Clippings

“A diagram of the relationships between Unix systems” by Eraserhead1, Infinity0, Sav_vas (Wikipedia)

I’ve come to consider that it doesn’t matter too much what activity you choose to get a discussion going. What matters most is regular reflection, hearing all the voices in a team, and making progress together. — Jono Hey in Rose, Thorn, Bud - Sketchplanations

Building Bluesky: a Distributed Social Network (Real-World Engineering Challenges) Rapid growth. The product went from zero to 5 million users in around 12 months after announcing an invite-only beta. Small team. Bluesky was built with a small team of 3 engineers during the first year, and with 12 software engineers at the time of publication.

The differences in British and American spelling - Oxford International English Schools The main difference is that British English keeps the spelling of words it has absorbed from other languages, mainly French and German. Whilst American English spellings are based mostly on how the word sounds when it is spoken. Follow the link for more details on typical differences in nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc.

Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man. — Aristotle

It’s time to be outcome driven - Felipe Castro - OKR Trainer, Speaker, Author As Benedict Evans points out, humans have a clear tendency when they get new tools: There’s an old saying that when we get a new tool, we begin by making it fit the old way of working, and then we change the way we work to fit the new tool. ...

Simple suggestions for technology investment. | by swardley | Apr, 2024 | Medium Wardley’s unproven method of thinking about investment. Step 1: Ignore the consultants, business gurus and analyst reports. Step 2: Gather some actual practitioners. Step 3: Ask them what matters. Step 4: Categorise the list. Step 5: Map the perspectives [Parallel] Step 6: Identify areas of investment. [Parallel] Step 7: Aggregation and comparison. TL;DR Be clear on your purpose. Understand the landscape. Realise that the landscape changes. Analysts are a good signal for the market but that may not be where you should invest. Diversity matters.

Show Me the Money: Making a Business Case for Accessibility in Small and Large Publishing Organisations | BookMachine DON’T: Say it’ll increase sales DO: Talk about compliance DON’T: Pretend to be a lawyer DO: Speak to a lawyer DON’T: Promise AI will fix everything DO: Explore vendor options DON’T: Narrow the conversation solely to print disability DO: Talk about readiness and future-proofing DO: Talk to experts

GitHub - ivbeg/awesome-status-pages: Awesome list of status pages Awesome list of status pages opensource software, online services, and public status pages of major internet companies.

Rivers and buckets - Sketchplanations It’s impossible to keep up with everything. Consider thinking of areas of your life like rivers, not buckets. Oliver explains rivers not buckets in “Treat your to-read pile like a river”. (from the Oliver Burkeman article above) The problem, as the critic Nicholas Carr explained, isn’t filter failure. It’s filter success. In a world of effectively infinite information, the better you get at sifting the wheat from the chaff, the more you end up crushed beneath a never-ending avalanche of wheat. ...

Hypermedia Systems We hope to have convinced you that hypermedia, rather than being a “legacy” technology or a technology only appropriate for “documents” of links, text and pictures, is, in fact, a powerful technology for building applications. In this book you have seen how to build sophisticated user interfaces — for both the web, with htmx, and for mobile applications, using Hyperview — using hypermedia as a core underlying application technology. ...

Engineering strategy every org should write. | Irrational Exuberance An unordered list of strategies I would recommend every engineering organization document as they grow are: How do we review, merge, deploy, and release code? What are our approved technologies for new projects? When and how do we deprecate user-facing functionality? When and how do we deprecate internal tools? How do we document our software and process? Because this is a surprisingly controversial topic, explicitly which tools do we and don’t we use for documentation? How do we evaluate, select and adopt new technologies? How do we migrate away from our existing technologies? How do we respond to incidents? How do we identify and prioritize incident remediations? How do folks switch teams? How do you staff work on ‘unowned” areas and tools? How do folks move from individual contributor track to management track? How do they move back? How do you think about evaluating internal versus external candidates for scarce roles? How do you empower senior engineers to contribute to the engineering organization beyond day-to-day technical contributions?

The JOT Method Here’s how it works: Take a pen or pencil and turn to a blank page of a notebook. Write today’s date in the upper left-hand corner. Think of one simple task that you’ve been putting off. Write it down underneath the date. Do that task and only that task. Don’t write out a to-do list. It’s easy to let yourself get distracted by all of the other undone tasks you aren’t doing. Just do the one thing you wrote down. Once it’s done, draw a thin line through the task so that you can still read it, but you know it’s complete. Repeat steps 3-5. The goal of J.O.T. isn’t to get more stuff done. Or even to get more of the “right” stuff done. Instead, the aim is to break the procrastination-paralysis loop right now by proving to yourself that you are, in fact, capable of following through and taking action. ...

Putting up the big numbers | Seth’s Blog You can write a post to express yourself, or you can try to get more followers…

What should a manager goal be? Become redundant. What should a manager do all day? Jack Shit What is a great way to test the quality of a manager? Send them on a multi-week vacation and see what happens. Does everything keep running, or does things grind to a halt? Does the team still deliver, or things are completely blocked? Is there any visibility during this time of what this team is doing, or does it seem the team fell off the face of the earth? For extra browny points, does the team keep self-improving during this time, or does progress stall? ...

The State of Engineering Productivity in 2024 📊 1) Hybrid is hard Teams who work in hybrid mode have the hardest time. It is tough to create an environment where the playing field is level for everybody: there is less incentive to build a truly remote-friendly environment than in full-remote teams, while at the same time you don’t get the full benefits of co-location. Committing decisively to one of the two extremes might bring better results in terms of productivity — but of course it can be more challenging in other departments. ...

About the recording of We Are The World: The rock star conundrum | Seth’s Blog The documentary of the event is just okay, but it’s fascinating in how it shows us just how deep imposter syndrome lies. Imposter syndrome shows up because we are imposters, imposters acting ‘as if’ in search of making something better. Perhaps the best plan is to show up and not walk out.

How to Determine If the Balls You’re Juggling Are Rubber or Glass | Eblin Group Rubber balls bounce. Glass balls shatter. You can drop the rubber balls and usually recover easily enough. Drop a glass ball and you’re likely done with that one. The visual metaphor of juggling rubber balls and glass balls is easy to grasp. It still raises the issue, though, of how do you tell the difference between the two? ...

Os macacos pensam que o nosso nariz é a casa deles. — Miguel (5 anos)

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor Can you explain a hard idea uso g only the ten hundred most used words? It’s not very easy. Type in the box to try it out.