Published
Weekend Reading — Tornado full of sharks
You Had One Job "Don't be afraid."
FYI I'm traveling and AFK, so no Weekend Reading next week. I'll do my best to catch up when I come back. And also, if you know anyone who would enjoy Weekend Reading, send them here to sign up.
Design Objective
Cognitive Overhead is Your Product’s Overlord — Topple it With These Tips The dimension that matters most is cognitive simplicity — how easy your product is to understand:
Users shouldn’t sit on the sidelines, nor do heavy-lifting in apps. Go in between. Make them roll up their sleeves.
Great Alternatives to Hamburger Menus Putting navigation top and center.
Inclusive Design at Microsoft Once again, a helpful chart showing the benefits of accessible design:
Maintaining Accessibility in a Responsive World Dealing with adaptable CSS layouts and assistive technology.
A Dao of Product Design Let's talk about the social and societal impact of our products being used by millions of people every day.
Tools of the Trade
Writing Less Damned Code "Unprogressive Non-Enhancement" 40 minute talk, entertaining and insightful, that will teach you how to accomplish more by doing less front-end development.
FloydHub Is PaaS for training and deploying deep learning applications. With version control, Jupyter notebooks, CLI and web dashboard, and a lot of other goodness.
littlstar/s3-lambda JavaScript library for functional processing (map, reduce, filter, et al) of S3 objects.
ImageOptim API makes pages load faster ImageOptim now available as a service.
“I didn’t know Sketch could do that!” I didn't either. Lots of cool tricks, like drag & drop to replace image, drop to Slack, snap to text path, card grids, and more.
Holy Sh!t~ Designing with Craft by InVision LABS in Sketch When you need your sketches filled with sample data.
Team Libraries in Figma Sketch has the ecosystem, but Figma may get ahead on features.
How to Spot Openwashing What does it mean to be open? And how can you tell if a product is really “open”?
Ergonomica A Python-based alternative to Bash, with all the goodness of a proper language:
$ ls -> (filter) x[0] == "P"
Pictures
Public
Jake Archibald Why am I crying?
To change the mouse pointer with CSS, use "cursor"
To set it to a pointer, use "default"
To set it to a hand, use "pointer"
Why u crying?
Éimear "Fun fact: the Irish language has had a word for computer for about 1200 years."
Lingua Scripta
Mathias Bynens Fun fact:
As a result, any single-line URL is valid JavaScript. E.g.
https://mths.be/
httpsis the label
//starts a comment
In Safari's Web Inspector you can use simple
awaitexpressions in the Console! Fun way to get a value out of a Promise or use fetch.
Lines of Code
Ship Small Diffs Hang this on your office wall: "Ship small diffs, because the last thing you changed is probably setting those fires."
The First Program I Ever Wrote Debugging in the age of punch cards and green bar paper.
A demon, uninvited That same thing happened to me, 3 decades into my career:
Are you a new developer?
Are things hard?
I've been doing this for ~7 years and just lost 30 minutes of my life to a single rogue space.
youtube channel where you get drunk and try to read code you wrote five years ago
Francisco Alonso "fixing bugs"
Architectural
OH: you need two copies of the Kafka book - for availability. Or three, for quorum.
MicroCapClub Same with software developers:
Many in finance like to sound smart by making things complex. These people usually work for other people. Successful people simplify things.
Peopleware
Better wisdom from crowds You can get more accurate results from crowd sourcing answers, when you factor in the Dunning–Kruger effect:
Philadelphia is not the capital of Pennsylvania; the correct answer is Harrisburg. But most people believe Philadelphia is the capital because it is a “large, historically significant city.” Moreover, the people who mistakenly thought Philadelphia is the state capital largely thought other people would answer the same way. So they predicted that a very high percentage of people would answer “yes.”
Meanwhile, a certain number of respondents knew that Harrisburg is the correct answer. However, a large portion of those people also anticipated that many other people would incorrectly think the capital is Philadelphia. So the people who themselves answered “no” still expected a very high percentage of “yes” answers.
Sarah Mei Read the entire thread:
Most people see management as an authority role, but it's not. It's a service role.
Vala Afshar How to be a better mentor in four easy steps:
A good mentor will:
- push you
- guide you with questions
- expect continuous improvement
- teach you how to think, not what to think
Locked Doors
Ed Sheeran Explains How Taylor Swift Stops Her Songs from Leaking
Better opsec than your IT department:
“I was in San Francisco and they sent someone with a locked briefcase with an iPad and one song on it and they flew to San Francisco, and played the song I’ve done with her,” he said. “And they asked if I like it and I was like ‘Yeah’ and then they took it back. That’s how I hear it.”
University attacked by its own vending machines, smart light bulbs & 5,000 IoT devices And it gets even weirder:
The “incident commander” noticed “the name servers, responsible for Domain Name Service (DNS) lookups, were producing high-volume alerts and showed an abnormal number of sub-domains related to seafood.
FCoTR User Group "OH MY GOD, PAY IT NOW"
Techtopia
CNN "'Plan Bee' is a personal robotic bee designed to mimic how bees pollinate flowers and crop." Someone did not watch Black Mirror S03E06.
Rob Lach. "Hey @Google, exactly what kind of AI am I helping you guys train with this?"
None of the Above
Paul Savage "My new Hobby is photoshopping the eyes from Pixar's Cars onto the rigs from Mad Max: Fury Road"
Sloane Crosley "There is honestly no point in doing anything but this guy's job."
Bayesian Inference Simple interactive visualization to help explain/explore Bayesian inference.
Vala Afshar "Somebody thought it was a good idea to teach robots how to be exceptionally good with swords."
rosa would have won "Increasingly impressed with anyone who manages to write near-future SF under these conditions"
Jacob Schwartz git commit -m "fixed issue with fan"
