Weekend Reading — 💧 The new weekly drop model

scanofthemonth.com CT scans of the AirPods (all 3 models)

🪑 Design Objective

How to design great keyboard shortcuts Save time for your users by choosing memorable, conflict-free keyboard shortcuts.

The State of UX in 2022 With all due respect to designers, you’re not that special:

In the rush to find a "new normal" while trying to hold on to the old way of working, companies simply shifted in-person work dynamics to Zoom calls, making offices of our homes and requiring us to sit in front of a camera for eight hours a day. And that tore us down.

DeeKay “Curious about how I make animations? Watch this.” — that's some A+ creative talent

🧰 Tools of the Trade

Remix - Build Better Websites I’ve only been using Remix for a week now, and it's already my Go To Framework For Web Apps.

It’s designed around resources. Your folder/file structure reflects the URL structure. Everything about the resource — the UI (React), data (GET), and actions (POST, PUT, etc) — live in the same file. And you use folders to compose layouts (see screenshot), in a way that matches common UIs and URL structure.

Resources can also be JSON APIs, RSS feeds, XML sitemaps, etc. All resources can render on the server, and Remix will fallback to <form> technology when JavaScript is disabled, so it's scrape friendly as well.

The documentation is really good. Performance is amazing. TypeScript supported, of course. Adding TailwindCSS (3.0) took only a few minutes. It uses the Fetch API, instead of the older Node HTTP API.

It’s bleeding edge, though, and I did bleed a few times. And there’s no ecosystem of plugins – yet. Early days but very exciting.

Shottr “A free macOS screenshot app with scrolling screenshots, OCR, annotation, and measurement instruments.” — all the screenshots this week taken with Shottr

DevUtils.app “Stop pasting your data to random websites online.” Native macOS app to validate JSON, minify CSS, format SQL, convert YAML to JSON, decode JWT, encode base64, generate new UUID, find HTML entities, and many more common tasks.

Excalideck | Weapon for Legendary Slides PowerPoint but all your slides look hand-drawn in the familiar Excalidraw style. Next presentation, I think that’s what I’m using.

Improving GitHub code search New code search comes to GitHub. Waiting list for now … 😞

Dana Sibera 👇 This entire thread of products that could have been:

And lastly, my new favourite daily driver, this Apple Extended Keyboard III with Touchbar. Nothing like the classic with the new. Hope you've enjoyed the trip through 2021. I have no plans for 2022.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Teamwork

New data: What developers look for in future job opportunities Software developers are a picky bunch know their worth:

Aside from getting another offer (36%), the primary reason developers pull out of an interview process is because they didn’t like the tech stack (32%).
…
Over 53% want the developer experience to be prioritized at work, with salary transparency (41%) second

and don’t care much for documentation:

And those legacy wiki systems? Only 20% said not having access to one would make a company unappealing.

Dare Obasanjo 👍

The secret to removing anxiety about performance reviews is understanding what matters and what doesn’t.

In most systems, performance reviews are simply about whether your manager can sell your work to their peers as “great”. Everything else is just noise including peer feedback

Andreas Klinger “Name one thing that's more cargo-culted into startups than OKRs 🤔”

The Church of OKRs “We are again being attacked. Everyone knows that only startups who do OKRs can be successful. There wasn't a single successful company until they appeared.”

Pulp Librarian “Working from home vs working in the office.”

🤖 Machine Inelligence

Deep Dreams “Deep Dreams is an AI generated podcast with nonsensical stories to help you fall asleep to a soothing voice. Let your robotic overlords whisper comforting sweet nothings straight into your subconscious. What could go wrong?” — I didn't try it, had to stay away to finish writing this post

app.wombo.art Give it a prompt, pick a style, and the machine will hallucinate art for you.

📈 Business Side

Presentations — Benedict Evans Evan’s yearly presentation “exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry” (aka: what VCs would pay top dollar for)

The Architecture of a Web 3.0 application This is a good intro to the architecture and tooling of Web 3.0 circa 2021.

Personally, I think the whole web3 is a fig leaf on the crypto scam, and it will have the lifespan of … remember Marimba and Pointcast? (No doubt some people will make buckets of money before the trough)

You see, when they say web3 is “distributed”, what they really mean is web3 is “highly and unreasonably replicated”. Copying your data to every single node has immense storage costs. And nobody wants to pay $75 in ETH gas fees each time they upload a selfie. So unless you’re trading crypto or NFTs, your day-to-day usage of the web will be void of web3.

The whole “web3” framing is there to give crypto legitimacy. You see, crypto sounds “hackery”, and the idea of a secondary financial system scares governments. They want to regulate it.

What governments don't want to do is regulate innovation and get out-competed. And if “web3” is “the inevitable future of the web” — which it absolutely is not, but politicians don't know any better — that's how you keep regulators away. Brilliant lobbying, as this CNBC news segment makes very clear — watch to the very end.

🔒 Locked Doors

Log4Shell: RCE 0-day exploit found in log4j2, a popular Java logging package This dropped Friday and ruined the weekend plans for so many people:

Many, many services are vulnerable to this exploit. Cloud services like Steam, Apple iCloud, and apps like Minecraft have already been found to be vulnerable.
…
Simply changing an iPhone's name has been shown to trigger the vulnerability in Apple's servers.

The Popular Family Safety App Life360 Is Selling Precise Location Data on Its Tens of Millions of Users Because, of course.

Life360, a popular family safety app used by 33 million people worldwide, has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children’s movements using their cellphones. The Markup has learned, however, that the app is selling data on kids’ and families’ whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers who have sold data to virtually anyone who wants to buy it.

Verizon May Have Just Enrolled You in a Data-Collection Scheme “The mobile carrier is reportedly gathering customers’ contacts, app usage, and location information.” — If you’re a Verizon customer, you probably want to opt-out.

⭐ None of the Above

Alexis Gay when someone asks "how was work today?"

Kaela the Owl Lady 🤣

I spent some time doing research on ADHD coping techniques and did you know that Arcadia trees can warn other trees of danger by emitting a cloud of ethylene gas

Jen Richards

Hey, in case you weren’t already feeling old today, I just heard an intern say they loved Succession’s “new weekly drop model” and that it was a smart way to get people hooked.

Rob N Roll “the grinch who stole christmas”

Shannon Sevigny 👇 This thread is gold:

What’s the professional way to say “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Like, Librumtinia:

And if you add on, "I do encourage you to test your hypothesis and see where it may lead" You've come up with a polite version of 'fuck around and find out.'