Ryan Singer, head of Product Strategy at Basecamp, joined the show to talk about their newest book — Shape Up: Stop running in circles and ship work that matters. It’s written by Ryan himself and you can read it right now for free online at Basecamp.com/shapeup. We talked about the back story of the book, how the methodology for Shape Up developed from within at Basecamp, the principles and methodologies of Shape Up, how teams of varying sizes can implement Shape Up. Ryan even shared a special invitation to our listeners near the end of the show to his live and in-person Shape Up workshop on August 28th in Detroit, Michigan.

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Mireille and Adam explore the importance of relationships and the concept of attachment. We often think of ourselves as individuals, but our lives are spent embedded within the context of social relationships. These relationships influence and shape our brains, which deeply influences who we are.

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Focus was the topic of this and this episode of Founders Talk, but from a different angle than presented in this post from Bar Franek on freeCodeCamp. It doesn’t matter if you’re working on a side hustle or if you’re a junior developer wanting to get noticed and promoted. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lead developer looking for a change of pace, from a corporate gig to a start-up or the other way around. It doesn’t matter if you’re jobless out of college. As long as you’re a programmer, no skill is more important to your success than focused, deep work.

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To button or not to button…the button element is “actually really cool”… Something that comes up again and again in front-end accessibility is the issue of links versus buttons. You know, the HTML elements that open links in new windows or submit forms? In JavaScript web applications, it seems we’re still confused about which element to choose for user interaction. To try and clarify the haziness, I’ll define use cases for links and buttons in client-rendered applications and help you make better UI decisions, from design to development.

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Hot off the heels of GopherCon 2019 — Johnny Boursiquot, Jon Calhoun, and special guests Jamal Yusuf, and Yingrong Zhao recap the conference and the importance of representation in the Go community.

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Harry Roberts writing on CSS Wizardry: One metric I feel that front-end developers overlook all too quickly is Time to First Byte (TTFB). This is understandable—forgivable, almost—when you consider that TTFB begins to move into back-end territory, but if I was to sum up the problem as succinctly as possible, I’d say: While a good TTFB doesn’t necessarily mean you will have a fast website, a bad TTFB almost certainly guarantees a slow one. Even though, as a front-end developer, you might not be in the position to make improvements to TTFB yourself, it’s important to know that any problems with a high TTFB will leave you on the back foot, and any efforts you make to optimises images, clear the critical path, and asynchronously load your webfonts will all be made in the spirit of playing catchup.

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Most people are modest about their contributions in the workplace. We also forget how important our contributions are. Then, when it comes time for recognition, you’ve forgotten, others didn’t notice because they don’t understand all the details and moving parts, and work just moves on. What do you do if/when your work goes unnoticed? Here’s what Julia Evans suggests… Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season! This is a pretty common tactic – when I started doing this I mentioned it to more experienced people and they were like “oh yeah, I’ve been doing that for a long time, it really helps”. Where I work we call this a “brag document” but I’ve heard other names for the same concept like “hype document” or “list of stuff I did” :). BONUS — Julia included a basic template for a brag document at the end of the post.

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Erik Kennedy is back to give developers (and other folks who aren’t steeped in UX) some actionable advice on how to make interfaces more usable. This is my advice on improving the UX of your designs WITHOUT hours of user research sessions, paper prototyping playtime, or any other trendy UX buzzwords. When I started as a professional UX designer, I was shocked how many times my clients would hand me the initial wireframes (or the living, breathing, in-browser MVP) and there’d be completely obvious UX mistakes all over them. I’m not talking about things you need hours of research and A/B testing to discover. I’m talking, like, dead simple mistakes.

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If you’ve ever wondered why exactly Kubernetes is a thing OR wondered what the root problem is that Kubernetes solves, then this post from Jef Spaleta is for you. For organizations that operate at a massive scale, a single Linux container instance isn’t enough to satisfy all of their applications’ needs. It’s not uncommon for sufficiently complex applications, such as ones that communicate through microservices, to require multiple Linux containers that communicate with each other. That architecture introduces a new scaling problem: how do you manage all those individual containers? …Enter Kubernetes, a container orchestration system — a way to manage the lifecycle of containerized applications across an entire fleet.

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It’s completely modular, and built directly for async/await. Whether it’s a quick script, or a cross-platform SDK, Surf will make it work.

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If you’ve been intrigued by Tailwind and utility-first CSS ever since listening to JS Party #65 with Adam Wathan, but you’ve never gotten around to playing with it… here’s your opportunity. Pop a browser tab, futz with the settings, and see the results in real-time on the right side of the window.

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Adam adds a twist to our YepNope format this week. Instead of 2v2, it’s 1v1v1 with Mikeal reppin’ team Yep, Divya on team Nope, and Feross sitting in the middle on team It Depends. You don’t want to miss this excellent debate/discussion all about JS tooling complexity. Many packages New frameworks built all the time Config hell. Webpack

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I linked to this repo awhile back, but it’s worth another mention as more & more people are wanting to learn Go. It also contains a nice write-up on why unit testing and TDD is important.

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Version Museum showcases the visual history of popular websites, operating systems, applications, and games that have shaped our lives. I freakin’ love this site. They have quite a collection here, everything from Amazon.com and Google Maps to Mac OS and Super Mario Kart. Version 1.5 of Microsoft Excel was dope! (full Excel history here)

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Today, our network spans 193 cities in over 90 countries and interconnects with over 8,000 networks globally, including major ISPs, public cloud providers, SaaS services, and enterprises. We estimate that we operate within 100 milliseconds of 98% of the Internet-connected population in the developed world, and 93% of the Internet-connected population globally (for context, the blink of an eye is 300-400 milliseconds). We intend to continue expanding our network to better serve our customers globally and enable new types of applications, while relentlessly driving down our unit costs. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits in this filing. I love this lead-in to the industry analysis section: The Internet was not built for what it has become.

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Too often we forget that the constraints we face every day make our job interesting and rewarding. This article provides techniques for working with these constraints.

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CutiePi is a good name for this device. It sure is cute! We believe in open source, and we believe people should have control over the technology they use. Everything you see here is open source – schematics, PCB, drivers, firmware, UI, everything. It’s still early (no pricing, for example), but they’re shooting for a release before 2019 is out.

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Earlier this year, a team of computer science researchers published a paper with a novel solution to this problem: CROKAGE – the Crowd Knowledge Answer Generator. This service takes the description of a programming task as a query and then provides relevant, comprehensive programming solutions containing both code snippets and their succinct explanations. Click through to read the fascinating backstory and to see how it stacks up (😉) to previous search algorithms. Or, give it a try yourself at http://www.isel.ufu.br:9000/ Disclaimer: As CROKAGE is a research project deployed on a university lab server, it may suffer from some network instability and server overload.

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This article is Chris Coyier doing what Chris Coyier does best: pulling on people’s views from around the community, then sprinkling in his own take as he goes.

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Kudos to Verizon (words I never expected to type) for how they handled the process. I couldn’t think of better hands to receive the once-vibrant social network and shepherd it into the next era: Automattic is still a startup — I’m sure there are deep-pocketed private equity firms that could have outbid us, but the most likely outcome then would have been an “asset” getting chopped up and sold for parts. (This is a caricature and there are PE firms I like, but it’s not a terrible stretch of the imagination.) Instead, Tumblr has a new chance to redefine itself in 2019 and beyond. Its community is joining with WordPress’ 16-year commitment to open source and the open web.

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Marianne Bellotti shares five pieces of advice she’s taken from folks in other walks of life (NSA agents, therapists, etc) and how she’s applied that in the software world. My favorite one is “Thinking is also work”. On this topic, Marianne notes: On a personal level it gave me permission to take time when I needed time. Why should I feel guilty about leaving the office to go on a walk? Thinking is also work. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for us to get away from our computers a few times a day. Many of my best decisions and moments of inspiration have come while on a walk, a bike ride, or yes, while taking a shower! 🚿

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