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Stuart Antony “This is Toby he is now working from home...”
WFH
Everything we’ve implemented at Front to keep a great culture while being remote If you have a “suddenly remote team”, this article is full of ideas on keeping open lines of communication and morale high. Send a Daily Weather Report, host a 24/7 Zoom room, recommended books for parents, Skincare Fridays, etc. Have you tried any of these? What do you think?
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Design Objective
iPad Main Menu Concept Love this! This design concept adds a main menu to the iPad: no more hidden features that are only available by some magical incantation. This menu is part of the dock, so you can access it everywhere (slide from the bottom), and even makes sense of multitasking.
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Dawid Woldu “Are we all just supposed to ignore that? 🤓 @SlackHQ” 😱
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Tools of the Trade
Microsoft Edge is becoming the browser you didn’t know you needed Edge has some interesting features: collections with notes, vertical tabs, smart copy (visual block), password manager. And now that it's based on Chromium, it also supports most web sites. But, will it counter-balance the dominance of Chrome, or worse — take out Firefox?
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An introduction to the Web Contact Picker API The Contact Picker API allows a website user to pick specific contact from their address book, without allowing the website to access all their contacts. So you get the convenience (eg to share a link, add user to team) without privacy risk.
How To Say No ”Saying no is hard, but it’s also essential for your sanity. Here are some templates for how to say no - so you can take back your life.” Love this website. It's a collection of templates for saying no in different scenarios, and also available as GMail templates.
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COBOL will outlive the people making fun of it.
Jakub Kozłowski λ “okay Github, I know my builds are shit but no need to be passive aggressive about it”
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Architectural
About CRDTs • Conflict-free Replicated Data Types Community and resources for anyone interesting in CRDT. CRDT is a core technology for building collaboration apps that allow multiple users to edit the same document (eg Figma, Google Docs, Notion).
Today in Business Models
Newsletter-only startups are filling a niche in news consumption These growth numbers are staggering! In my opinion — I tweeted about it here — RSS/Atom feeds are not coming back. Get use to that. Instead, email — and specifically newsletters — is the new distributed social network:
Other newsletter digests have been taking off, too. In 2019 alone, Morning Brew's revenue grew from $3M to $13M, while their subscribers ballooned from the tens of thousands to nearly two million. The growth story behind the millennial-focused newsletter theSkimm is similar: since gaining 100,000 subscribers in their first 12 months, they've added about a million new readers per year.
Thumbtack Customer Projects March 1-31 2020 - Google Drive This is what it takes to fight the virus and the effect it has on various service industries. Carpet cleaning, DJ, painting, personal training, all down significantly. The one exception (green line): lawn mowing and trimming. What changes are you seeing in the service industry?
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Locked Doors
Apple and Google are building a coronavirus tracking system into iOS and Android Yes! The only way contact tracing works is if it's baked into the OS. If you need to install an app, not enough people would do that (I talked about it here.) It has to work across iOS and Android, and it has to be privacy friendly and not used for mass surveillance. If you get a chance to read the full spec for Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing let me know what you think about it.
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Zoom Rushes to Improve Privacy for Consumers Flooding Its Service “The risks, the misuse, we never thought about that.” That's the Zoom privacy policy in a nutshell. I have to admit, it's catchy and memorable, almost poetry. And it's classical Silicon Valley playbook: growth at any cost, wait until there's media backlash, apologize, maybe do something about it.
Meanwhile, NY schools, US Senate, and Singapore have mandated "no Zoom" policies, stock is a bit down on that news, but I doubt this will have a lasting effect. Like Facebook before, it's a PR blip, forgotten in a week.
“We were focusing on business enterprise customers,” Mr. Yuan said. “However, we should have thought about ‘What if some end user started using Zoom’” for nonbusiness events, “maybe for family gatherings, for online weddings.” He added: “The risks, the misuse, we never thought about that.”
Mr. Yuan said Zoom never felt the need until now to rigorously examine the platform’s privacy and security implications for consumers. “If not for this crisis,” he said, “I think we would have never thought about this.”
Related, Every Zoom Security and Privacy Flaw So Far, and What You Can Do to Protect Yourself
Webcam Hacking - Technical Walkthrough Deep dive and very interesting look into the security architecture of iOS and Webkit.
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Available For Hire
Zoe Gagnon Looking for an IC or management role. https://www.zgagnon.com/
Erin Fox React, React Native, GraphQL. Most of my experiences have been product focused. I sometimes give conference talks. Bay Area or Remote. https://medium.com/@erinfoox
None of the Above
SANWlO “Oh to be rilakkuma, floating in coffee without a care in the world”
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to sanitize your fabric masks, boil them for ten minutes. do NOT forget to put aside a little of the mask water to add to the sauce
Eva 🍞
There are no bread baking mistakes, there is only tomorrow's French toast.
My wife and I play this fun game during quarantine, it's called "Why Are You Doing It That Way?" and there are no winners
Hillary Monahan “This is RAD.”
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Radiolab for Kids Radiolab is one of my favorite podcasts, educational and entertaining. They just launched a new podcasts, with only kid-friendly episodes. The first one is about space!
Alec Luhn “The "Isolation" Facebook group where Russians stuck at home impersonate famous paintings is by far the best thing to come out of the #coronavirus lockdown. I'm going to post my top 3 https://www.facebook.com/groups/izoizolyacia/”
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If You and Your Friends Are Bored, PowerPoint Parties May Be the Answer People are going to find ways to socialize remotely, but this is not what I expected would happen:
Andrew: You make a random PowerPoint on something that you enjoy, and you present it to your friends. We all picked a random topic—some topics were really goofy.
Audrey: It was interesting to listen to, because everyone got to share something that they were passionate about. I think a Zoom meeting can last up to 40 minutes and we had to restart it three times.
askreddit.txt “I wish the OP good luck on their noble quest”
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Dreadnought Holiday 👇 This is pure slapstick comedy, but with a navy vessel and cruise ship:
It often seems that the golden age of naval idiocy has disappeared forever.
I'm therefore pleased to note that the Venezuelan patrol vessel Naiguatá has managed to recapture some of this spirit by fighting the dumbest action of the 21st century.”
Here's What People Across the Country Are Ordering on Uber Eats During Quarantine That explains … I went grocery shopping and I couldn't find any garlic. None. The store didn't run out of garlic, they had none to begin with. There was no display case where the garlic used to be. And then, back home I'm reading this piece on what people order most from restaurants, so now we know where all the garlic went:
According to the delivery company, French fries were the most popular dish ordered in March, followed by pad Thai and garlic naan.
