Weekend Reading — People who are Very Computer

By Assaf Arkin – 20 Mar 2022 – View online →

Tech Stuff

Sema If you’re doing it right, code review is a great way to share knowledge and develop individual and team skills. Sema expands on that with a Chrome extension that has two interesting features.

One is a snippets library with search that allows you to quickly recall relevant information: code conventions, architecture decisions, best practices, relevant articles, etc.

Second is a way to quickly give feedback about the changes: is the code maintainable, performant, secure, etc? Developers can bring that feedback to their 1:1, performance review, etc.

It's all about fostering collaboration, building a feedback culture, and creating a better experience for mentoring and onboarding developers.

SCR-20220320-oip

tef ebooks mic drop …

thinking about that time i was in a meeting with amazon engineers, and my co-workers asked "what's serverless"

i said "per-request, not per-instance billing" and there was an awkward silence like all the hype had been let out of the room

Growth of human factors in application development This article was written 27 years ago — when the web was young, 17” monitors were big deal, and fully loaded PCs had 64MB — some buzzwords did not survive the test of time (RAD?), but practices have not changed much since (h/t Matt Van Itallie):

Programming has followed this track. People sometimes complain that with rapid, interactive programming, they actually make more errors in programming, and spend more time fiddling with their code. Yet it is almost impossible to peel developers away from their screens to desk-check or derive their work. Rapid feedback also has introduced Rapid Application Development as a technique for deploying software. The idea is simply to get the software out so fast that the users can be brought in a few days to comment on the software. Of course, days is a very long time for feedback, which provides the opening for paper and lo-tech user interface design.

Maybe because:

History has repeatedly shown that if a logical argument clashes with a cultural habit, the logical argument will probably turn out to be right, and the cultural habit chosen.

2313

Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall The progress on AI is not matching up to inflated expectations. This has happened before and will happen again, and this article goes over the history of deep learning, from the 80's to the present day, and the multiple hype/letdown cycles.

That Girl Kyle 🇺🇦

Forget naming your production branch something lame like "master" or "latest." Name it "The Limit" so you can always say "Push it to The Limit" instead of "deploy to prod."

taber "Very Computer"🤣

a popular myth is that people who are Very Computer have computers that work. nothing could be further from the truth. the Very Computer are capable of generating much more novel and fascinating ways to make computers not fucking work and exercise this capability wantonly

Eye for Design

Honest Portfolio — UX Designer Sigh.

Peoples

Managing Your Manager The textbook ideal manager doesn’t exist. Real managers vary in how they perceive and synthesize information, communicate, delegate, etc. You have to know how to manage your manager. This article explores the different management styles and how to deal with them:

We can all help our managers help us by more thoughtfully considering their goals, preferences, motivations, and style in the way we work with them.

I’ve come up with a set of questions to help you figure out what makes your manager tick, and some specific steps you can take to help them help you.

Also, check out this Twitter thread.

When war comes to work Just a reminder that Russia invaded Ukraine, that war is still raging, and people are dying. To the software industry, this is what we call "edge case": we didn't anticipate it, are not prepared for it, and most likely handling it wrong.

Caleb Scoville: “Why do people care what time people send them emails? It’s literally an asynchronous communication system. If you are one of those people who gets a notification when you get an email, why?”

William Pietri: “Oh, I know this one! Because power. If the sender has more power than the recipient, it can create expectations of quick responses and working at all hours. In that context, people with power (and those who are seen as representing power) should use delayed send.”

Don’t ask to ask, just ask <- this needs to be printed on a t-shirt or coffee mug and given to every new employee before they’re granted access to email/Slac:

The Workaday Life of the World’s Most Dangerous Ransomware Gang A Ukrainian researcher liberated 60K messages from inside the fearsome Conti ransomware group. Turns out, they operate just like every other tech company:

As with any workplace, Conti members get frustrated with their colleagues. People don’t reply to messages, they vanish while working (“he went to get a haircut”), and they complain about long working hours. “For my part, I do not agree with the idea that I should be in touch 24 hours,” Driver complained in March 2021. Working all hours of the day “is a direct path to burnout,” they

Everything Else

Barred and Boujee

God grant me the serenity to close all the tabs I'm never going to read
The courage to read the open tabs that really ought to be read
And the wisdom to know the difference