Overall devs love to learn, love to be curious, love to innovate. It is core stuff.

What would it look like if we could ask, “how do I make this the absolute best environment for complex problem-solving” instead of “how do I take away all these annoying hard problems.” The stuff we want to accomplish in the world is hard. But can be joyful to accomplish.

However, LLMs are not a direct solution to most of the NLP use-cases companies have been working on. They are extremely useful, but if you want to deliver reliable software you can improve over time, you can’t just write a prompt and call it a day. Once you’re past prototyping and want to deliver the best system you can, supervised learning will often give you better efficiency, accuracy and reliability than in-context learning for non-generative tasks — tasks where there is a specific right answer that you want the model to find. Applying rules and logic around your models to do data transformations or handle cases that can be fully enumerated is also extremely important.

Throttling Rails logins with Rack Attack

The Grug Brained Developer A layman’s guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained

https://gomakethings.com/the-most-important-articles-ever-written-about-web-development/

Supporting your customer support staff with internal service design VIEWPOINT For most organisations, the dream of providing an entirely digital self-service for customers is often far from reality. With many services, there is still (and always will be) a need to blend digital self-service with real-time help from customer support staff.

What Does it Mean to be Wholesome in 2023: An Analysis of the 2023 Wholesome Direct

PostgreSQL Lock Conflicts

This tool shows all commands and locks in postgres. If you select a command, it lists the locks that it acquires, commands that conflicts with it and commands are allowed to run concurrently with it without conflict. If you select a lock it lists commands that acquire the lock and what are the other conflicting locks.

The Source of Readability Readability is often treated as a subjective thing. When someone says code is more readable, what they really mean is they can more easily read it. The straw-man goes, this is all taste and convention, just follow the team’s rules and use the auto-formatter.

The Hidden Complexities of Running Shell Commands in Ruby

I had the weird pleasure of listening to two books back-to-back that created a serendipitous connection. The first was Mindf*ck by Christopher Wylie, a behind the scenes first-person account of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its attempts to usurp democracy. The second was The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre, a look into the strange history of the popular Myers-Briggs personality test.

When the Worst Happens (OS Feels 2016)

What follows is the text I used as my guide during my 2016 Open Source and Feelings talk When the Worst Happens. You can also view a video recording of the talk.

Breakdown of dam, like gdpr

This post is part of a series, starting at Reflections on a decade of coding.

I will bet you that, in practice, they simply avoid collecting against anyone who demonstrates ability and financial resources to enforce their rights. This is one for the history books of borked equilibriums. We devoted substantial efforts to pro-consumer legislation to address abuse of (mostly) poor people. We gated redress behind labor that is abundantly available in the professional managerial class and scarce outside of it, like writing letters and counting to 30 days. (People telling me they were incapable of doing these two things is why I started ghostwriting letters for debtors.) We now have literal computer programs exempting heuristically identified professional managerial class members from debt collection, inclusive of their legitimate debts, so that debt collectors can more profitably conserve their time to do abusive and frequently illegal shakedowns of the people the legislation was meant to benefit.

Administrative burden in the (regulated) private sector

Freakonomics and global warming: What happens to a team of “rogues” when there is no longer a stable center to push against? (a general problem with edgelords)

I’m a computer scientist, so I’m bound by law and custom to mention that this essay is an example of the process described in this essay.

Bi-temporal data has been around since the early 1990’s, based on the pioneering work of Richard Snodgrass

Track both the date it actually happened and the date that the system became aware of it (effective date and posted date)

When social apps launched select features

Jupyter notebooks and Ruby

What we talk about when we talk about System Design

Ruby ML

Rails rescue_responses

Ruby promotion

People who argue that certain information should be pushed to everyone on a social media platform eventually need to just admit that the reason behind their belief is one of two things: either they agree with the viewpoints they’re saying we need more of, or they are simply unaffected by the consequences of those viewpoints.

I think it might just be that simple.

The paternalistic insistence that people be spoonfed content they “disagree with” on social media

HOW TO

MAKE

SENSE

OF ANY

MESS

Salmon soup

In my experience, engineers confronted with a new problem often leap to creating a system to solve that problem rather than addressing it directly. I’ve found this particularly true when engineers approach a problem domain they don’t yet understand well, including building prestige.

Anti-populism, and its cousin of anti-patriotism, is alluring for our elites. Many lack faith in fellow citizens, and think the work of convincing a large complex country isn’t worth it, or may not even be possible. Others can’t imagine politics itself as a useful endeavor because they believe in a utopia. Indeed, those who believe in certain forms of socialism and libertarianism believe that politics itself shouldn’t exist, that one must perfect the soul of human-kind, and then the messy work of making a society will become unnecessary. In this frame, political institutions, like courts, corporations, and government agencies, are unimportant except as aesthetic objects.

Anti-populism and anti-patriotism leads nowhere, because these attitudes are about convincing citizens to give up their power, to give up on the idea that America is a place we can do politics to make a society.

A common theme between the devs discussing why loading bars don’t move at a consistent crawl - we’ve all had loading bars that jump forward seemingly at random, or zoom to 99% before sitting there for an unfold amount of time - revealed that it isn’t because of the way games load (which loading bars don’t follow anyway), but because we as players simply wouldn’t believe them if they did.

“Fun thing: players don’t trust a smooth loading bar. The stutters and pauses show you that the load is ‘biting’. I’ve worked on games where we artificially faked it,”….

Cuprite configuration

It’s enough to make you wonder if maybe the defining millennial experience is actually just a deep longing to make things that matter, the crippling anxiety about what that might actually require — earnestness, introspection, material risk — and the delusion that you can achieve mainstream acceptance and still be your raw, unflinching self on the largest possible stage.

But the book fails spectacularly because Kuang is more interested in supporting the established myths inside the design industry rather than investigating why those myths don’t line up with reality he reports.

People can read their manager’s mind

Cognitive Load Developer’s Handbook

Nice visual design tweaks, like centering irregular images.

A systematic framework for technical documentation authoring.

Jura Instructions

Nice list of open source llm models

Estimation. Cone of uncertainty. Some good lists.

How to scale a JavaScript project over time:

1. One file
2. One function
3. One class

American School of Geomancy THE 12 BRANCHES OF GEOMANCY

So even beyond The Thick of It and Veep and In the Loop—the latter of which features David Rasche, AKA Karl, as the nastiest US senator ever put on-screen—Armstrong has done a lot of work that begins from the worldview that, because those in power can choose what veneer gets presented as “sane” and “rational,” the world’s afflictions arise from that dissonance between the things we’re conditioned to accept and the reasons we’re being conditioned to accept them in the first place.

From this vantage point, Logan is basically the horrors of the world manifested in human form: he holds no illusions, except that nothing else is possible, and alternates between a weary man who barely cares about the trappings he’s waltzing through and the sheer fury he fires off at anyone who dares to suggest that there’s more to the world than this.

Via phil gyford

Nice chart of what goes wrong with product market fit and startup stuff

Values and labels and variables. A nice definition

this”else

else is “something”

else is “something”

The equivalent of: I’ll know it when I see it.

Efficiency isn’t simply about maximizing throughput. It’s about finding the optimum balance between quality and quantity. I’m super intrigued by professions that use junk work as a buffer here. Filling out documentation is junk work. Doctors might not have to do that in a future scenario. But is the answer to schedule more surgeries? Or is the answer to let doctors have more downtime? Much to my chagrin, we tend to optimize towards more intense work schedules whenever we introduce new technologies while downgrading the status of the highly skilled person. Why? And at what cost?

Nice offsite or conference planning tips

I appreciate that it makes a distinction between the order to create the presentation, and the order of the presentation.

Math is great.

One of the comments:

It’s always been my intuition that null-hypothesis significance testing is even more inappropriate in the tech industry than academia. The traditional framework considers an asymmetric standard of evidence between the null and alternative hypothesis, but oftentimes in industry settings there’s no natural choice for a “null hypothesis” at all. There’s no reason NOT to chase noise when all alternatives are costless or equivalently costly. But it’s surprisingly hard to convince people of this even at big-name “independent thinker” firms. They end up tying themselves in knots trying to justify some arbitrary choice as a “null hypothesis” just to reshape the problem into something traditional methodology can handle–presumably because so long as they’re going with the state-of-the-art in science at the universities, nobody can blame them for how they’ve done things.

There is a natural social hierarchy, threatened by decadence, able to be overcome only through power centralized around the infliction of violence. You know, soft times, hard men, that whole fashy cycle.

Via Rob:

Found it: this is the blockchain security report I was thinking of. I remembered it more about security, but the actual angle here was “practically speaking, is this actually decentralized?”

They also have a BOM tool.

A few years ago we talked about the two modes of pop-microeconomics:

1. People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist.

2. People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient.

Argument 1 is associated with “why do they do that?” sorts of puzzles. Why do they charge so much for candy at the movie theater, why are airline ticket prices such a mess, why are people drug addicts, etc. The usual answer is that there’s some rational reason for what seems like silly or self-destructive behavior.

Argument 2 is associated with “we can do better” claims such as why we should fire 80% of public-school teachers or Moneyball-style stories about how some clever entrepreneur has made a zillion dollars by exploiting some inefficiency in the market.

The trick is knowing whether you’re gonna get 1 or 2 above. They’re complete opposites!

But Generation X, which came of age in a moment of political stagnation and cynicism and drift—and, for Musk and his cohort, came into mind-bending wealth through hitting it big on some technologies that have not on balance changed humanity for the better—has been spiking to the right for reasons that seem to go beyond the normal trend in that direction as people age. Forged amid a dead consensus of center-right managed decline, they did not really have much chance to participate in public life at a level above the affective, or theatrical. There was still politics—there is always politics—but it unfolded along a meaningless Coke/Pepsi binary.

Socialism and barbarism are now both back on the menu, and each on the ascent. But for members of a generation who saw their politics as inseparable from themselves without ever thinking nearly as hard about the former as they did about the latter, this is all still a matter of performance. Such politics are easy to change because they were never really anchored to any actual system of belief. An obliterating narcissism and sawed-off selfishness is latent in American culture like lead in contaminated water; in the absence of countervailing principles, it will naturally make its presence felt over time. If your politics is just about Opposing Authority, for instance, with no regard for or sense of the structural and material realities of actual power, then remaining true to those politics is just a matter of propping up new authority figures to rage against.

Any idiot can do that, and many idiots have.

The other thing about ARA I’d like to highlight was the de facto method of leadership—the anarchistic “leadership by example.” Instead of a top-down structure where a few intellectuals dictate strategy and tactics on the larger mass—ARA chapters made their arguments by producing real world examples of what they were talking about. Think we should all do Cop-Watch patrols? Show me what that looks like. Convinced we need to make feminism a core part of our culture? Build a crew that exudes that vibe. Want economic demands as part of the program? See how we are doing it in our town, etc. etc. etc.

–commit=bensheldon/bookmarks#main

Lecture 5: Peter Thiel "Business Strategy and Monopoly Theory" Notes

What a time it is to be a prison abolitionist! Millions of people filled the streets during the 2020 uprisings, forcing a national conversation around defunding and abolishing the police. The abolitionist lexicon broke into the mainstream. Suddenly everyone had—and had to have—an opinion on the movement. The newly invigorated abolitionist movement has faced swift […]

A deep dive into how Khan Academy took a 1 million-line Python monolith and split it into ~40 Go services in a more than 3 year-long project.

Also img2prompt

Dokku is dev ops for dummies and a cheaper alternative to Heroku. Recently I've migrated a couple of my projects to it. In this blog post, I will describe how to setup and migrate a Rails app to Dokku with PostgreSQL, Sidekiq, Redis and Let's Encrypt or Cloudflare for free SSL.

MOST PEOPLE DON’T HAVE THAT MUCH DATA

Chocolate crumb cake is a moist coffee cake topped with big fudgy crumbs ~ breakfast doesn’t get any better than this!

Via https://mastodon.social/@fgregg/109730056199340303

Responsive scrollable videos without obscure video encoding requirements. Compatible with React, Svelte, Vue, and plain HTML.

The only sustainable counter to the fantasy of a lost racial or national solidarity that never was, is to build a real class solidarity in the present.

If you’re running an Nginx proxy configuration, you can run into the following error in your logs.

Substack is a new and improved way to write and distribute a book, communicate, and build a community while doing so.

Voice, Exit, Loyalty

Normconf was amazing!

The political economist Albert O. Hirschman famously characterized the choice that is faced by people within declining institutions as being between “voice” and “exit.” Either you speak up to change things, or you leave and look for something better.

“The body has a memory,” she told me, and looked at her hands. On one finger she wore a gold ring with a fuchsia stone. If you got close you could read, engraved in capital letters below the stone, TYSON. The ring, a gift from the company, had belonged to her husband. Her hands always hurt, pulsing as if they had been hit. She could no longer lift or open things—her fingers didn’t work as she wished. Yet in her sleep, she processed birds with such a ferocity that she would wake up covered in scratches and cuts. Her doctor gave her a cast-like glove to wear at night.

I never used to pair program, and then I spent four months on a pair-by-default team. Here’s what I learned.

When we truly learn the secrets of the Flexbox layout mode, we can build absolutely incredible things. Fluid layouts that stretch and shrink without arbitrary breakpoints. In this action-packed interactive tutorial, we’ll pop the hood on the Flexbox algorithm and learn how to do remarkable things with it. ✨

How can you work more effectively with diverse individuals and teams as a product leader? We all tend to have our “go-to” explanations when things go wrong at work. A couple of examples: You can usually boil things down to leadership issues. That and grit and perseverance.

A systematic framework for technical documentation authoring.

Thought: “action without strategy is chaos”

A modern Pinboard app for 2022.

People own what they help create Real change happens in real work Those who do the work, do the change Connect the system to more of itself Start anywhere, follow everywhere The process you use to get to the future is the future you get.

via https://blog.mattedgar.com/2022/11/19/weeknote-14-to-18-november-2022/

John Ashbery, in an interview in the Poetry Miscellany, talks about wasting time: “I waste a lot of time. That’s part of the [creative process]….The problem is, you can’t really use this wasted time. You have to have it wasted.

Here are some strategy prompts to guide you through the perverse holiday ritual we call annual planning. Are these meant to be challenging? Yes. You’ll notice that each prompt explores a tension and/or polarity. Do organizations AVOID statements like this like the plague? Yes. Most do. Why? Because focus is a threat to whatever political stalemate exists.

The thing is with shops on the web is that once upon a time they made a ton of sense because people spent time actually browsing the web.

Today? Not so much.

Which is why we individual stores resort to aggressive email marketing, and the rest is dominated by retailed large enough to colonise mental real estate: Amazon basically.

You probably use some type of error monitoring software to notify you when an exception is raised in your application, but are you being notified when there is an anomaly in user behavior?

Inline validation in web forms is useful when it works, but frustrating when it fails. Too often it leads to an endless stream of disruptive error messages or dead-ends without any chance of getting out. Let’s fix it.

When a market is saturated, a better product wins. For example, it makes sense to build a better SQL because the market is already well educated about the usage of the technology.

When a market is new, better marketing wins. For example, it makes sense to educate the market about graphs, even with a simpler product, so devs understand when to use it and how. Not knowing how to position or market the software cost us dearly.

The stories are individual and nuanced, but the pattern is consistent. What they tell us about their people and about themselves is a thing you already know.

When you are doing work that…

you give a shit about

in an environment that supports you

…you are unstoppable. And when you aren’t, you aren’t.

Those two ingredients come up again and again. They’ve been the same ingredients since Andy Grove was writing about them when we were the kids playing with our dessert. They’ve been the same since Drucker before him. There’s a whole trade press devoted to re-discovering and re-naming them every five years. Is it “giving a shit,” or “ambition,” or “employee engagement,” or “hustle”? Is it “Quiet Quitting,” or is it “work to rule,” or is it “presenteeism”?

System programming for Ruby programmers.

Petersen’s most acute insight is perhaps in identifying a link between relentlessly optimized childhoods designed to prevent downward mobility, and the professionally competent but profoundly enervated millennials overwhelmed by the prospect of canceling plans, of keeping plans, of cooking food, of texting their mothers. I think she is correct. I think it’s possible that for many, considering the shape of your life and then living it with vigor is so difficult because it cannot be externally validated. Unlike education and work, it offers no socially obvious meritocratic path. The moments where, like sourdough, it proves, are largely invisible — in cooking, in walking, corresponding with a friend, in chatting with a neighbor or registering to give blood. They cannot be tallied up and put on a resume. They are never “finished.” The progress you make is spiraling rather than linear; circling steadily, slowly, around your weak points, taking two steps forward and one step back, building habits so slowly that only in retrospect can you see your life become different than it was. And there is no one who can tell you that you did it right. But this is not the condition of life under capitalism, this is life itself. And it is a sad irony that though the fear of life may be produced by class imperatives within capitalism, the impulse to restrict it to a problem of capitalism is itself part of the same fearful rejection of the task of living.

Coming from SPA frameworks, Stimulus.js might feel underwhelming or frustrating. Here are some guides to help us take the best out of it.

Ruby Rails meetup

“indifference curves”

Finalist #1 of the Book Review Contest

mildly dynamic websites and the hackish state of jamming with php

the therapeutic is so wholly the established bedrock for any hope of “wellness” that it’s difficult for most people here to even understand how or why you’d question it as a metaphysics. The therapeutic proceeds from a mechanistic model of the human body and self. Its domains are full of useful information and even wisdom about that mechanistic how, but psychology should take up the same epistemic humility that’s crucial for all disciplines in making claims about the why of our lives.

Recently I got an interesting question from someone looking for resources for Engineering Directors, as distinct from general engineering management: I was wondering if you’ve written any posts geared towards engineering directors or have any recs for posts others have written I’m mainly looking for advice on how to manage projects from two layers away. How do I give managers creative freedom to manage however they like while also stressing the importance of deadlines?

What is Agile? And where does it come from?

And it appealed to managers because, as Nathan Ensmenger writes, “The essence of the software-engineering movement was control: control over complexity, control over budgets and scheduling, and, perhaps most significantly, control over a recalcitrant workforce.” This was precisely the kind of professional that waterfall development was designed to accommodate.

I have written a lot about the pendulum swing between engineering and management, so I often hear from people who are angsting about the transition. A quick recap of the relevant posts: The Engineer/Manager Pendulum Engineering Management: the Pendulum or the Ladder If Management Isn’t A Promotion, Engineering Isn’t A Demotion There are two anxieties…

I’m not a process freak, but I do believe teams should have their house in order. You can get by with very little process overhead. Too many teams are spinning in circles (or sprints). It often isn’t their fault, but still…the level of reactivity is so draining.

What I’ve found effective in these cases is to lead with constructive energy directed towards a positive outcome. Even if you can’t get your peer’s performance addressed directly, you can often overcome your peer’s bad performance by generating excitement in the direction you want to go. Enough excitement will give the resolution avoidant manager a way to solve their problem without actually engaging with the situation that they’re unwilling to address.

My read of “The Food Lab,” which I think is not uncommon, is that it’s a book built around the idea of optimization. There’s certainly, as you said, unpacking the science, and explaining why this or that recipe works. But it also implies that a recipe can have a platonic ideal, or a perfect state.

Certainly, I understand why you would read it that way, and why a lot of people would read it that way, but that’s definitely not where I am right now. My views on a lot of these things have changed in the last six or seven years. Even when I was writing “The Food Lab,” when I said something like “the best,” what I really meant was: “I’m going to give you some basic descriptions that I think a lot of people would agree are what ‘the best mac and cheese’ is. There are certain things that maybe not everybody agrees on, but here are my specific goals right now, which I think probably a lot of people agree are good goals to have for macaroni and cheese. And now I’m going to show you ways you can optimize those specific things. If you disagree that those are good things in mac and cheese, well, I want to provide you with enough background information so that you can then modify the recipe to make it to what you think is best.”

Anyway, what’s simple to you may well be complex to me, and what’s complex to you may well be simplifiable but if you stop at making it possible, nobody will get that benefit.

It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Perhaps understandably for a scholar with an interest in utopia, if less expectedly for a scholar of criticism, Nersessian believes in the importance of pressing forward with new visions rather than just critiquing existing ideas and systems. “I think lots of people believe the world right now is pretty bad—politically, ecologically—and that capitalism is responsible for a very large part of the situation. But being against capitalism doesn’t entail being for anything else,” she said:

It’s all very well to say “capitalism turns us into commodities, that’s degrading, human beings shouldn’t be degraded.” But how should we be treated, and how should we live? What would love and sex—among other things, like health care or having a job—look like in a good world? It’s important to take the risk of answering those questions, even if the answers are messy and provisional.

On the most basic human level, I suspect our generation still hasn’t processed our shared collective trauma of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and our anger is now still coming out in very unhealthy ways. With crypto we’ve decided to do the most American thing ever, to commoditize our rage at the financial system into a financial product. Because after all, we’re just temporarily embarrassed millionaires and the only problem with CDOs wasn’t the moral hazard, but that you didn’t have a piece of the action. This time you have a choice, but I suspect history is going to have the same lesson to teach us about the perils of greed untempered by reason.

A comprehensive, curated list of open-source Ruby on Rails applications.

In psychology, the term “insight” is used to describe a recognition of one’s own condition, such as when a person with mental illness is aware of their illness. More broadly, it describes the ability to recognize patterns in one’s own behavior. It’s an example of metacognition, or thinking about one’s own thinking, and it’s something most humans are capable of but animals are not. And I believe the best test of whether an AI is really engaging in human-level cognition would be for it to demonstrate insight of this kind.

Insight is precisely what Musk’s strawberry-picking AI lacks, as do all the other AIs that destroy humanity in similar doomsday scenarios. I used to find it odd that these hypothetical AIs were supposed to be smart enough to solve problems that no human could, yet they were incapable of doing something most every adult has done: taking a step back and asking whether their current course of action is really a good idea. Then I realized that we are already surrounded by machines that demonstrate a complete lack of insight, we just call them corporations. Corporations don’t operate autonomously, of course, and the humans in charge of them are presumably capable of insight, but capitalism doesn’t reward them for using it. On the contrary, capitalism actively erodes this capacity in people by demanding that they replace their own judgment of what “good” means with “whatever the market decides.”

kafka explained with otters

https://web.archive.org/web/20210817013129/https://austinvernon.eth.link/blog/softwareisprocess.html

argues letting the rich keep their money can be deflationary as taxing it.

On feeling overwhelmed by systems. remove the stress first before fixing the system.

Discover the easiest way to get started contributing to open source. Over 61,239 devs are helping 6,439 projects with our free, community developed tools

Compliance vs. respect

“Once we realized we weren’t being offered a seat at the table, we pulled up our own with AFSCME. The people who work here have invested too much in this library to be so easily dismissed, and we hope to work as a union to protect our ability to serve anyone who relies on us.”

This denialism-as-counter-insurgency works because it goes beyond the political: it resonates with those who suffer a spiritual deficit.  That is to say, those who turn away from these moments of cathartic rebellion do so out of spiritual poverty. Or perhaps, more generously, we might attribute this abhorrent lack to a fear response that has been conditioned by deep trauma. The uprising calls us to live up to the historical task of our generation, but we turn away out of fear of repression, violence, prison, losing our friends or family. And then we deny the rebellion happened at all, or we deny it had any “legitimacy,” to avoid the shame of our own failure.

sukey.org

“Not only is it a burden on recipients,” she added, “but also, the senders still know that the recipients have to read [the posts] in order to [report them]. [The abusers] still get the satisfaction. It really needs to be disincentivized.”

Things you’re allowed to do

CRT embraces “race consciousness in the service of racial justice.” But, CRT teaches, we should be aware of racial inequality not because people of different races are inherently different, but because they are the same.

Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

The reality is, when you’re a manager, not everyone will like working for you. You could be the greatest boss in the world and some people still wouldn’t like you. Partly that’s because being a good manager means giving feedback, addressing problems, and holding people accountable in ways they might not like. If you need to correct someone a lot, or have difficult conversations with them about their work, or say no to something they wanted, it’s human nature that you might not end up being their favorite person. Or you might have a style that doesn’t align well with theirs — maybe you’re very direct and matter-of-fact and that feels brusque to them, or maybe you’re a planner and a devotee of process and they work more spontaneously. That wouldn’t mean either of you is in the wrong; it would just mean you don’t mesh well together.

Sometimes, too, people dislike a job or a manager for reasons that aren’t as much about the manager as they are about other things going on with that person — a dislike of their career path, stressors outside of work, a generally bad fit with the role, or all kinds of things.

Or, frankly, you might be an imperfect manager — most of us are — but that doesn’t mean you’re a horrible one. Managing people is hard, and every manager will get things wrong now and then. Ideally you’ll establish a track record of fairness, transparency, and good judgment so your mistakes are judged within that context … but you still might encounter an employee who judges your mistakes harshly. You’re basically on a stage when you’re the boss; you’re going to be scrutinized by the people under you, and there will be things they take issue with. It’s part of the job, and you’ve got to be okay with that.

Or, yes, you might be a terrible manager! It’s possible. There are lots of terrible managers out there. But I’m skeptical that you’re terrible in the specific ways the review described (mean and intolerant of mistakes), because your detailed explanation of your approach to mistakes sounds pretty healthy and because you sound genuinely thoughtful and caring toward team members. People can delude themselves, of course, and managers aren’t always reliable narrators of their own management styles. But the way you talk about how you operate — and your reaction now — doesn’t seem to line up with that review or with the feedback people have given your boss about you. That doesn’t mean that review is definitely wrong. I obviously can’t say that with certainty. But I don’t think it warrants the self-flagellation you’re doing.

What is the difference between a bias and expertise?

In a previous newsroom she worked in, there were a few people who had pilots’ licenses. When a plane crash happened, those people were looked to as experts. Similarly, newsrooms seek to hire people with military experience, seeing that as expertise as opposed to bias. Many news outlets sent reporters to cover Hurricane Maria who were either Puerto Rican or had lived in Puerto Rico. Ho believes she’s a better business reporter because she worked in banking for three and a half years.

So why do we consider some lived experiences — being a woman, being a person of color, being queer, having had an abortion — biases, and others expertise?

At the root of the problem is that Google conflates the meaning of data with its physical representation. When you’re at Google scale, this sort of thing probably makes sense. After all, they have an internal tool that allows you to compare the finances behind programmer hours vs network utilization vs the cost to store x x bytes vs all sorts of other things. Unlike most companies in the tech space, paying engineers is one of Google’s smallest expenses. Financially it makes sense for them to waste programmers’ time in order to shave off a few bytes.

Outside of the top five tech companies, none of us is within five orders of magnitude of being Google scale. Your startup cannot afford to waste engineer hours on shaving off bytes. But shaving off bytes and wasting programmers’ time in the process is exactly what protobuffers are optimized for.

Let’s face it. You are not Google scale and you never will be. Stop cargo-culting technology just because “Google uses it” and therefore “it’s an industry best-practice.”

As is often the case with tech companies, instead of having a thoughtful, careful analysis of what’s going on and creating a framework around that, they have simply cut out the process and thrown it in the trash. Negotiation around compensation is something that can, will, and in many cases should happen - if someone doesn’t feel as if they’re getting what they want, they should be able to express that, and a company should be open to that discussion. The blunt-force “no negotiations” policy doesn’t actually solve any problems because it doesn’t offer any solutions - it doesn’t address pay equity, it doesn’t address bias, it doesn’t address…anything? It mostly just says “trust us, we’ll pay people better, and we intend to pay people we think are doing good work more, because they’re good. Somehow this will not be biased.”

The De-risking Government Technology Project provides expert, actionable guidance to the public sector for delivering federally-funded, custom technology projects successfully.

“Because there must be no bad surprises,” Sedgwick writes, “and because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known.” In Curtis films, the bad news seems to be the only real news and it is always uncovered in roughly the same way. The banks take over, a high-minded experiment fails, the sexy Soviets come marching in, and an unidentified Black American nods off, too high to act.

“There’s this kind of left figure, but sometimes not really on the left, who tends to think of power entirely in terms of organizations and figures at the top and elites,” UC Berkeley lecturer Jasper Bernes wrote to me. “I think of Julian Assange as a kind of figure like that, or maybe Glenn Greenwald. There’s a left media sphere which really doesn’t see anything happening except these powerful people making decisions and producing discourse, which is really not the way societies and economies work.”

Racism [and] white supremacy are not things that are so convenient that they only happen when full intention is present, or true malice is present,” the employee said. “Evil is not required. We’re not so lucky as for this to come down to good and evil. It’s as simple as creating a space where people do not feel welcome.”

The employee continued: “The silence in the background is what racism and white supremacy does. It creates that atmosphere that feels suffocating to people. It doesn’t require active malice. It’s not that convenient.”

How to take nonprofit board minutes that move your nonprofit forward and and don’t subject your nonprofit to unnecessary risks.

181 votes, 13 comments. This isn’t a professional “how to design 101” it’s just a process I have used to build and design websites without a design …

great statement

Serving ActiveStorage uploads through a CDN with Rails direct routes

if you try to cherry-pick any single issue, you’re missing the forest for the trees.

Sometimes, Youtube wants us to think of its self-serve, algorithmic ad/publishing system as untouched by human hands, an interplay of pure math, initiated and steered by third parties whose choices are not Youtube’s responsibility.

Other times, Youtube wants us to think of it as a corporate person, with identities and values, priorities and ethics. The selective demand that Youtube be considered a moral actor – but only for the outcomes that reflect well on the company – leads to this contradiction.

Some developers I’ve known seem to think that being good at concurrency makes them badass. Others seem to think that senior developers must be great at concurrency, and so they should be too.

But what senior developers are good at is eliminating concurrency as much as possible by developing a simple, easy, consistent model to follow for the app and its components.

And this is because concurrency is too difficult for humans to understand and maintain. Maybe you can create a system that makes extensive use of it, and have it be correct for one day. But think of your team! Even if you’re a solo developer, you and you-plus-six-months makes you a team.

Finance for non-finance directors: Part 1

Our lives as UI designers have never been easier with a host of amazing tools at our disposal. In this article, Paul Boag explores some of the useful tools that he keeps close at his work.

scheduling points

.The basic problem that GameStop is revealing in our economy writ large is that as a society, we are increasingly putting our time, energy, capital and talent we could use to build fun or useful things into gambling or acquiring market power.

Gain a deep understanding of a particular system and its rules. Step outside of that system and look for something surprising that subverts its rules. Use what you find as the basis for making something new and creative.

The trade-off wasn’t worth it.

In giving voice to those trying to destroy the rule of law and dignifying their efforts with our talents and even our basic competence, we enabled that destruction. Were we doing enough good elsewhere to counterbalance the harm we facilitated, the way a public health official might accommodate the president on the margins to push forward on vaccine development? No.

css

As long as tooling keeps privileging the manager who wants to grade their team rather than learn from the development process, these tools will be actively distrusted by the engineers who instrument them and create false confidence in managers using them. The right tool here should be designed exclusively from a learning perspective.

Alternatives jobs and roles for software engineers.

civic tech internal organizational culture change tactics

Why Silicon Valley has so many Bad Managers (and what to do about it)

when to use agile or lean

Rather than simply letting people check a box for will/won’t participate in contact tracing, they broke down the process into its component parts. Those involve contacting public health officials, sharing personal information with them, and then self-isolating if conditions call for it.

lots of product ans strategy lists.

A psychology professor whom I’ve never met once wrote to me a mini-manifesto, disparaging my efforts as a critic. He wrote:

There are two kinds of people in science: bumblers and pointers. Bumblers are the people who get up every morning and make mistakes, trying to find truth but mainly tripping over their own feet, occasionally getting it right but typically getting it wrong. Pointers are the people who stand on the sidelines, point at them, and say “You bumbled, you bumbled.” These are our only choices in life. If one is going to choose to do the easier of these two jobs, then one should at least know what one is talking about. Sorry, but I think by and large you don’t.

I think this dualism is counterproductive. If, instead of dividing the world into “bumblers” and “pointers” (and let me not even comment on the ridiculousness of a research psychologist making such a categorization and saying “these are our only choices in life”), we were to consider “bumbling” and “pointing” to be two essential activities conducted by any scientist—and, for that matter, if we were to recognize that one can and should spend lots of time criticizing one’s own work (that is, “pointing” at our “bumbling”) and that we can and should consider criticism to itself be an ongoing development (that is, “bumbling” in our “pointing”)—then, I think our research and our criticism could improve.

To draw a humble analogy from my experiences on the street: If each of us were to spend some time as a pedestrian, some time as a bicyclist, some time as a bus rider, and some time as a car driver, than I think we’d all be able to interact more efficiently and considerately. But if we associate each person (or, in the sociology example, each area of expertise) with only one role, we get all kinds of trouble, as indicated by various psychology and biology researchers who can’t seem to handle open criticism.

A friend asked me to share a few favorite resources on design systems. I thought I’d share them with you, too.

It was, Rays manager Kevin Cash confirmed afterward, all Margot’s call. That’s part and parcel of how these Rays operate, seeking every edge to shorten the odds against what is undeniably a more talented Dodger team. It’s not just nerd shit, either. Those edges can be found on spreadsheets and in payroll forms, but on the diamond as well. If Margot, a fast and decently smart baserunner, saw something from third base that his coaches couldn’t see from the dugout, they’ve specifically empowered him to try to take advantage.

“We try to do things and make decisions that allow players to be athletic and be the athletes they are,” Cash said. “If Manny felt he had a read on it, for whatever reason, it’s tough for me to say yes or no just because he’s a talented baserunner. He might be seeing something that certainly I’m not or can’t appreciate in the moment right there. He’s trying to do something to pick his team up.”

There are many phenomenal critics speaking out about technology these days. To name only a few: Safiya Noble has written at length about the ways that the algorithms built by companies like Google and Facebook reinforce racism and sexism; Virginia Eubanks has exposed the ways in which high-tech tools of surveillance and control are first deployed against society’s most vulnerable members; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun has explored how our usage of social media becomes habitual; Jen Schradie has shown the ways in which, despite the hype to the contrary, online activism tends to favor right-wing activists and causes; Sarah Roberts has pulled back the screen on content moderation to show how much of the work supposedly being done by AI is really being done by overworked and under-supported laborers; Ruha Benjamin has made clear the ways in which discriminatory designs get embedded in and reified by technical systems; Christina Dunbar-Hester has investigated the ways in which communities oriented around technology fail to overcome issues of inequality; Sasha Costanza-Chock has highlighted the need for an approach to design that treats challenging structural inequalities as the core objective, not an afterthought; Morgan Ames expounds upon the “charisma” that develops around certain technologies; and Meredith Broussard has brilliantly inveighed against the sort of “technochauvinist” thinking—the belief that technology is the solution to every problem—that is so clearly visible in The Social Dilemma. To be clear, this list of critics is far from all-inclusive. There are numerous other scholars who certainly could have had their names added here, and there are many past critics who deserve to be named for their disturbing prescience.

the matter at hand is not to ask “what kind of computers do we want?” but to ask “what kind of society do we want?” and to then have the bravery to ask how (or if) computers really fit into that world—and if they do fit, how ubiquitous they will be, and who will be responsible for the mining/assembling/disposing that are part of those devices’ lifecycles. Certainly, these are not easy questions to ask, and they are not pleasant questions to mull over, which is why it is so tempting to just trust that the Center for Humane Technology will fix everything, or to just say that the problem is Silicon Valley.

“In your first 6 months here, here is your number one job. Familiarize yourself with the dozen senior people at Shopify who have the final call on really important decisions, from Tobi and Harley on down. You need to familiarize yourself with their operating philosophy around business and around how Shopify works. Go consume every written memo and every podcast episode (we have a great internal podcast called Context) they’ve ever done, get inside their heads, learn their perspectives and their preferences, and learn what gets them to say Yes to things.

“Here’s why this is your most important job. In your first six months, you’re gonna be useless anyways. You’re going to be drowning in new information and context and it’ll take you a few months to learn how to swim. But then once you do, you need to become effective. And in order to be effective, you need to know how to get those people to say Yes to things, and how they would think through a decision down to a detailed level. If you can do that, then you can get basically anything you want done. If you can’t do that, then you’re never going to get anything done. Therefore, this is your most important job right now.”

I remember thinking at the time, wow, that sounds like really important advice, I should listen. And I did put in some effort; not nearly enough, in retrospect, but more than zero. Now, six months in, I’m not nearly at a point where I would consider myself “effective” yet – I still have a long way to go in that department. But that advice is paying huge dividends already; not only with my own initiatives but actually more so with helping other groups with theirs.

build trust first

While they have tested with users with accessibility needs, the focus seems to have been on whether they can use the digital service; not does the service actually meet their needs?

And perhaps one reason for that is that we decided early on that we would not participate in “on background” conversations with company officials and spokespeople. We tell every company that we contact for a comment that we need an on-the-record statement, and if they can’t provide one, we will not use any comment at all. Not only that, but we also require that official spokespeople—who are paid to speak on behalf of their companies, after all—attach their name to their statements. We don’t publish company statements that a person would not, for some mysterious reason, want to attach to their name. Our reasoning is simple: anonymity isn’t standard; it is a privilege that should be borne only out of necessity. We reserve anonymity for people who could face retaliation or undue hardship for the information that they are providing us in the public interest. Corporate spokespeople who are paid to provide information simply don’t meet the criteria for being granted anonymity.

Is there anything I do as a manager that’s particularly helpful for you or the team? No manager’s perfect. What’s something I do that you find frustrating? If you were the manager of this team, what’s one thing you’d do differently?

Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals

Lately I’ve been thinking of Deadspin as a strange machine. For more than a decade, the people charged with the maintenance of that machine were allowed to tinker with it according to their whims and idiosyncratic tastes. The result of all that tinkering was a machine which, for all its apparent wonkiness, worked brilliantly. 

The problem with a machine like that is that it’s difficult for anyone who didn’t build it, or doesn’t respect those who did, to understand exactly how or why it works. When Deadspin’s staffers and readers looked at the machine, they saw a wonderful and whirring contraption, but all Spanfeller and Great Hill saw was an odd collection of valves and pistons. They saw parts, but not the whole.

Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick discuss the final chapter of Agile Conversations. They look at how leaders can not only provide accountability for others, but be accountable themselves, including stories from the early days of agile and from today’s clients.

Yesterday I published the top 10 tips that came out of my research into job ads and descriptions for DDaT roles in public service. Then the new Government Chief Digital Officer role was published so I thought I would test my ideas against this high profile role! Now for the record I’m not having a…

One reason that Twitch is apparently resistant to the tag because of the potential for harassment, a fear that was also brought up to me by an anonymous non-binary streamer. “A Twitch representative told me that when there was a trans tag, moderation actions increased, which was ‘unacceptable’ to them,” Loehr explains. Twitch did not respond to a request for comment on this article.

It is, unfortunately, unsurprising that some would use the tag to target trans streamers with abuse. But tags are optional, meaning that any streamer who chooses to use them is making an informed decision. “Instead of either doing something to moderate their webpage themselves, or giving minorities the ability to opt into this responsibility, they removed the choice altogether,” Loehr says. “That’s just letting trolls have the ultimate victory, and hiding trans people away.”

Stimulus sprinkles interactive behavior on top of your boring HTML pages. By keeping your controllers small, generic, and composable you can build a front-end without the typical JavaScript mess.

The ultimate guide to dynos on Heroku. If you've ever asked "how many dynos do I need?" or "which dyno type is right for my app?", this is the guide for you.

Are you a manager, manager of managers, or manager of directors? How long have you been in that role? The prior role?

When was your last promotion, and what was your internal headline for that promotion? (Example: “Reliable manager finally gets the promotion to a senior manager after the successful release of X.”)

Who are your credible sources of actionable feedback? What the most recent memorable feedback from one of these sources? Why was it memorable?

What are your areas of strength? How do you know that?

Where are you focusing on improving your leadership skills? Why?

Have you identified your next role? If so, what is it, and what’s your current plan to get there?

What’s your current most significant challenge with your direct reports? (A specific issue with one of your directs or an overall issue with all/many)

What’s your current most significant challenge with your manager?

What do you want to be when you grow up?

This Background Jobs style guide is a list of best practices working with Ruby background jobs. - toptal/active-job-style-guide

Human beings have an astonishing evolutionary gift: agile imaginations that can shift in an instant from thinking on a scale of seconds to a scale of years or even centuries. Our minds constantly dance across multiple time horizons. One moment we can be making a quickfire response . . . Read More

257 people responded to my survey about what job seekers are looking for from job desscriptions/ads. There is a lot to dig into properly and I intend to do some follow up interviews - and then share a bunch of the raw data (maybe not the free text? Will have a think.) Here are a…

Inevitably, I also notes from people who assert that financier domination is just capitalism in America, and always has been. Some (usually on the right) like this model of development, others (usually on the left) find it dystopian, but they are unified in a pervasive view that such market structures are both inevitable and long-standing. I find such an attitude bizarre, not for any philosophical reason, but because concentrating wealth and power in monopolized markets was just not accepted as a legitimate way to do business for most of American history.

From the 1600s to the 1970s, asking the question of how to constrain wealth and regulate prices was a core part of our tradition and ideology. Here is, for example, something from a 1779 pamphlet passed out in Philadelphia against profiteering during the Revolutionary War: “You that have money, and you that have none, down with your prices, or down with yourselves.… We have turned out against the enemy and we will not be eaten up by monopolizers and forestallers [aka speculators].”

That legacy, hundreds of years old, is why Americans are mad when we are mistreated or overcharged. We aren’t cynics and never have been, and we don’t believe that our corporations and governing institutions should be corrupt. We know at one point they weren’t. And that populist sentiment is bubbling up, in every nook and cranny of our society, because we know something about how we do business today is very wrong.

In the 1980s, most of our elites on the right and left were persuaded that monopolies were natural and, good or bad, simply the American Way. They changed policy accordingly, which is why most of the monopolies we know about were formed during or after that decade. But corruption and monopolization isn’t natural, or inevitable. It’s a choice we’ve made, and a choice we can always undo. Remember that.

With that in mind, here are a few more sectors that have been monopolized. At the end, I’ll offer ideas for what we can do about this problem (which isn’t actually that difficult to address.)

Of course, Ms. Sandberg, who has increasingly played blocker for Mr. Zuckerberg’s very bad calls, posted about the report in a who-me style that has now become a joke for those of us who follow the company. Noting that the report was “the beginning of the journey, not the end” for Facebook, she concluded that “what has become increasingly clear is that we have a long way to go.”

Whose essential freedoms were put at risk by the Bennet-Cotton episode? In the world of the Harper’s letter, the threat that mattered was the one to the careers of veteran editors—not the threat that had bullets and bayonets behind it, a threat that the president himself would offer again in his Independence Day remarks. The promoters of the letter cast themselves as persecuted heroes, putting their names on the line to defend an embattled conception of liberty. The people putting themselves in front of police lines have a more expansive vision of what freedom means, and what risks they’re prepared to take for it

How many of you know deep down that the team is working on something that no customer wants?

This is not an article about CSS positioning. I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people recently about the difficulty of finding clients. The coronavirus has only made the problem the worse. My friend Jonathan Stark recently ran a free positioning crash course webcast that’s available to watch on replay any time. If you run your own business, you want to go watch this! Why positioning matters When I started Go Make Things, I hired Jonathan as a business coach.

Until this morning, I always styled the current link in my navigation menu by doing this.

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.nav .active a { border-bottom: 0.125em solid #fa7176; color: #272727; } It gives users a clear visual indication that “you are here.” Well… sighted users, that is. If you’re visually impaired or use a screen reader to navigate the web, it tells you nothing.

Margaret Thatcher said that “there is no such thing as society,” and Ronald Reagan said that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” These stupid slogans marked the turn away from the postwar period of reconstruction and underpin much of the bullshit of the past forty years.

We are individuals first, yes, just as bees are, but we exist in a larger social body. Society is not only real; it’s fundamental. We can’t live without it. And now we’re beginning to understand that this “we” includes many other creatures and societies in our biosphere and even in ourselves. Even as an individual, you are a biome, an ecosystem, much like a forest or a swamp or a coral reef. Your skin holds inside it all kinds of unlikely coöperations, and to survive you depend on any number of interspecies operations going on within you all at once. We are societies made of societies; there are nothing but societies. This is shocking news—it demands a whole new world view. And now, when those of us who are sheltering in place venture out and see everyone in masks, sharing looks with strangers is a different thing. It’s eye to eye, this knowledge that, although we are practicing social distancing as we need to, we want to be social—we not only want to be social, we’ve got to be social, if we are to survive. It’s a new feeling, this alienation and solidarity at once. It’s the reality of the social; it’s seeing the tangible existence of a society of strangers, all of whom depend on one another to survive. It’s as if the reality of citizenship has smacked us in the face.

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As for government: it’s government that listens to science and responds by taking action to save us. Stop to ponder what is now obstructing the performance of that government. Who opposes it? Right now we’re hearing two statements being made. One, from the President and his circle: we have to save money even if it costs lives. The other, from the Centers for Disease Control and similar organizations: we have to save lives even if it costs money. Which is more important, money or lives? Money, of course! says capital and its spokespersons. Really? people reply, uncertainly. Seems like that’s maybe going too far? Even if it’s the common wisdom? Or was.

It was long overdue, but I’ve added an accessibility statement to my website. Here are a few reasons why.

“The problem with the MK1 stuff was that I didn’t have my eye fully on the ball, because I was still taking care of a lot of Tesla stuff,” Musk said. “Now Tesla, I think, is in a good situation here, so that’s why I’m pretty much camped out in Boca. The MK1 was a failure not because the rocket failed at low pressure, but because we failed to build a production line.”

Now he has built the production system. It’s not finished. It’s not perfect. But it’s starting to pay dividends. The factory is beginning to flow linearly, from one station to another. And after last week’s flurry of hiring, the company has the workers it needs to produce rockets one after another.

“If you’re just trying to make one of something, it can all basically just be made by the engineering team,” he said. “But if you want to actually make something at reasonable volume, you have to build the machine that makes the machine, which mathematically is going to be vastly more complicated than the machine itself. The thing that makes the machine is not going to be simpler than the machine. It’s going to be much more complicated by a lot. Things need to be translated into instructions that the average person can understand. You can’t have somebody with an engineering master’s degree from MIT hand-making every single part. It’s not possible. There just aren’t enough. MIT’s not graduating enough people.”

list of tools for measuring performance like web page test and pagespeed

The challenge for the left is to provide a sense of purpose and fulfillment, without replicating the logic of a death-cult; to create a feeling of belonging without chauvinism, and authenticity without essentializing identities. Our politics must learn to speak, simultaneously, the language of reason and the language of values. Without abandoning the Enlightenment, our movements must be ready, nevertheless, to address our deepest psychological, cultural, and even spiritual needs. Unless we can do so, we may find our demands for material security, social equality, and personal freedom continually outbid by those who promise only a life of sacrifice and a glorious death.

mistake theory and government policy

This week I searched old emails and made a page containing all the nice things strangers have sent me about it, mainly because this makes me feel good.

The lessons here are:

Making simple little online tools is totally worth it, especially if the alternatives are usually covered in ads and tracking Providing an obvious way for people to get in touch with you is important There’s no shame in collecting it together like this because it’s nice for you and probably nice for users to see that they’re not the only ones who’ve been there It’s really nice if you email someone to tell them you like something they’ve done.

pro monolith

In Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s novel Memory in the Flesh, the narrator recalls a saying: “A man spends his first years learning how to speak, and the Arab regimes teach him silence for the rest of his life.”

If games are art, we must treat them that way. An essential part of that is breaking cyclical discourse, discarding the debates of yesterday and contextualizing games within the new reality the media exists in. The broadening of an audience means accounting for shifting tastes and sensibilities. This means acknowledging the growing concerns of queer players, disabled persons, people of color and other voices that were not traditionally heard within the culture’s earlier days. Did you really beat a game? Should we even care about “casuals”? Do we have our Citizen Kane? Stop, please. We don’t need to keep asking “are games art” until we all die in the upcoming Resource Wars.

Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) Framework

managing the emotional and time of hiring

t-shirt interview

realtime sync of text

Of course one of the biggest proponents of the public-markets-don’t-care-about-the-long-term thesis is Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., who went so far as to pretend he was going to take Tesla private to get away from the short-termist public shareholders who gave his money-losing future-focused company the highest valuation of any American car maker ever. The problem with public markets is not that they can’t stomach short-term losses in pursuit of higher long-term value. The problem with public markets is that they have a diversity of opinion. Some people will think that the short-term losses are acceptable in the pursuit of long-term vision, and they’ll buy the stock. Other people will think that the short-term losses demonstrate a long-term problem, and they’ll short the stock. In private markets, the only investors you deal with are the believers. Some people won’t believe in your long-term vision, but you’ll never hear from them. In public markets you will, and you might not like it.

In a way, thinking and feeling through Ferrante make me wonder if the whole project of literary criticism, for some of us, might be one of un-pleasure reading. To me, the joy of writing about a text is the twisting, rupturing, pleasurable unpleasure of unforming and being unformed as I work to shape an argument. To read a book to its core, to get under its skin and let it get under yours, is to engage with it in a mutual process of transformation and sometimes-ecstatic contortion. This is, some might say, highly un-professional (whatever this profession is), definitely un-objective, possibly even un-ethical. But for me, to write a piece of living interpretation, to share in gutsy, real conversation with a piece of art, is always to invoke form as a verb, not just to submit to the noun of its existence—a forming that is process-oriented but not simply procedural—and to somehow animate that constant movement in words. In my life as a critic, as in Ferrante, this is an impossible yet irresistible desire: the little stories I’ve told you along the way here, my shape-making narrative impulses, are the legible coverings that skim over the roiling blurriness of ongoing forming-unforming beneath, the frantumaglia—that dialect word that Ferrante uses to mean “bits and pieces,” magma, a jumbled tangle that refuses reduction—of reading and being read (shades of Calvino here, too). This is the last thing I’d call pleasure—and yet…

Lots of nice Rails SQL queries.

Worker-in-the-loop

exhasting reading about html5

a summary of font/text sizing techniques

business planning

It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem – which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.

14kb is rhe magic payload size

The problem isn’t the algorithms.

The problem is that everyone is stuck on social media.

The problem is that social media networks are centralised platforms that aim to monopolise their users’ attention and time.

When you have PZF, the product resonates with users not because it’s better, but because it feels extremely culturally relevant at that particular moment in time for a particular group of people.

postmortems that are blameful but shameless

Foremost among these has been the return of an old “integration debate”—about whether people from non-European countries can successfully become part of German society—even though no one can agree on what exactly German society is. “The question is not who we are, but who we can become,” the late British social theorist Stuart Hall argued, but Germany is poised uneasily in that polarity.

“You get used to it,” Haru answers. For her, after all, it is not a little bit. It is her life, and a life she has to – she wants to – inhabit and live well. Being angry all the time, fighting against all those tiny oppression that don’t even have a culprit behind them: it is all exhausting and tiring. To be upset and to be angry is eminently human, but to have a hope that voicing your anger will change something is, also, a privilege.

Two examples stuck in my mind: the story of the senior leader who did nothing but watch the production line for four hours so he could see for himself what was going on, and the minivan chief designer who insisted on personally driving in all 50 US states and Canada. The minivan designer then went back to the drawing board and made significant changes to the design that made sense in North America, but not in Japan (such as having multiple cup-holders for thelong journeys typical of that region)

Travis’s website

“twenty-forty rule.”: spend twenty minutes working a problem before asking a question. dont spend more than 40 minutes.

As Eliyahu Goldratt says, you have to subordinate the whole process to the constraint. That means incentivising people to sell something a lot like what you have now, over selling a bigger number of things you don’t have now and won’t have soon.

TI coaches strive to teach a proven method that works to countless other people for whom simply swimming with ease and enjoyment would be a great gift. TI is also about swimming every stroke with clear purpose . . . whether for health, enjoyment, or competition.

15 minutes to write. 5 min to read

on safety, just and no blame.

the state of agile. with a nice point:

But, importantly, they do the things they do because it helps them release software, not because it helps them hit project milestones. The revolution really did land there.

You can’t separate out diversity and inclusion from ethics, so it became apparent that ethics should be addressed by the ad hoc committee.

Many people saw Instagram museums as the ultimate non-mission driven, too far on the visitor-engagement. I might argue that their mission is to give people experiences, and they do well by their missions as their bank accounts show. And, understanding these orgs help museums, as Koven Smith brought up. It’s important to interrogate what lines they’ve crossed and why.

Real life comes at you fast, though. When you’re working on version 1, you want to do as little work, as quickly as possible, to get to the point where you can validate that there are enough customers who derive enough value to make the product worthwhile. But by the time you come to work on version 1.0.1, you wish you’d taken the time to make version 1 maintainable and easy to change. Most subsequent versions are a little from column A and a little from column B, as you try new things and iterate on the things that worked.

As fast as possible, but no faster, I guess.

When public figures so unabashedly follow a PR checklist, regular people can be seduced into judging mainly the quality of the checklist, and viewing these things purely as PR successes or failures. Let’s dispense with that, quickly: Luhnow’s PR advisors should be fired. They’re real bad at their jobs.

But as a series of human actions, this is all hideous. The Astros have a culture where a person could even develop the specific anger behind Taubman’s taunts, to say nothing of shouting those taunts at someone in public; where the kind of person who would both feel that specific shit-hearted triumph and then weaponize it is otherwise considered a good guy with high character; where the organization’s inclination is to take the word of internal “witnesses” who would have obvious professional incentives for obscuring the truth over a first-person report from a journalist; where the action that flows from that misguided trust involves publicly accusing the journalist of fabrication; where a group of adults would need whole days in order to determine that even a general apology is appropriate; where orchestrating a happy ending to this disastrous sequence in a press conference is more urgent than personally apologizing to the only person who was actually wronged; and where you’d even need a PR playbook to sort this out in the first place.

Browse – I want to explore to see what’s available Find – I want to locate something specific Query – I want to see items which meet my criteria Structured – I want to be led through a series of choices to help me narrow my focus Guided – I want to be led through the information

amazing summary of high output management that is clearer than the entire book.

on pregnancy, community, and what goes unacknowledged

It wasn’t long before I was dreaming up hundreds of dollars every day. It seemed to get easier and easier. Around the time I was imagining a thousand dollars a day, I knew I’d hit on something big. Heck, if I could imagine a thousand dollars a day, couldn’t anyone? I mean, I’m not so special.

RCP stuff

For Thomas, dishonesty was not only about race; it was also about class. However well intentioned white liberals were about remedying racial inequality, their élitism was steadfast. At Yale, some of Thomas’s classmates would query the absence of class rankings and grades. “You do not separate cream from cream,” a professor responded. “It is your fate as a Yale Law School student to become one of the leaders in the legal profession. It will happen, not because of you personally, but because you are here. That is what happens to Yale Law School students.” But Yale’s black students were separated from the cream; indeed, the absence of rankings was used to effect that separation. As he approached graduation, Thomas tried to secure a position at an élite law firm in Atlanta, which had no black associates. One of the marks against him was that he had no grades. Even if he came from Yale, how could his prospective employers know how good he was?

about active learning. interesting comments

what his argument does imply is that large profits that cannot go into productive capital investment or to workers will instead go into government bonds, pushing interest rates for ‘safe assets’ down quite low, or even into negative territor

What is it you do? Whatever it is, you write for a living. Memos, proposals, emails, commit messages, performance reviews, user stories, code – you write for a living. The better you write anything – the better you write everything. You write an email and then you decide that it is better not to send it. So you delete it. You find the code that is never called and you eliminate it. It is just noise. What about that code that is called all the time? I hope it is good. I hope it has been tested and profiled. This is where working your magic can really pay off.

Suppose we find that counting small stories is part of giving management the information they need Remember that as we split small stories, we often come up with slices that can be deferred.

This is the sweet spot of Agile Software Development!

It seems that there’s always too much to do, and too little time to do it.

• Reusing good software is easy; it is what allows you to build good things quickly; • Software is limited not by the amount of resources put into building it, but by how complex it can get before it breaks down; and • The main value in software is not the code produced, but the knowledge accumulated by the people who produced it.

decision making from a quaker perspective

good process

I think many companies get so busy they don’t “have time” to ensure alignment through the layers, which leads quite directly to unaligned execution. Likewise, my experience is that few companies can distinguish between misalignment due to poor individual performance (by the person being delegated to) and misalignment due to poor direction (from the person delegating).

i like renaming legacy code “legendary”

Take your current annual take-home pay before tax and divide by 80. Quote that as your daily rate and negotiate from there. Edit: here's why: • Fixed-price work is toxic for all parties. Never take a fixed-price job. They pay for your time. • Hourly billing is for lawyers and hookers. You think by the day. • In regular employment you (probably) work ~240 days a year. But as a freelancer the income is very lumpy. You will have downtime, you will have cashflow timing issues especiall...

some expectations will be met, others don’t. some aspects of the framework will be implemented perfectly, other won’t. some problems will be solved, others won’t.

This moves you away from the challenges of measuring nines of uptime, etc, which are output metrics that can be the result of luck rather than effective planning, and towards measures that you can directly invest into and impact.

performance testing

How do we maintain the progress that the business case for diversity has made in the corporate world without perpetuating more harm? How might we fix the “business case?”

First, having a leadership team (LT) unwittingly thinks you’ve communicated adequately to the troops. You talk about things with the LT and it “feels” like things have been discussed and socialized, but it doesn’t make it out of those boundaries.

Second, employees can feel like raising issues to the LT is like throwing a suggestion over a big wall. They don’t know what happens to the suggestion, what the process is for dealing with it, and a final resolution isn’t adequately communicated back. It’s a black hole that they resent.

r/agile: Interesting bits about Agile Development. Includes Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Lean, Kanban, etc.

“I have to tell them, ‘We always have to be ready,’” one officer said of his crew. “But it is tough to put your people through very hard conditions when you privately think you’re not going to go out.”

Absentee leaders are people in leadership roles who are psychologically absent from them. They were promoted into management, and enjoy the privileges and rewards of a leadership role, but avoid meaningful involvement with their teams.

about the social problems of papering over everythinf with react

Good distinctions between different probe types

externals, expose, provide and friends.

It’s also worth mentioning that this approach is often more successful in product organizations than in service organizations. In a product organization, users typically only interact with the end product, rarely interacting with the team directly that produces that product. As a result, the customer is abstracted from changes to a team’s composition. However, in many services organizations the individual members of the team may interact closely with the organization’s client. In these situations, clients will often form attachments to certain high-performing members of the team and resist any changes which could result in those members leaving that client’s project. This can make it very difficult for an organization to honor a request from an individual to leave a certain project without also risking the alienation of key client.

interesting topic about asymetry between report and manager

It’s a good idea to omit hard and fast deadlines in nonprofit bylaws where possible. Also, avoid high voting thresholds where they aren’t required. Particularly for new organizations, a rigid structure of meeting dates, odd quorum and voting requirements, and notice provisions are more likely to promote inadvertent bylaw violations than good governance. If greater specificity or higher voting thresholds are desired down the road, they can always be added once the organization has some operational experience under its belt.

The year is 1935, and the U.S. Army Air Corps is holding a competition for airplane manufacturers vying to secure a contract to build the military’s...

It’s important to divorce the concepts of operational metrics and product analytics. Confusing how we do things with how we decide which things to do is a fatal mistake.

some nice models and experience working with teams

nice list of mac configurations and utilities for productivity

The flow in this outline seems to be from reducing risks by managing time and increasing learning to mindfully taking risks by using your whole brain and quickly triaging ideas.

thinking as lift

email like a boss graphic of email phrases

Elite athletes at the peak of their abilities do spend more time on deliberate practice than their near-elite peers. But scientists have found that, at a younger age, those who go on to become elite athletes typically devote less time to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period”. They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in on one area. The title of one study of athletes in individual sports proclaimed “late specialisation” as “the key to success”; another was titled Making It to the Top in Team Sports: Start Later, Intensify, and Be Determined.

setting up password autofill for react-native

It’s easier to accelerate growth with world class retention than fix retention while maintaining rapid growth.

Fold the paper into 8 different sections and draw fir a shirt anount of time

No doubt, Alex’s mother had hopes for him—he was insightful and ambitious. He could’ve done more with his life, even if he were in prison like me. It’s wrong for me to take a snapshot of Alex as he was before he died and tell myself I’m not so bad because I killed a criminal—and then, in the same breath, say that my character should not be defined by my crime. I finally realized that I had to fully account for the murder before I could gain acceptance as a writer.

The first thing we worked on as a leadership team was the objectives for 2019. What did we need to achieve next year to be successful? We then went to the product managers, designers, and engineering managers and explained the objectives. We then tasked them to propose the organizational structure that would help them with these objectives.

shell autocomplete tool

novels are bags of people, hero narratives are sticks bashing through stuff.

good stuff on product ethics

docker for production

Heroku offers a robust backups system for it's PostgreSQL database plugin. Unfortunately, you can irreversibly lose all your data and backups just by typing a single command. It might seem improbable, but still, I would rather not bet my startup's existence on a single faulty bash line. In this tutorial, I will describe how to set up a proprietary Heroku Postgres backups system to a secure AWS S3 bucket.

Confidence is often in anticipation of what will happen. Many people are not confident that the transport system will be accessible and thus they do not go out. Many people lose confidence as they become more and more tired by the stresses of differing forms of inaccessible design that accrue over the day.

about happiness curve

1. Start with user needs 2. Do less 3. Design with data 4. Do the hard work to make it simple 5. Iterate. Then iterate again 6. This is for everyone 7. Understand context 8. Build digital services, not websites 9. Be consistent, not uniform 10. Make things open: it makes things better

Narrative is the great litmus test. Larry Fink should have asked: What big and important problem is your business solving. Narrative is also a tool to provide uniquely creative answers to sincere questions. Even if the story isn’t obvious or watertight, a narrative approach will highlight what works and what is weak and can be very creative in merging contingencies under a common purpose that matters. That is how story is written: backwards and forwards at the same time. What can’t be written but has to be earned with courage: the choice of a story that is ambitious enough for the world to care.

smoke testing ansible playbooks

chrome plugin rhat looks like a nice accessibility companion

going deep on writing clean react code witb properties.

Example of geotargeting/geofencing for facebook advertising

People often are afraid to lead change because they know that some will resist that change. That’s true. But it’s also true that if you are changing an organization to be more inclusive and relevant, many, many people will fall in love with the change. They will thank you for the change. They will push you to keep changing. I don’t see leading change as hard or painful. I see it as a great privilege and I feel lucky to do it.

At Center Centre, the UX design school where I’m a faculty member, I get to review many resources on inclusivity and accessible design. I collect the best resources I find and review them with my…

Often times when you’re having a discussion around privilege and signaling, particularly in the context of hiring, you’ll end up having a discussion around the “unimpeachable efficiency of bias”, where someone cedes the moral superior of biased evaluation, but argues there isn’t a pursuable alternative. I understand that perspective, and would have agreed with it at certain points. The path to doing better is to have a clear understanding of the behaviors and skills that make someone impactful in your organization and evaluating precisely for those skills. Many interview processes are unclear about what they’re evaluating, and those are the most susceptible to testing for signaling over skills. The good news is that designing interview formats that effectively test the identified skills is a very mechanical skill that anyone can develop with practice: I’ve gotten to participate in several interview loop revamps that took that approach to good effect. On the other hand, getting to clear alignment on what makes someone impactful at your organization, that’s really hard, and is the stuff of effective, courageous leadership.

Why vertically spacing text is hard because text bounding box margins do not fully represent the whitespace

Lots of helpful driving tips like this:

To deal with this, you can close all popups on the page, and scroll down to the element before clicking it.

In any case, “severity” levels are not objective measures of anything in practice, even if they’re assumed to be so in theory.

They are negotiable constructs that provide an illusion of control or understanding, or footholds for people as they attempt to cope with complexity.

The only users in this story are the ones you’re trying to fire. Executives aren’t users. Managers aren’t users. It seems like you should listen to them, because they have a lot of opinions, and they’re the ones writing checks, but nope.

Yet even with scale effects, our observation is that data is rarely a strong enough moat. Unlike traditional economies of scale, where the economics of fixed, upfront investment can get increasingly favorable with scale over time, the exact opposite dynamic often plays out with data scale effects: The cost of adding unique data to your corpus may actually go up, while the value of incremental data goes down!

But improving player experience, particularly when it comes to removing bigotry and harassment, is development. These games are social spaces, even during play, teamwork is necessary for the best results. It isn’t a separate experience from doing the shooty or magicky bits. Even from a purely business perspective, people are just as likely to drop off because they don’t like the other players as they are because they’re bored of the mechanics. And by this point, developers can hardly claim to be surprised that they need these kinds of features in order to reduce, if not prevent, abuse.

. I will explore how a “diversity of tactics” emerged as a viable tactical orientation within this new anti-capitalist movement and eventually turned against itself, when the conditions for such diversity no longer existed.

polygon of pain

https://twitter.com/bensheldon/status/1125434588853968896

Software engineers need to understand what civil engineers learn as undergraduates – safety is not someone else’s job; it is the responsibility of every engineer involved in the design and implementation of a system whose failure might cause harm. If your team is not ready to accept this responsibility, then call yourselves developers or programmers or technicians – but not engineers.

“Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.”

Motivating toward a behavior Motivation can be defined as the energy for an action5: how much we want to do something. Fogg suggests 3 core motivation drives to focus our motivation efforts toward:

So perhaps a more accurate definition of data science would be: The inhumane reduction of humanity down to what can be counted.

A nice and tidy Capybara driver for headless Chrome. Even supports file downloads

using JSON Schema to validate an API

copy and microcopy

“I don’t have a way of making myself less threatening as a black person, as a black woman, as a Muslim person. And so it is just living with the reality that there are people who will see you as a threat. And figuring out how do you not allow that to deter the work that you have to get done.”

pretty good breakdown of how to use analytics to think through dropoff points

on administrative burdens and government paperwork

microcopy and mwsaaging styleguide

honest looking reflections on a bootstrap saas product

Why we should stop saying design systems solve the easy problems, so you can focus on the hard ones

the workplace is just like college admissions. You learn the rules and use them to your advantage. So teach your kids when they’re young that the higher the stakes the game is, the more arcane the rules are. And the more arcane the rules, the more likely it is that you can find a backdoor route to the top. But pretending the system is a meritocracy encourages more discrimination –– so says economist Robert Frank. And belief that one has succeeded inside a meritocracy leads to more self-congratulatory, selfish behavior. Frank says people who accept that all of life is about skill and luck are much more likely to be thankful and therefore more generous. Bottom line: Gaming the system is a great idea, but you can’t game the system if you don’t have good grades. Hard work counts too. So raise a kid who has gratitude. Because when it comes to being a happy person, having gratitude is much more important than having a fancy diploma.

Taking those risks requires supporting structures that, in Pedercini’s view, the industry lacks. “The parallel with the film industry is useful,” he said. “A politically uncompromising film like ‘Sorry to Bother You’ became a blockbuster, but its production would not have been possible without Sundance and a whole supportive ecosystem.” Video games have no such ecosystem; as Yang put it, the medium is in the process of reverse-engineering an art form from an entertainment business. “We have to build the arts-and-culture platforms and the festival circuits,” Yang said. “We have to convince funding bodies and governments that games are worth more than their sales numbers.”

on streaks and stats and gamification

I think people tend to under estimate how important it is to be transparent about things that don’t need to be private.

GitHub is where people build software. More than 28 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 79 million projects.

The problem with testability is that even the most reasonable of success criteria can be non-testable—and if a success criterion is not considered testable, it isn’t included in WCAG 2.0. Whether the criterion is an otherwise useful technique that improves accessibility is now irrelevant to whether it gets included in WCAG 2.0. Due to the testability requirement, many useful success criteria have been removed from WCAG 2.0, and others watered down.

“Getting over it is a spiritual discipline”

Learn the skills needed for data science today

We can easily see from these few examples the business value of an accessible website. Accessibility is more than just “the blind people” and actually pays out.

about social media anxiety

more from Christina maslach

Why we should teach machines to help us privately reflect instead of publicly read our minds.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6eBuPfX3zSMJ:https://uxdesign.cc/artificial-affective-intelligence-6f60f9bcb35+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

has chromedriver setup

As a final point on the Getting Started side of things, there’s a certain human / political cost involved. Getting an entire development team onboard philosophically is non-trivial. There will be those excited by the idea who read up on it outside work and are down for riding out the growing pains involved in trying alternative development methodologies, and then there will be those who aren’t into it at all. However, regardless of which “camp” a person is in, disagreements will still mount as everyone tries to figure out how best to build a maintainable a system under a foreign methodology with unclear best practices.

deep dive on burnout and recovery

Good Rails SQL activerecord tricks (including lateral join)

had these with serena. she added chopped crystalized ginger. underbake for softness.

Self-care and social retreat under neoliberalism

Conservative intellectuals often cite individual liberty — defined as the freedom of contract and from arbitrary coercion — as the guiding principle of their politics. But Americans will never enjoy such liberty if they cannot meaningfully influence their contractual obligations to the state; which is to say, the laws that they are coerced into obeying. As the great American political scientist Robert Dahl once wrote, “one of the most fundamental of all human freedoms” is “the freedom to help determine, in cooperation with others, the laws and rules that one must obey.” America’s present level of economic inequality is incompatible with that freedom.

interviews with engineers who became managers

Software is easy. People are hard.

A taxonomy of people on software projects, each assigned a cute animal icon.

Shining light on the PM discipline.

Product management blog recommended by a coworker

Look for uses of present?, none?, any?, blank? and empty? on objects which may be ActiveRecord::Relations. Are you just going to load the entire array later if the relation is present? If so, add load to the call (e.g. @my_relation.load.any?) Be careful with your use of exists? - it ALWAYS executes a SQL query. Only use it in cases where that is appropriate - otherwise use present? or any other the other methods which use empty? Be extremely careful using where in instance methods on...

about authoritorianism and politics

UX Strategy Means Business

If what you want is a space away from patriarchy in general, then don’t call it a “women’s space”. Don’t call it a “women’s conference”. Don’t call it “Women in Technology”. Yes. I know that word carries a lot of weight for you.

agile process

simple rules can play out radically differently vased on team size

A good summary of all things Heroku

time management

“mistaking interest for demand” is ⭐️

I will provide you with suggestions on your performance so you can overcome the challenges you encounter every day while working for a difficult boss, so you can feel less stressed.

a color picker

Progress: What were your three biggest accomplishments this week? Plans: What are your top three priorities for next week? Problems: What are three problems you are facing? Problems usually require the help of other people to solve.