Published
Weekend Reading — End of Code forWeb
Holiday and travel got in the way of publishing Weekend Reading, but I'm back and catching up on three weeks worth of fantastic links.
Design Objective
The dangers of delightful design Everything, in context and in moderation:
One thing I’ve learned is that it’s usually safer to be delightful on the screens that a user won’t see too often.
...
This is why you’ll often see delightful imagery in onboarding flows.
Your Best Work Will Be Invisible
As a designer, your best work is going to always be invisible. It’ll be invisible because the best part of what you do will be everything that takes place behind the scenes, where nobody will ever see it.
"A canceled meeting cannot be declined." I gotta say, Outlook, that's pretty zen.
Tools of the Trade
nathancahill/Anycomplete The magic of Google Autocomplete while you're typing. Anywhere.
CSS Reference A visual guide (try before you code?) to the most popular CSS properties.
When to use which CSS methodology Find the CSS methodology that's right for you, your project, or your team.
kubek2k/lambdoku Heroku-like command line for AWS Lambda functions.
htop explained. Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux.
davehull/Kansa A Powershell incident response framework.
Attacking discrimination with smarter machine learning Turns out you can build machine learning algorithms that don't amplify bias and give in to discrimination.
Probabilistic Data Structure Showdown: Cuckoo Filters vs. Bloom Filters "For similar space constraints, the Cuckoo filter provides lower false positives, particularly at lower capacities."
turbo.js Perform massive parallel computations in your browser with GPGPU.
Ben Bridts The unintended consequences of machine intelligence:
Just did a test with @awscloud Rekognition, and it was capable of correctly classifying objects in google's reCaptcha
Lingua Scripta
ES6 is great, but use it cautiously Destructuring is one of those ES6 features that are easy to get carried away with:
"Let's use fancy ES6 destructuring"
"Seems hard to read"
"Fear not! I'll leave an explanatory comment"
The Missing Immutable.js Manual with all the Examples you’ll ever need What it says on the label.
Lines of Code
FunctionLength Martin Fowler answers the age old question, "how long should a function be?"
The argument that makes most sense to me, however, is the separation between intention and implementation. If you have to spend effort into looking at a fragment of code to figure out what it's doing, then you should extract it into a function and name the function after that “what”.
Slow Down to Go Faster Not convinced? Watch this unrelated video:
Programming definitely has an addictive component. Those tiny wins that keep you solving a problem for hours and hours.
Please Don't Learn To Code From Stock Photos
"All websites should end with: <!-- End of Code forWeb -->"
Architectural
AWS Snowmobile Amazon taking Tanenbaum to the logical extreme:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
— Andrew S. Tanenbaum, 1989
You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck.
— AWS re:Invent, 2016
Devoops
Etsy’s Debriefing Facilitation Guide for Blameless Postmortems
By placing the focus explicitly on learning first, a well-run debriefing has the potential to educate the organization on not just what didn’t work well on the day of the event in question, but a whole lot more.
Peopleware
No one expects the lady code troll Jenn Schiffer on why and how she satirizes the tech industry. Hilarious. And insightful.
The Fraud Who Isn't Impostor syndrome explained.
Techtopia
Silicon Valley Has An Empathy Vacuum
Silicon Valley’s biggest failing is not poor marketing of its products, or follow-through on promises, but, rather, the distinct lack of empathy for those whose lives are disturbed by its technological wizardry.
Amazon thinks my recent humidifier purchase was merely the inaugural move in a newfound hobby of humidifier collecting.
There are an awful lot of stock photos for virtual reality that just consist of people wearing headphones incorrectly.
Locked Doors
How To Fight Calendar Spam If you’re getting calendar spam, do not decline. That just confirms your account exists. Read this article on how to deal with calendar spam.
drduh/macOS-Security-and-Privacy-Guide A practical guide to securing macOS.
San Francisco Rail System Hacker Hacked Because everyone loves a double hack story. Also have backups ready for all your production systems.
The S in the IoT stands for Security.
None of the Above
Smartphone Magnifier Turn your smartphone videos into blown-up retro masterpieces.
We went in search of the world’s hardest language "English is pretty simple. Learning to speak Ubykh or !Xóõ presents more of a challenge"
Books I’ve read Looking for something to read? Check out Derek Sivers' list of books he read.
Disrupt Cards Cards against humanity but for startups.
How to Write Email with Military Precision Please, everybody who emails me:
- Subjects with keywords
- Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF)
- Be economical
This W3C spec reads like a text on gnostic mysticism
Do NOT drive drunk. I will find you. I will arrest you. I will make you listen to One Direction cover bands on the way to jail.
Rescue Goat With Anxiety Only Calms Down In Her Duck Costume
