Published
Weekend Reading — 🕧 Time travel glitch
This week we hack an iSight, refactor our Stack Overflow, get a pep talk from the CEO, scale Machu Picchu, and visit the aquarium.
How to look cute in a mask
🪑 Design Objective
A reminder: you can't build a culture of experimentation if you respond to failed experiments with disappointment, regret or even indifference. A culture of experimentation celebrates every null result, every glorious first try.
News flash everything on social media is an editorial decision by the company. Every single thing, the UI, the posts you see, the posts you don’t, the metrics, the speed with which everything updates, the colors, it’s all human decisions all the way down. It’s all subjective
Simon Walker “With some help from the amazing team at @GSDM I made a custom font for @pizzahut based on their old logo from the 60s. dream project.”
🧰 Tools of the Trade
Wireflow Free online and open source tool for creating user flow diagrams.
exelban/stats macOS system monitor in your menu bar.
nb · CLI note-taking, bookmarking, and archiving If you live in the command line, nb got you covered.
That time I put a Raspberry Pi inside an Apple iSight because nobody stopped me How to look good on webcam, and also have the best looking webcam.
Zoomstock This is a fun way to search for stock photos. You zoom in to see photos that are more closely related. You zoom out and pan to find something quite different. (eg zoom on the highlighted image to see more apartment interior shots)
Fuck cache invalidation, the biggest problem in computer science is guessing whether the help flag is
-h,--help, or-helpthis time.
🕸️ Web-end
Cumulative Layout Shift in the Real World Does it matter? This post looks at user metrics from billions of page load experiences. Looks at bounce rate, session length, and rage clicks.
The Widening Responsibility for Front-End Developers In the last decade or so, the job description for front-end developers balooned into anything and everything:
Being a front-end developer requires a haystack of skills that grows and grows. It’s the natural outcome of the web getting bigger. More people use the web and internet access grows. The economy around the web grows. The capability of browsers grows. The expectations of what is possible on the web grows. There isn’t a lot shrinking going on around here.
Always remember that although a subset of the JavaScript community can be very loud, they represent a paltry portion of the web as a whole. This means that when they say something like “CSS sucks”—what they mean is “CSS sucks for a small subset of less than 1 percent of the web”
How to Create a Realistic Motion Blur with CSS Transitions Such a cool trick. Animating 20 identical elements, each at 10% opacity, to create a realistic looking blur transition.
📓 Lines of Code
Crafting Functions On writing code and moving up the abstraction stack:
I think one heuristic you can use is this: pick the most powerful option you can limited by your confidence. For example, if you have a light understanding of the problem, stay on the lower side of the abstraction spectrum. As you understand more (say, time to introduce XML) you can evolve to the powerful side of the spectrum. When you’re very confident, and you can see good use-cases for your building blocks, lean to the most powerful side of the spectrum.
Sara Vieira Shh … it’s supposed to be a secret!
It's not that senior developers don't copy stuff from stack overflow
It's just that we refactor it so that no one will ever know
🧑🤝🧑 Teamwork
Most junior job requirements could be three lines
Evidence of:
- solving a hard and relevant problem independently
- being enthusiastic
Startup Hiring 101: A Founder's Guide Pretty good and exhaustive resource on hiring.
📈 Business Side
Transitions Running a company is stressful and we don’t talk enough about the emotional toll, how to identify it, communicate it to others, and dealing with burn out:
The job itself was nowhere near as difficult as it had been in the past, but depression and burnout can make even small challenges feel like a big deal. Problems seemed to stack one on top of the other. Moments of happiness were fleeting.
Emily “Pep talk from the tech CEO bro. I feel bad for him 😔”
🔒 Locked Doors
Becky Yoose “The new glitter” 😆
Hot take - Data is not the new oil. Data is the new glitter:
- Lures humans in with its shininess
- Very easy to accumulate
- Found in places you least likely expect to find it
- Almost impossible to get rid of
- Everyone insists on using it w/o thinking through the consequences
A Popular Online Learning Platform Was Actually Created by an Underground Religious ‘Cult’ Just wonderful:
Alarmed parents have spent months accumulating Acellus content. Screenshots and videos of Acellus lessons compiled this year show a slide asking what “a family” is: a Black woman with her child or two white parents and their child. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, another slide attempts to justify the economics of American slavery.
⭐ None of the Above
To make terrible wordsearches (h/t Massimo)
When people call my phone, I answer with "Why?" instead of "Hello."
Stew Fortier 👇 This is a fantastic thread. What’s you’re “signature move”?
Had a call yesterday with the guy who discovered and advised Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and just about every other famous comedian.
He utterly blew my mind with how he guided them early on in their careers to find their “signature move.”
Here’s everything he shared 👇
Alyssa Miller (Speaking at All Things Open) “Most plausible explanation I've seen yet:”
Machu Picchu reopens for a single tourist who’s been stranded in Peru for seven months Your feel-good story of the week:
After an unexpected Covid-19 induced seven month stay in Peru, Jesse Katayama is finally crossing “visit Machu Picchu” off of his bucket list.
RTFM! From a thread about questionable practices in your industry:
You know the people who write instruction manuals or user guides in things you buy? Half the time, they've never even seen or touched the product. Some dude just sends us pictures, a rough description of how it's supposed to work, and that's it.
Q Timex is back! Not exactly a smartwatch, won’t count your steps, no Twitter notifications, but holds a special place in our hearts.
S.F. rent prices plunge as much as 31% - steepest decline in U.S., new report says A dramatic drop in rent prices in San Francisco, going from “unaffordable to most people” down to ”still unaffordable to most people”:
Median rent prices for studio apartments in San Francisco declined 31% year-over-year to $2,285 in September, according to Realtor.com. The median price fell 24.2% to $2,873 for one-bedroom apartments, and dropped 21.3% to $3,931 for two-bedroom units.
Elissa Washuta “Took ages to locate the word “sauce” in my mind today”
Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet Ever wondered why pretty every medication you take asks you to stop drinking Grapefruit? What's so special about this off-brand Orange?
This interaction, by the way, seems to affect all of the bitter citruses—the ones that inherited the telltale tang from the pomelo. Sour orange. Lime, too. But it’s unlikely that anyone would drink enough sour orange or lime juice to have this effect, given how sour it is. Grapefruit, on the other hand, is far more palatable in large doses.
Tressie Lieberman “The power of TikTok 💯”
Why it’s so hard to read a book right now, explained by a neuroscientist Chronic anxiety:
The pandemic that we’re in is the most uncertain thing possible. You don’t know when it’s going to end, whether you’re going to get it. You don’t even know what it is, really. And all of a sudden, everything in your environment is dangerous. Door handles are dangerous. Other people are dangerous. It’s the most uncertain thing.
…
So why are people having difficulty concentrating? That’s part of the explanation: They’re trying to resolve an uncertainty that is unresolvable.
Thoughts and Observations on Apple’s ‘Hi, Speed’ iPhone 12 Event Pretty much all I need to know about the new iPhone lineup. I would definitely get the 12 Mini because it’s pocketable … but that’s not as relevant when I barely leave the house.
Amanda “Jeff Goldblum as fish. A thread.”
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