Labnotes - Weekend Reading — 👻 A ghostly reminder

🪑 Design Objective

Thinkwert “When the people writing the user manual have never used the product.”

Scott Berkun “A fun reminder that it's not required to take work so seriously. Thank you @BlazingBagels.”

🧰 Tools of the Trade

Patrick Collison 🤯

Everyone has noticed ⌘-⇧-A in Chrome, right? (Maybe I'm very late to the party here.)

XState Everything you need to manage a state machine in your web app: details docs, feature packed library, React/Vue/etc components, and a state chart visualization tool!

Web development best practices in 2021 What web developers are building, what they’re using to build it, frameworks that are trending up, languages that are trending down, etc. Lots of interesting stuff here, especially if you’re building tools for developers, or hiring developers, or finally getting rid of Angular … Anyway this is my favorite slide:

20 Awesome Figma Plugins to improve your Workflow

Reverse Meme Search OK this is pretty cool. This app will wipe away the text from any meme image so you can reuse it.

Bash functions are better than I thought TIL that bash functions with parenthesis use a sub-shell so you get scope and proper error handling.

orval Feed this fish a Swagger/OpenAPI YAML, and net a TypeScript interface + API + MSW mocks. If this word salad makes no sense, don’t worry about it.

Microsoft’s Edge browser is now available on Linux Microsoft is betting on someday being the year of Linux on the desktop. Or at least hedging against MacOS and Chrome OS. As the saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is an operating system I support.

Aprops, Warner Losh: “Today is the 50th Anniversary of the 1st Edition of Unix.... It was targeted at the PDP-11/20 with 8kW of memory (16,384 bytes)....”

David Alicea

We Hack Purple “I feel attacked.”

📓 Lines of Code

Product Discovery from an Engineer’s Point of View How to move fast and test things:

Have engineers limited to a few weeks on discovery. It’s easy to feel motivated for a quick and dirty sprint. But spending months working without tests, deploying code that you know is a long way from your best, and feeling like you can’t stop and improve things starts to feel like you’re having a negative impact on your codebase.

DrTune Story time:

1/n Twitter-friend posted description of a real brain-twister of a bug, which reminds me of my personal favorite-ever-hardest-bug-to-find, so.. here is that tale... cast your mind back to 1988 - so long ago I suspect most of you were just a glint in your dad's eye.. :wink:..

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Teamwork

Lorin Hochstein: “I swear, I got more coordination work done in two in-person-in-front-of-the-whiteboard meetings spanning an hour and a half than in a month's worth of Google Docs and slack threads.”

Ben Kehoe: “My feelings on this: the things that can be async should be very async. The things that are better not-async should be very not-async. Neither is served by trying to make it the other, nor is a middle ground helpful.”

Jobs that Marry Together the Most Is it easier to communicate with a spouse in the same profession as you? Coordinate work schedule? Or is that a sign of narcissism when you prefer people from the same profession?

Afterall …

📈 Business Side

Patrick McGee 👇 Apple’s play on privacy also just happens to shift billions of dollars from the competition to Apple’s pockets:

New: @Apple’s privacy settings caused an estimated $9.85bn of revenues to evaporate in the second half of this year at @Snap, @Facebook, @Twitter and @YouTube, as their advertising businesses were shaken by the new rules

Average impact on revenue: -12%

Alex Rampell 👇 This is an interesting thread about financial services the risk of adverse selection, and why your first customers may be your worse customers:

1/ Many areas of financial services have “stochastic margins” per widget, but hopefully (obviously!) positive margins for the whole batch of widgets sold - unlike most manufacturers, with fixed/declining COGS at scale. This means many things when you build a “financial” business

US-based, women-founded startups raised more $40 billion so far in 2021 “One indicator might be who’s writing the checks: As of September, roughly 15.4% of general partners at VC firms were women, up from 12% in 2019.””

Corry Wang

1/ There's a well known anecdote from The Everything Store about Jeff Bezos visiting Harvard Business School in 1997. The students told Bezos "you really need to sell to Barnes and Noble and get out now"

Less well known: you can read the actual 1997 HBS case study from the class

🔒 Locked Doors

The Booming Underground Market for Bots That Steal Your 2FA Codes Reason number #46589 to not answer the phone …

But this call was actually from a hacker. The fraudster used a type of bot that drastically streamlines the process for hackers to trick victims into giving up their multi-factor authentication codes or one-time passwords (OTPs) for all sorts of services, letting them log in or authorize cash transfers. Various bots target Apple Pay, PayPal, Amazon, Coinbase, and a wide range of specific banks.

⭐ None of the Above

Hong Kong bus ride helps people sleep 😴💤

In Otter News.... “A zookeeper gave this baby otter a sock to keep warm. She later turned it into a onesie with holes for the hands, feet, and tail!”

Firr 🤣

I'm currently unemployed.
A recruiter lined me up an interview.

...With the employer that just fired me.

I wish I was making that up

Ford Motor Company Something old, something new …

Say hello to the F-100 Eluminator electric concept truck. #SEMA2021​

🔘 480 hp​
🔘 634 lb-ft​
🔘 All-wheel drive​
🔘 And alllll electric”

Tim Medin “At no point did I know what the next word was going to be. For any of it.” (All 9 updates)