Labnotes - Weekend Reading — Not another channel!

Of Interest

Introducing Shortwave: Actually Enjoy Your Inbox Shortwave looks dope. Like it or not, your email is a giant todo list. Shortwave embraces it. It got keyboard shortcuts for speeding through your inbox, markdown and emoji, pinning, snoozing, and … and … you can drag & drop emails to order them around!

For teams, it also has a conversation UI that feels like you're in Slack, using an email thread behind the scenes. I didn't get a chance to try it out yet, sorry, busy sorting my inbox!

Still missing features — no send later, no spam/trash, iPad app is portrait only — so not off GMail yet, but so far I am having a lot of fun using it. Let's see if the habit sticks.

The State of JS 2021 I like reading these yearly surveys. With the caveat that they're a popularity contest, but popularity does matter when it comes to the size of an ecosystem, hiring, learning resources, etc. Brian Rinaldi reminds us:

The one insight I had from the State of JavaScript survey was a reminder that there can be a huge gap between the tools developers say they want to work with & those they have to work with. Twitter/blogs tend to present the former

Take Angular for example The State of JS 2021: Front-end Frameworks

Running Scheduled Jobs I actually wrote a blog post this week, on how QueueRun manages your back-end’s scheduled jobs:

When I added scheduled jobs in QueueRun, I started with two simple goals:

1. Get me from "I need to run this job" to "in production" in under 2 minutes
2. Beyond that first-minute experience, make it easy to manage and monitor

DevToysMac is the macOS port of DevToys (Windows only), an app for base64 encoding, SHA256 hashing, UUID generating, JSON prettifying, Regexp testing, and many other common tasks.

Lily Scott Ouch but true:

if you're into JS dev, no matter your thoughts on ESM, some piece of text on this page will make you upset Pure ESM package

Fantastic jless is a command-line JSON viewer. You can use it with arrow keys and VIM shortcuts, collapse/expand objects, "smart case" search, with raw view and more condensed data view.

diagram.md GitHub now supports Mermaid diagrams in your markdown. Interestingly, GitHub implemented it so that you need client-side JavaScript to see the diagram, yet it doesn’t use client-side JavaScript to render the diagram. Apparently, iframes are making a comeback.

SecretAgent is a headless web browser designed specifically for web scraping. Built on Chrome and nearly impossible for websites to detect. Also includes session replay to help you create and debug scripts.

import agent from 'secret-agent';

(async () => {
  await agent.goto('https://example.org');
  const title = await agent.document.title;
  const intro = await agent.document.querySelector('p').textContent;
  agent.output = { title, intro };
  await agent.close();

  console.log('Retrieved from https://example.org', agent.output);
})();

The coordination stack Interesting thread about management, autonomy, and alignment. I particularly agree with this point: it's not enough to just agree on the general direction (North Star). The problem space is vast, you also need to agree on the path that takes you there. The dreaded but essential coordination costs.

8/ What I've learned since, way too slowly, is that companies are performing a monumental balancing act trying to decide what 98% of their problem space to focus, what to ignore, and how to ship.

That’s your strategy. And it’s complex, ambiguous, and changing.

Way cheaper and way faster … This print-it-yourself Raspberry Pi looks like a miniature Cray-1. Not only smaller, but energy saver, and faster to boot.

Slack diet Too many Slack channels? Try NOT ANOTHER CHANNEL: “This website is to help companies resist the urge of creating another channel by letting you do it here.”

This Week In Tech

Google Search Is Dying I'm not a fan of Reddit, the UI is just … not great … yet I'm using it more nowadays. Google Search is really not what it used to be:

Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface. So instead we resort to using Google, and appending the word “reddit” to the end of our queries.

SaaS Multiples Collapsing Fast This is just not a good year for tech stocks and equity:

At the end of every quarter, we publish SaaS multiples of publicly traded SaaS companies. It’s very important data since public market valuations do drive those in private markets. We’ve never published the data during a quarter, but the correction in SaaS multiples has been especially rapid. Below are the latest SaaS multiples as of this week.

Equity 101 for Software Engineers at Big Tech and Startups Related, if you have equity, this is a good time to re-evaluate your vesting and exercising strategy. The tax consequences (paper gains, AMT) will surprise you. And if you're considering taking a loan to exercise, read this thread first so you know what to expect.

For The Fun

Nice one Dad This single-purpose site will show a different dad joke each time you refresh the page.

Daniel Summers, MD How dare you call me out like that!

I finally completed an administrative task that has been hanging over my head for weeks. I took my about ten minutes of actual work/attention. I felt my anxiety drop like a rock as soon as it was finished.

I will learn nothing from this.

Richard Ngo

Octopuses are surprisingly intelligent, and reproduce at 1 year old. If we'd started a breeding program 50 years ago, we probably could've gotten them smarter than dolphins by now. A disappointing failure of the long-term mad science ecosystem.

What came first, the chicken or the round earth? linc: “the earth is not round nor flat. the earth is chicken tenders”

You're holding your phone wrong No, not like that. More that our hands were not designed for endless scrolling, and you end up with a smartphone pinkie:

“Our hand wasn’t designed to handle small objects.” Ideally, instead of zeroing our thumb in on a thin object, which loads the joint unfavorably, we want to “bring the thumb out into what we call abduction or away from the palm.”

John Moffitt “That moment at the flea market, when you realize you're looking at a vampire killing kit.”