When I heard this on the radio I was impressed (it may be a low bar) with Pinterest’s Ifeoma Ozoma’s responses to NPR’s Audie Cornish:

OZOMA: Our goal, really, is harm reduction. And so because we’re humble about our limitations and our own expertise here, we look to outside experts like the WHO, CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics and their guidance on what’s harmful.

CORNISH: Now, there are some critics of this move. Jennifer Granick of the ACLU told The Wall Street Journal that this is dangerous, that it’s essentially a secretive process, no real appeal. People are making very difficult subject calls when it comes to politics and culture and religion. What’s your response?

OZOMA: So to that, we have clear and transparent community guidelines. And this is just one way of enforcing, like…

CORNISH: Like buried in the terms and conditions or what do you mean by that?

OZOMA: No. Nope. They’re clear in our community guidelines on our website. And we also, whenever we have a search that we’ve removed results for, we explain right in there in the search advisory why we removed it, and we link to those community guidelines. And we also have an appeals process for any content that’s taken down.

CORNISH: Is this essentially censorship?

OZOMA: For us, we don’t see it as that. There’s an enthusiasm gap between those who save harmful health misinformation and organizations like the CDC and WHO and American Academy of Pediatrics. And so because of that, you’re going to find more health misinformation than, say, journal articles on the virtues of vaccination or other science-based health interventions. We’ve taken the view that further sharing that harmful content through our search results isn’t in line with enforcing our community guidelines.

CORNISH: Your title is public policy and social impact manager. None of those things are things we thought about when we thought about social media when it was first starting up, right? We called them platforms. They were just places we put things that we wanted to share. When do you think this mindset changed?

OZOMA: We have had content policy and trust and safety teams since the beginning. And so safety has always been a consideration when you think about different types of harmful content, whether they’re illegal or not illegal. Safety has been top of mind and still is for every team across the company.

This zine, Your Attention is Sovereign(PDF) by Jay Springett (via Phil Gyford) which is a collection of 6 essays:

Your attention is sovereign.

There are two things that should be addressed.

1. You, personally, get to decide where you put your attention.
2. By acknowledging this fact you have to take full responsibility for where you have put your attention in the past, and where you will put it in the future.

…

I’ve been attempting to find mechanisms to remind myself that my attention is sovereign every single time I open an app on my phone. The only solution, has been to keep it in my pocket and not even try and open an app. Slowly slowly you begin to not bother pulling out your phone at all. If you are actually doing something, like reading a longread news article and feel the urge to check social media you have to think to yourself ‘Should I open twitter again or should I keep doing what I was doing’.

Maria Farrell’s This is your phone on feminism

via Bruce Schneier:

Let’s face the truth. We are in an abusive relationship with our phones.

Ask yourself the first three questions that UK non-profit Women’s Aid suggests to determine if you’re in an abusive relationship:

• Has your partner tried to keep you from seeing your friends or family?
• Has your partner prevented you or made it hard for you to continue or start studying, or from going to work?
• Does your partner constantly check up on you or follow you?

If you substitute ‘phone’ for ‘partner’, you could answer yes to each question. And then you’ll probably blame yourself.

If this feels dangerously close to trivializing abuse and intimate partner violence, then stick with me just a minute more. What our smartphones and relationship abusers share is that they both exert power over us in a world shaped to tip the balance in their favour, and they both work really, really hard to obscure this fact and keep us confused and blaming ourselves. Here are some of the ways our unequal relationship with our smartphones is like an abusive relationship:

• They isolate us from deeper, competing relationships in favour of superficial contact – ‘user engagement’ – that keeps their hold on us strong. Working with social media, they insidiously curate our social lives, manipulating us emotionally with dark patterns to keep us scrolling.
• They tell us the onus is on us to manage their behavior. It’s our job to tiptoe around them and limit their harms. Spending too much time on a literally-designed-to-be-behaviorally-addictive phone? They send company-approved messages about our online time, but ban from their stores the apps that would really cut our use. We just need to use willpower. We just need to be good enough to deserve them.
• They betray us, leaking data / spreading secrets. What we shared privately with them is suddenly public. Sometimes this destroys lives, but hey, we only have ourselves to blame. They fight nasty and under-handed, and are so, so sorry when they get caught that we’re meant to feel bad for them. But they never truly change, and each time we take them back, we grow weaker.
• They love-bomb us when we try to break away, piling on the free data or device upgrades, making us click through page after page of dark pattern, telling us no one understands us like they do, no one else sees everything we really are, no one else will want us.
• It’s impossible to just cut them off. They’ve wormed themselves into every part of our lives, making life without them unimaginable. And anyway, the relationship is complicated. There is love in it, or there once was. Surely we can get back to that if we just manage them the way they want us to?

Nope. Our devices are basically gaslighting us. They tell us they work for and care about us, and if we just treat them right then we can learn to trust them. But all the evidence shows the opposite is true. This cognitive dissonance confuses and paralyses us. And look around. Everyone has a smartphone. So it’s probably not so bad, and anyway, that’s just how things work. Right?

I enjoy “falsehood programmers believe” articles for the same reason as Graham Lee, who also points out that I shouldn’t assume others approach those articles (or any seemingly common structure) the same:

As the sort of programmer who writes falsehoods programmers believe articles, my belief is that interesting challenges to my beliefs will trigger some curiosity, and lead me to research the counterexamples and solutions. Or at least, to file away the fact that counterexamples exist until I need it, or am otherwise more motivated to learn about it.

But that motivation is not universal. The fact that I treat it as universal turns it into a falsehood I believe about readers of falsehoods articles. Complaints abound that falsehoods articles do not lead directly to fish on the plate. Some readers want a clear breakdown from “thing you might think is true but isn’t true” to “Javascript you can paste in your project to account for it not being true”. These people are not well-served by falsehoods articles.

I’ve started collecting ideas that are anti-flow. From Jonathan Bach’s Above the Clouds: A Reunion of Father and Son:

I turned a shallow left, lined up the directional gyro until the needle pointed to 36.

Another fifteen seconds in that bank and I dipped the let wing to see a little inlet, a freshwater lake with foothills surrounding it.

Richard took the stick.

“Here, I’ll just yank it around to base. Bring the power back a bit to fifteen hundred rpm.”

The takeoff was easy; landings were much different. It’s one thing to go from zero to one hundred twenty miles an hour, but do it backward?

“Uh, I don’t know…”

“Just one step at a time. Power back.”

Power Back.

“Flaps down.”

Down.

“Wiggle toes.”

“Wiggle toes?”

“Yep. Try it. Wiggle your toes.”

“Okay”

I did it. For those few seconds I was a passenger.

“Helps you relax. Am I right?”

“Hey! That’s cool. It works.”

“Makes you aware that you’re still human, that the airplane doesn’t have control of you.”

Sure enough, I had been caught up in exactly that, letting myself be an airplane.

Last week I attended Code Climate’s Engineering Leadership Summit. The content overwhelmingly focused on the “team” of people you manage, rather than your “team” of other managers and leadership.

From “The Advantage” by Patrick Lencioni:

The only way for a leader to establish this collective mentality on a team is by ensuring that all members place a higher priority on the team they’re a member of than the team they lead in their departments. A good way to go about this is simply to ask them which team is their first priority. I’ve found that many well-intentioned executives will admit that in spite of their commitment to the team that they’re a member of, the team they lead is their first priority. They’ll point out that they hired their direct reports, they sit near them and spend more time with them every day, and they enjoy being the leader of that team. Moreover, they feel a sense of loyalty to the people they manage, and feel that those people want and need their protection.

This is absolutely natural, common, and understandable. And dangerous.

When members of a leadership team feel a stronger sense of commitment and loyalty to the team they lead than the one they’re a member of, then the team they’re a member of becomes like the U.S. Congress or the United Nations: it’s just a place where people come together to lobby for their constituents. Teams that lead healthy organizations reject this model and come to terms with the difficult but critical requirement that executives must put the needs of the higher team ahead of the needs of their departments. That is the only way that good decisions can be made about how best to serve the entire organization and maximize its performance.

The advantage that can be achieved by shifting a team’s priorities from individual to collective ones, and thus demonstrating a true commitment to team number one, is undeniable.

From “Your Next Move” by Michael D. Watkins in the section of Core promotion challenges:

You have a legal obligation to produce an accessible website; these are some thoughts about what comes next.

At Lighthouse Labs this month, there was a lively discussion on “Detecting accessibility events, a debate on the ethics and implications of this new feature from Apple” [article]. I offered this in the pre-discussion email thread:

I wanted to share some perspective as a web developer: I would like to have aggregated analytics about what screen-readers are using my website (how many and which ones). Here’s why:

Within an agile process, once we achieve the baseline of WCAG/valid/passable/usable, the question becomes how do we make it even better and where do we start? Being able to point to analytics is useful for prioritization discussions about bottlenecks/friction. For example, on GetCalFresh.org, which has helped 700k people apply for food stamps, we can identify completion differences between, for example, English and Spanish-language users on particular parts of an application flow, and prioritize improvements based on frequency and severity. I don’t have the data to do that kind of prioritization for screen-readers, but I would like to.

The Lighthouse Labs discussion brought up several dimensions of the issues:

• People with disabilities are legally protected from discrimination, and have legal rights to privacy of their conditions and freedom from discrimination.
• If the lived experience is a spectrum of “discrimination - inaccessibility - accommodation - accessibility - usability” (these are my words, imprecise), the majority of experience lives towards the left of that spectrum. Everyone has a story of being identified as a low value / low priority user.
• Some people would like to be fully and accessibly served; others would like to remain apart; everyone wants individual agency in that decision. An example of this was some people saying “I want websites to be completely accessible” and others saying “I’m fine not experiencing advertising and junk”. This came up as “ghettoization”, but I have been thinking about it as the difference between exclusion and seclusion.
• Differentiating between accessibility, accommodation and discrimination in digital products is important yet slippery. An example: Twitter’s native iOS client generally works with Voiceover (accessible), but used a separated streamlined UI for composing a tweet when the app detected that VoiceOver was in use (accommodation); when Twitter changed to 280 characters, they failed to update that sheet in a timely manner (discrimination). [article]

When discussing this with a my data science coworker, she shared “Counting the Countless: Why data science is a profound threat for queer people” by Os Keyes:

So: trans existences are built around fluidity, contextuality, and autonomy, and administrative systems are fundamentally opposed to that. Attempts to negotiate and compromise with those systems (and the state that oversees them) tend to just legitimize the state, while leaving the most vulnerable among us out in the cold. This is important to keep in mind as we veer toward data science, because in many respects data science can be seen as an extension of those administrative logics: It’s gussied-up statistics, after all — the “science of the state.”

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

Within the context of assistive technology, it is not a far leap between tracking screenreader usage and creating an implication of a disability and the segmentation that comes with it.

These discussions have made me think a lot more about my own digital footprints. I frequently use VoiceOver to explore websites and mobile apps and I now wonder about the impact/risks of being tracked and weigh them against the benefits to my own design practice and discernment, of which quantitative analysis is a tool.

_If you have thoughts about this post, quantitative usability testing and advanced product management for assistive technology and disabilities, I’d love to chat. Tweet me at @bensheldon

or email me at [email protected]._

The back page of “Learning How to Learn” by Joseph D. Novak, D. Bob Gowin, and Jane Butler Kahle still gives me goosebumps to read:

For almost a century, educational theory and practice have been influenced by the view of behavioral psychologists that learning is synonymous with behavior change. In this book, the authors argue for the practical importance of an alternate view, that learning is synonymous with a change in the meaning of experience. They develop their theory of the conceptual nature of knowledge and describe classroom-tested strategies for helping students to construct new and more powerful meanings and to integrate thinking, feeling, and acting.

In their research, they have found consistently that standard educational practices that do not lead learners to grasp the meaning of tasks usually fail to give them confidence in their abilities. It is necessary to understand why and how new information is related to what one already knows.

All those concerned with the improvement of education will find something of interest in Learning how to learn.

I revisited “When you get that wealthy, you start to buy your own bullshit”: The miseducation of Sheryl Sandberg” which I’ve been tweeting about. From “The Parable of the Sadhu”

, a Harvard Business case study by Bowen McCoy, which is held up as an example of bullshit and stands in contrast to the ethics of The Concrete Sumo:

The word ethics turns off many and confuses more. Yet the notions of shared values and an agreed-upon process for dealing with adversity and change – what many people mean when they talk about corporate culture – seem to be at the heart of the ethical issue. People who are in touch with their own core beliefs and the beliefs of others and who are sustained by them can be more comfortable living on the cutting edge. At times, taking a tough line or a decisive stand in a muddle of ambiguity is the only ethical thing to do. If a manager is indecisive about a problem and spends time trying to figure out the “good” thing to do, the enterprise may be lost.

Business ethics, then, has to do with the authenticity and integrity of the enterprise. To be ethical is to follow the business as well as the cultural goals of the corporation, its owners, its employees, and its customers. Those who cannot serve the corporate vision are not authentic businesspeople and, therefore, are not ethical in the business sense.

I had an interesting conversation with my friend Rob about Single Transferable Vote schemes. For example, when there are 3 seats and 5 candidates, it’s a process for re-assigning “surplus” votes once one candidate has enough votes to win a seat. I had also come across a definition of wealth that had me thinking of the limits of consumption:

The current meaning of wealth is not the amount you own, but rather how much you can consume (sustainably). Formally, the definition is Total of all assets of an economic unit that generate current income or have the potential to generate future income. This is of course the same amount as the amount that you can sustainably consume. This means that we can measure wealth either as production or as consumption.

…remember that you cannot consume money. You can only consume goods and services. Amassing riches has little value in itself. It is mainly a way (for an individual or group) to postpone consumption to some point in the future.

This post on “Trust and Integrity” by Jessie Frazelle resonated:

I think people tend to under estimate how important it is to be transparent about things that don’t need to be private. I’ve seen a lot of people in positions of power, use their power of keeping information privateagainstthose under them. They don’t fully disclose the “why” and it leads to people they manage not fully being able to help solve the problem as well as not fully understanding the problem. It also doesn’t build trust.

From “The Vision 2 and the Severing of Politics from Video Games” by Simon Parkin (emphasis mine):

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.”

Penelope Trunk’s “Here’s the high-priced advice college applicants buy that doesn’t trigger the FBI”

:

…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.

“Ilhan Omar’s Embattled First Months in Office” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells:

“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.”

From New Yorker’s “Do Jails Kill People?” (Yes):

“Because jails are chaotic and concealed from outside view, we only become aware of them when very bad outcomes occur, such as deaths,” he writes. “As a result, our periodic glimpses into this area miss the systemic failings of the systems we’ve designed, and we make the repeated error of blaming individuals for outcomes that we’ve essentially predetermined.”

Taming the Demon: How Desert Monks Put Work in Its Place about scriptorium@christdesert:

Work ceases for the day with a 12:40 bell. That’s it; they’ve upheld their end of Paul’s bargain. The monks clean up, pray another brief office, and then eat their main meal in silence. They spend the afternoon at rest or in silent prayer, eat a light meal, and enjoy a brief recreation period in the evening. The final office of the day, entirely in Latin, concludes by 8:00 in the evening with a ritual of sprinkling the community with holy water. Thus begins the Great Silence, when the monks return to their cells and may not speak. They won’t go back to work until the next morning.

I asked Fr. Simeon, a monk who spoke with a confidence cultivated through the years he spent as a defense attorney, what you do when the 12:40 bell rings but you feel that your work is undone.

“You get over it,” he replied.

Getting over it is a spiritual discipline that is in short supply in secular life. It’s what makes the paradoxical but deeply humane approach to work at the monastery possible. The Benedictines who live in the canyon keep strict watch over their time and attention. Doing so keeps their desires in order. But it also keeps labor within limits. They get over work so they can get on with something much more important to them.

More from Christina Maslach on Job Burnout:

I used to talk about burnout as a red flag that warns you that something is going wrong in the workplace.Let me change that a little bit and say that it’s more like the canary in the coal mine.

The canary in the cage goes down in the coal mine, and if the canary is having trouble breathing and functioning, it’s a sign to you that the workplace, the mine, is dangerous. Too many toxic fumes, you’d better not send people down there. It’s a warning sign, and this is really what burnout is in a sense. It’s a warning sign of a toxic work environment, and what you should be doing is saying, “What is going on to cause so many problems among people who work here?”

What you don’t want to do is try and make the bird tougher and more resilient and “it can take it!” You know, “If you can’t stand the toxic fumes, you shouldn’t work here.” Again, it’s a sign that it could get worse. You don’t want to go there because it’s harder to treat people at that point.

Anna Shipman on Finding the Next Level Tech Job:

The first important step was to work out what I was good at. This is something worth doing because although it seems like it might be obvious, I tend to focus on getting things done, and don’t always reflect on what skills it is that mean I’m succeeding (or what weaknesses mean I’m not).

There were four main ways I did this:

1. I asked people directly what they valued about me. For example, a friend made an intro to her boss and I asked how she’d described me, and she reported that she’d said “more single minded than anyone else I know”.
2. Another former boss called me “terrifyingly competent” (which I think was a compliment…).
3. I did an exercise called a Johari window to learn what colleagues thought my strengths are, which I’ve written up here.
4. As I started having interviews, I made sure to ask for feedback at every stage of the process. A good question to draw that out can be something along the lines of “Do you have any concerns about my ability to do this job? Are there any gaps I can perhaps set your mind at rest about?” And of course, as I live my life by lists, I made a list, and updated it when I noticed I’d done something well or badly.

On the changing (and more difficult) labor market for data scientists, “Data science is different now” by Vicki Boykis:

Don’t get paralysis by analysis. Pick a small piece of something and start there. Do something small. Learn something small, build something small. Tell other people. Remember that your first job in data science will probably not be as a data scientist.

One of my favorite books ever is Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. It’s about how to write. The story she tells in the book, of how the book got its title, is a book report her brother had to write.

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said. ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

And he got it done.

This week I created a Dockerized development environment for Panlexicon. I find it’s forever a struggle to bridge the Docker-for-development and Docker-for-production workflows and configuration, but this is Docker-for-development.

I’ve been working on “project planning as narrative”, having written out a long story about an accessibility project that has yet to kick off. Here’s an excerpt:

This led to a collaborative discussion that was also tinged with reasonable fear: how can our team ensure that we’re taking into account the newly collected design considerations? We knew that this would involve some new skills: screen-reading, keyboard navigation, low-vision simulation, and more.

It’s easiest to learn new skills when they’re grounded in practice, so we placed their usage within the context of our delivery pipeline:

1. Design: Screen-reading, expanded awareness of content/action hierarchy, inclusive design patterns. [Design]
2. Prototyping: Expanded usability testing community. [Design, UX Research]
3. Development: Inclusive design patterns, validation and automated testing. [Engineering]
4. QA and Acceptance: screen-reading, keyboard navigation, low-vision simulators. [Engineering, Product Management]
5. Support: expanded awareness [Client Success].

I was reminded of this long story about Windows Vista via a Highly highlight. The thoughts from my notebook (that I then tweeted about:

What would principles of continuous delivery look like if applied to project planning and management? What would be necessary for a project to live in a continuously deliverable state?

I read another long article from Christina Maslach on Burnout.

If there’s one image that I’m talking about today that I hope you remember, it’s this — we have found that the fit, the match, or the balance between a person and the job, is critical for burnout in six areas. They are not listed in order of importance. They’re listed in order of which one people think of first.

• Workload is the one that everybody thinks of first. It must be they’re working too hard. They’re stressed out. The imbalance between too many demands, too few resources to get it done. But there are five other areas that turn out to be just as important.
• Control. In other words, how much autonomy you have in your work, how much choice, or discretion to figure out how to do it the best way or innovate in some way.
• Reward. People think of things like salary, benefits, perks, et cetera. We’re finding in the research that social reward is sometimes more important, that other people notice that they appreciate what you do and let you know that you’ve done something that’s really meaningful.
• Community. These are all the relationships that you have at work, with other colleagues, your boss, clients, whoever. Are those relationships functioning well? Are they supportive? Do you trust? Do you have ways of working out disagreements and figuring out how to move forward, work together well on teams, et cetera.
• Fairness. This turns out to be a very important one. Is whatever the policy is, whatever the practices are, here in this place, are they fairly administered in terms of who gets the opportunity? Are there glass ceilings, or discrimination, or other things that block people from moving forward when they should have that chance?
• Values. Which sometimes turns out to be one of the most important. This is meaning. This is why am I doing this. Why am I here? What do I care about? What is important to me, in terms of what I think is important for our society, the contributions I make, and so forth? With burnout, it’s not just about being exhausted and working too hard and being tired. It’s often that the spirit, the passion, the meaning is just getting beaten out of you, as opposed to being allowed to thrive and grow.

These six areas offer entry points into what could we could be doing differently, that might actually create a better, healthier, improved workplace to support the things we want to achieve.

I follow several blogs that are all-in on Event Sourcing; reading “Event Sourcing is Hard” was refreshing:

What’s the take away here? Should I event source or not!?

I think you can generally answer it with some alone time, deep introspection, and two questions:

1. For which core problem is event sourcing the solution?
2. Is what you actually want just a plain old queue?

If you can’t answer the first question concretely, or the justification involves vague hand-wavy ideas like “auditablity”, “flexibility,” or something about “read separation”: Don’t. Those are not problems exclusively solved by event sourcing. A good ol’ fashion history table gets you 80% of the value of a ledger with essentially none of the cost. It won’t have first class change semantics baked in, but those low-level details are mostly worthless anyway and can ultimately be derived at a later date if so required. Similarly CQRS doesn’t require event sourcing. You can have all the power of different projections without putting the ledger at the heart of your system.

The latter question is to weed out confused people like myself who thought the Ledgers would rule the world. Look at the interaction points of your systems. If you’re going full event sourcing, what events are actually going to be produced? Do those downstream systems care about those intermediate states, or will it just be noise that needs to be filtered out? If the end goal is just decoupled processes which communicate via something, event sourcing is not required. Put a queue between those two bad boys and start enjoying the good life.

I was heartened to read this about “How the Seattle Times is empowering reporters to drive subscriber growth”:

Over the past year, the news publisher, which grew its digital subscriber base 38 percent to 40,000 in 2018, has been trying to get small teams of reporters to think more entrepreneurially about driving subscriptions. It wants them to not just monitor which kinds of content visitors read on their way to paying but also to experiment with new content and packaging formats designed to keep readers engaged.

In 2017, the Times gave its newsroom staff access to a dashboard that showed reporters which stories they published were driving subscriptions. Next, the Times’ executive editor, Don Shelton, formed several teams, called mini-publishers, which paired editorial staffers with members of the paper’s digital audience, product and business intelligence teams to figure out what kinds of content the audience likes, how to make more of it, and so on.