Published
Weekend Reading — 79 degrees
Design Objective
Jobs to be Done: from Doubter to Believer Fantastic presentation by Sian Townsend about JTBD, and how Intercom uses them to build a better product. Goes along with the book.
According to the Apple world clock app, the time is 4:56AM and it's 79 degrees Fahrenheit at UTC.
Tools of the Trade
GitHub Dark Switch off the lights on GitHub for a pleasant reading experience.
hueniverse/metaphor If you want to add Slack-like smart embeds to your app: Open Graph, Twitter Card, and oEmbed metadata collector.
A Facebook Sixth Sense This post discusses the process of reverse engineering private FB APIs: I didn’t realize how powerful the available tools are for debugging React apps.
Reverse Engineering for Beginners Topics touched: Oracle RDBMS, Itanium, copy-protection dongles, LD_PRELOAD, stack overflow, ELF, win32 PE file format, x86-64, critical sections, syscalls, TLS, position-independent code (PIC), profile-guided optimization, C++ STL, OpenMP, win32 SEH.
Laura Eck "The cat stack is an important data structure every purrgrammer should know and understand."
Lingua Scripta
Async and Await Overview, lessons learned & future directions.
Lines of Code
If you can’t tell what a code does by glancing at the naming conventions & several code lines, then the code is too complicated
Simple!
Bug in large-flows.py decoder · Issue #51
Thanks! Fixed in 80ad7a3. The developer responsible for this bug has been promoted to middle management and should no longer be a problem.
Bob Ross, Game Dev on Twitter:
Sometimes you have to break the code first in order to make it better.
Kumail Hunaid: "Chuck Norris gave programming a shot"
Architectural
Growing Your Tech Stack: When to Say No Should you add this new technology to your stack? To answer this question, take a look at the risk profile of that technology: e.g dev tools carry a low risk profile, databases are high risk profile.
Tech and Culture Musings: Coffee and its Effects on Feature Creep “And that’s how I set out to simplify ordering Starbucks and created an internal banking system.”
Devoops
it takes a village to deploy a changeset
Subscribe to our daily newsletter: “Which Services Don’t Rotate Their Logs”
Peopleware
Ask vs guess culture in the office
Naturally, thinking about how you and your family or friends fit into the Ask vs. Guess dichotomy works wonders for learning how to deal with others, but what about when you’re at work?
Welcome to the Executive Team. It’s Messy Here
It can give me goosebumps when I see the individual who disagreed the strongest leave the room and execute on the decision with crazy enthusiasm. Be that person. Disagree and commit. Commit hard.
James: "Attitudes in two different industries"
Techtopia
Mary Meeker's 2016 Internet Trends Report At 213 slides quite a handful, but choke full of interesting data points.
My favorite, though: tune in to slide 107, to learn that phone calls are on the decline, people would rather text (chat/social media/etc) than talk to a business.
Then on to slide 128: voice interface is the next big thing, and what is your business doing about it?!?
Tech people on vacation: “I’m out of the office on vacation this week. My emails may be delayed by as much as 15 to 20 minutes.”
Locked Doors
What’s driving Silicon Valley to become ‘radicalized' Apparently, protecting people’s privacy is now deemed “radicalized”.
Bait and Switch: The Failure of Facebook Advertising
The main point here however has been proven: fraudsters can create ads that appear to point to legitimate sites, and then drive tens of thousands of clicks through to their landing pages.
breaking into a wordpress site without knowing wordpress/php or infosec at all This is how easy it is to break into WordPress. But if you look closely at the underlying vulnerability (path traversal), you can find code like that in many other applications/languages/frameworks.
The impossible task of creating a “Best VPNs” list today Know what kind of security/private VPN may but probably doesn’t provide.
None of the Above
asia ✨: "so tell me a little bit about yourself"
What do normal and abnormal heart rhythms look like on Apple Watch? On the difference between ECG and PPG, 5 second samples, and what a watch can tell about you about your heart. Also, looking for participants to study whether watches can predict stroke.
Dear Google Trends users. You can’t infer usage of things from search volume. Please stop. Sincerely, common sense.
Campaign Seeks to End Stigma Around Disabilities Through Provocative Signs That’s pretty brilliant: ads that expect you to agree with a stigma, thereby recognizing your cognitive bias.
The Trailers for Ghostbusters (2016) and the Art of Editing Comedy This is why I like British comedies more than American comedies.
Jason Long: "I mocked up an Instagram feature request."
