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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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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Kitze shared this somewhat controversial story of Sizzy — from struggling open source project to successful product launch and charging money. It’s important to hear more stories like this because not all of the roads of open source are paved with gold. Honestly, it felt kind of shitty to delete the repository and unpin the project from my profile. I hated the feeling but I had to shrug it off. I had to convince myself that I’m not doing anything wrong. The app was serving a lot of people for 2.5 years, and I rarely got any contributions. It was time to get real and think about what matters. Oh, here we go… I’m gonna mention the M word and lose a ton of readers at this point. Money. Money matters. Kitze also made an appearance on JS Party #72: LIVE from React Amsterdam.
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It negatively impacts planning accuracy, implementation quality, product refinements, and design quality. I will tell you about the many issues created by real-time messaging in workplaces, and how to remedy your work culture.
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It looks like a legit cable from Apple. It works like a legit cable from Apple. BUT…. Joseph Cox writing for Vice Motherboard: I plugged the Apple lightning cable into my iPod and connected it to my Mac, just as I normally would. My iPod started charging, iTunes detected the device, and my iPod produced the pop-up asking if I wanted to trust this computer. All expected behaviour. But this cable was hiding a secret. A short while later, a hacker remotely opened a terminal on my Mac’s screen, letting them run commands on my computer as they saw fit. This is because this wasn’t a regular cable. Instead, it had been modified to include an implant; extra components placed inside the cable letting the hacker remotely connect to the computer.
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What does it take to be successful as a CTO? The stories of founder/CEO transitions is plentiful, but what about the evolution of a company and the need for a CTO who has a vision of how to do things and the team and skills needed to make it happen? A CTO at this point still needs to mainly look inward and know how to code, know the structure of the application and infrastructure, but the focus is shifting towards managing a team, establishing a culture and processes to be able to grow quickly. Growing also means hiring but also making sure that every hire is an effective team member as soon as possible.
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Many people and companies have poorly interpreted Grace Hopper’s famous quote about getting things done inside bureaucracies. I’m here to set the record straight.
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In this inaugural episode, Mireille and Adam explore what it means to be human at the most basic level. Our goal is to explore the inner-workings of the human brain to better understand our humanity. What are we capable of? What are the common experiences of life we all share? We start by asking the question, “what are the fundamentals of being human?”
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Tim Kadlec writes about “The ethics of web performance” and the idea of web performance having ethical ramifications. When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to see one could argue performance doesn’t have ethical ramifications. So clearly, folks who have built a heavy site are bad, unethical people, right? Here’s the thing. I have never in my career met a single person who set out to make a site perform poorly. Not once. People want to do good work. But a lot of folks are in situations where that’s very difficult. The business models that support much of the content on the web don’t favor better performance. Nor does the culture of many organizations who end up prioritizing the next feature over improving things like performance or accessibility or security. I would argue the other angle, “Web performance as compassion” to show how you can show compassion for the users of your software through performance.
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So good…anyone collaborating on code with other humans should 💯read this. Take a moment to remember the last time you collaborated in a code review. Did your team overcome feedback resistance and manage time expectations? Fostering a healthy mindset is the key to build trust and sharing knowledge with your colleagues.
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How common is burnout in tech? According to this survey from Blind, nearly 60% of surveyed tech workers are burnt out. Blind is an anonymous, work email-verified, social networking platform for professionals… …used by 40,000 Microsoft employees, 25,000 from Amazon, 10,000 from Google, 7,000 from Uber, 6,000 from Facebook, and thousands from other tech companies, so there is wide representation in their survey results. This one-question survey had a simple yes/no answer: “Are you currently suffering from job burnout?” And over half of respondents (57.16%, to be exact) answered yes. So, are you currently suffering from job burnout?
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Cory Doctorow, writing for EFF about the history and present of adblocking: The rise and rise of ad-blockers (and ad-blocker-blocker-blockers) is without parallel: 26% of Internet users are now blocking ads, and the figure is rising. It’s been called the biggest boycott in human history. It’s also something we’ve seen before, in the earliest days of the Web, when pop-up ads ruled the world (wide web), and users went to war against them. Fascinating. I’d never heard of adversarial interoperability before.
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As William Gibson says, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” We cannot visit media websites like BBC, Fox News or VOA, social media websites like Twitter or Facebook, messengers like Telegram, WeChat, Kik or SnapChat, or services like YouTube, and —you may not believe— but even some SourceForge subdomains! How do devs in Iran survive? Proxies and VPNs, mostly. This is an eye-opening read if you (like me) have only ever written software from an unencumbered internet connection.
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A generative engineering culture is one where nothing seems to fall through the cracks, “we should” gets prioritized and becomes reality, and original ideas and value come primarily from engineers, rather than management. A culture like this is an engine for building capacity, quality, innovation, and sophistication.
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Daniel Stori nailed this one 🎯
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Fun little site poking fun at the 10x engineer meme. Here’s a sampler of things a 1x engineer does: Writes code that &emdash; gasp &emdash; has bugs. Writes code that others can read. Is a team player that goes to the same meetings their co-workers are required to go to. If you’re wondering whether the &emdash;es are intentional… yes and no. Bonus points for NES.css 👌
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Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, best known as the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer and founders of The Pragmatic Bookshelf, joined the show today to talk about the 20th anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer. This is a beloved book to software developers all over the world, so we wanted to catch up with Andy and Dave to talk about how this book came to be, some of the wisdom shared in its contents, as well as the impact it’s had on the world of software. Also, the beta book is now “fully content complete” and is going to production. If you decide to pick up the ebook, you’ll get a coupon for 50% off the hardcover when it comes out this fall.
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Is it possible to work just 4 days a week, be happier, more productive, and still make the same amount of money? That’s one of many questions Aidan Harper and other researchers at the New Economics Foundation and members of the 4 Day Week campaign are trying to solve in an effort to combat the problem of overwork, which is “leading to a crisis in mental health and well-being.” The single biggest cause of work related stress, anxiety, and depression is overwork. So much so that last year one in four of all sick days was the result of overwork — which is huge proportion of sickness caused directly by overwork. In some ways, you can look at this statistic as a massive drag on the economy. Losing that many work days is very expensive but, more importantly, it’s also a huge societal malaise. Every day people are feeling the effects of overwork and this statistic doesn’t even take into account the number of people who aren’t taking sick days but are feeling generally burnt out and are just barely getting by. To summarize — the 4 day workweek is a pragmatic response to a the problem of overwork that is leading to a crisis in mental health and wellbeing. If you’re just off the heels of the recent honest conversation about burnout on JS Party, then you’ll certainly enjoy this interview with Aidan Harper,
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By now you’ve probably heard about Zoom’s zero day bug that exposed 4+ million webcams to the bidding of nefarious hackers. Security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh shared the full background and details on InfoSec Write-ups: This vulnerability was originally responsibly disclosed on March 26, 2019. This initial report included a proposed description of a ‘quick fix’ Zoom could have implemented by simply changing their server logic. It took Zoom 10 days to confirm the vulnerability. The first actual meeting about how the vulnerability would be patched occurred on June 11th, 2019, only 18 days before the end of the 90-day public disclosure deadline. During this meeting, the details of the vulnerability were confirmed and Zoom’s planned solution was discussed. However… If you use Zoom or if you’ve EVER installed Zoom, read Jonathan’s write-up and take appropriate action to update Zoom or to remove the lingering web server it leaves behind. Confirm if the server is present by running lsof -i :19421 in Terminal.
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Suz, Feross, and Emma have an honest conversation about burnout. They ask questions like — How do developers deal with burnout? What is burnout? What are examples of burnout in open source? Plus they close the show by sharing tips for avoiding burnout and also how to manage burnout if/when it happens.
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Clearly it takes years to truly master Vim, but it takes just 9 minutes, or less depending on the speed you read at, to hear someone else’s journey with Vim. Omer Hamerman shared the “why” and “how” of Vim — plus the recipe and resources he used to learn Vim. How did I do it? After a few brutal fights, having my fallback IDE to run back to crying with the tail between my legs, I made a decision. Here’s how I did it: Got a nice small notebook I could carry around I bought the awesome Practical Vim by Drew Neil both in hardcover and for my iPad to read on the move Every night before going to bed, I read one tip — the book is very intelligently built like that for easy, slow studying…
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Brent Simmons: I’ve been asked a few times about using algorithms in NetNewsWire to bring articles you wouldn’t otherwise have seen — from outside your feeds list — to your attention. I’ve also been asked a similar question about using algorithms to bring articles — from inside your feeds list — to the top based on the likelihood that they’ll interest you. I’m not going to do either. Good for him. This is what Twitter and Facebook are about — but it’s not right for NetNewsWire. The app puts you in control. This is what I love about the spirit of RSS readers. More like this, please!
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E.W. Dijkstra, in an ACM lecture he delivered almost 50 years ago: … the computer, by virtue of its fantastic speed, seems to be the first to provide us with an environment where highly hierarchical artifacts are both possible and necessary. This challenge, viz. the confrontation with the programming task, is so unique that this novel experience can teach us a lot about ourselves. It should deepen our understanding of the processes of design and creation, it should give us better control over the task of organizing our thoughts. If it did not do so, to my taste we should not deserve the computer at all! A fantastic read that was recommended to me by Andy Hunt during a conversation that you’ll be hearing on The Changelog real soon. I took his recommendation and now I’m passing it on.
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