Clippings

Homepage | European Alternatives European alternatives for digital products We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.

Portfolio Performance An open source tool to calculate the overall performance of an investment portfolio - across all accounts - using True-Time Weighted Return or Internal Rate of Return.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one. — Mark Twain

The Captain Class - by Kent Beck [emphasis added] These captains, in turn, shared traits (some of which we don’t always associate with leadership). The traits are: Doggedness. Captains just keep coming. Their example causes the rest of the team to raise their effort level to match. Edges. Captains play right to the edge of the rules. (This is why he says Derek Jeter didn’t see many World Series trophies–too law-abiding.) ...

Fight or Flight - Sketchplanations Fight-or-flight psychology, coined by physiologist Walter Cannon in 1915, is only part of a broader spectrum of acute stress responses. A more accurate sequence we experience may be freeze, flight, fight, or fright. Freeze: Our immediate reaction to danger might be to “stop, look, listen,” remaining hyper-vigilant while we assess the threat, and perhaps hope by not moving, the dinosaur won’t spot us. Flight: We may flee the situation to safety. ...

Pay Once Alternatives Pay once. Use forever. Find the best one-time purchase alternatives to popular subscription tools and never pay another subscription ever again.

GitHub - TwoBitCoders/jx: jx: Memory-Safe JSON Processing using JavaScript implemented in Go Welcome to jx, a powerful command-line tool for JSON processing! … jx fuses the memory-safety and performance of Go with the flexibility of JavaScript syntax. Unlike other tools like jq that require learning a new domain-specific language, jx allows you to use your existing JavaScript knowledge to handle JSON with ease.

How It Works – Holacracy Foundation Holacracy is a management framework for organizations made of 5 distinct —but complementary— modules. Holacracy is a management framework codified into a constitution — the “rules of engagement” for working in an organization. It takes a leader willing to delegate their authority into a set of foundational rules that everyone will follow, including themselves. Module 1 - Organizational Structure Defines an explicit standard format for encoding roles and rules of the organization, as well as basic responsibilities for anyone in a role. ...

11 tips for how to keep your readers reading - Josh Bernoff 1 Scare the crap out of them. 2 Ditch the introduction. 3 Keep it short. 4 Use the reader questions method to design the book before you write it. 5 Start chapters with stories 6 End chapters with teasers. 7 Write directly to the reader with “you” and “we.” 8 Vary the length of sentences and paragraphs, and keep paragraphs short. ...

“The Varieties Of Human Work” by Steven Shorrock (Safety Differently) Early ergonomists realised that the analysis of work could not be limited to work as prescribed in procedures etc (le travail prescrit), nor to the observation of work actually done (le travail réalisé). Both have to be considered. But these are not the only varieties of work. Four basic varieties can be considered: work-as-imagined; work-as-prescribed; work-as-disclosed; and work-as-done. These are illustrated in the figure below, which shows that the varieties of human work do usually overlap, but not completely, leaving areas of commonality, and areas of difference. Here we will consider each variety, one by one. ...

Travelling to work ‘is work’, European court rules - BBC News (Sep. 2015) Time spent travelling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time, the European Court of Justice has ruled. “Employers may have to organise work schedules to ensure workers’ first and last appointments are close to their homes,” he added. [BBC legal correspondent Clive Coleman]

Work Is Work | codahale.com (Jan. 2020) The Ceiling Is Low The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added. … The ceaseless pursuit of force multipliers is the only possible route to superlinear productivity improvements as an organization grows. The Floor Is Lava Contention costs grow superlinearly as new members are added. … Staffing highly sequential efforts as if they were entirely parallel leads to catastrophe. ...

Not Just Scale - Marc’s Blog One Machine Is All You Need? … It’s Not Just Scale Availability. … Durability. … Utilization. … Latency. … Specialization. … Isolation. … Changes. … … Simplicity is a System Property … Scaling Organizations Just like computer systems, organizations scale by avoiding coordination. The more the organization needs different pieces to coordinate with one another to work, the less it is going to be able to grow. Organizations that wish to grow without grinding to a halt need to be carefully design, and continuously optimized, to reduce unnecessary coordination. ...

We tend to regret things we didn’t do over things we did do. — Several different authors in Wisdom Trove Ask “What if?” and follow through…

“Little Billy Ignore Instructions” by Philippe Schrettenbrunner (LinkedIn) Remember Little Bobby Tables? I think he has a sibling. Just some iPad doodles. Stay safe, sanitize all inputs. (Original xkcd comic: Exploits of a Mom) [aka “Little Bobby Tables”] School: Hi, this is your son’s school. We’re having some computer trouble. Parent: Oh dear - did he break something? ...

How to write a cold email Here are a few things I’ve learned about powerful/wealthy/interesting people. This is almost universally true. They read their own email. Moreover, they’re good at responding to email. They’re very, very curious people. They have very little time. Anything with friction gets sorted into a “later” bucket. The perfect cold email is Short and grabs attention. Super clear on who you are. Value prop for the receiver. Has a specific ask.

Essays on programming I think about a lot | benkuhn.net Every so often I read an essay that I end up thinking about, and citing in conversation, over and over again. Here’s my index of all the ones of those I can remember! Nelson Elhage, Computers can be understood Dan McKinley, Choose Boring Technology Sandy Metz, The Wrong Abstraction Patrick McKenzie, Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names Thomas Ptacek, The Hiring Post Gergely Orosz, The Product-Minded Engineer ...

How LLMs Work, Explained Without Math - miguelgrinberg.com In this article, I’m going to attempt to explain in simple terms and without using advanced math how generative text models work, to help you think about them as computer algorithms and not as magic.

GitHub - azet/community_bash_style_guide: Community Bash Style Guide: writing useful and modern bash scripts, seriously. When to use bash and when to avoid bash it’s rather simple: does it need to glue userland utilities together? use bash. does it need to do complex tasks (e.g. database queries)? use something else. Why? … It consumes a lot of time and is often very difficult to debug in comparison to dynamic programming languages such as python, ruby or even perl. You are simply going to waste valuable time, performance and nerve you could have spent better otherwise. ...

Rule of Silence definition by The Linux Information Project The rule of silence, also referred to as the silence is golden rule, is an important part of the Unix philosophy that states that when a program has nothing surprising, interesting or useful to say, it should say nothing. It means that well-behaved programs should treat their users’ attention and concentration as being valuable and thus perform their tasks as unobtrusively as possible. That is, silence in itself is a virtue. ...