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Blog posts, links, and more that I found good/interesting.

November 2020
October 2020
September 2020

November 2020

Make Your Test Fail

Watch "Make Your Test Fail" on egghead.io Have you ever seen a test go green and be surprised? You expect it to fail, but it somehow passes and you don't know why. When that happens, do you: Thank the testing gods for their blessing and move on? Figure out what's going on?

kentcdodds.com

History's 7 Craziest Heists, From The Delivery Guy Who Robbed A Bank To The Theft Of The Mona Lisa

From ingenious bank robberies, and that time a couple of malicious thieves fastened a collar bomb around a pizza delivery guy's neck, to the elaborate mafia-backed Lufthansa Heist, these are the most astonishing grafts in recent history.

allthatsinteresting.com

History's 7 Craziest Heists, From The Delivery Guy Who Robbed A Bank To The Theft Of The Mona Lisa

The Nine Phases of an Open Source Project Maintainer

There is more to running an open source project than writing code. In fact most of all work has to do with something else. This places additional requirements to project maintainers that are often not talked about. In this post we'll briefly go over nine distinct phases each with a different hat one might have to wear.

nibblestew.blogspot.com

Been there.

What Should Be Done About Social Media?

One of the most basic and urgent policy questions is how to tackle the rising role of social media in our public sphere. As social media has proliferated across the globe, societies have had to grapple with its implications for both exercising and constraining speech.

m-cacm.acm.org

Who knows?

My Priceless Summer on a Maine Lobster Boat

During her college break, the author went all in on solitude-living alone on a Down East island and working for one of the area's few female skippers. Luna Soley reflects on a time of loneliness, hard work, and natural beauty.

www.outsideonline.com

My Priceless Summer on a Maine Lobster Boat

Hungry for more lobstah

psql command line tutorial and cheat sheet

You've installed PostgreSQL. Now what? I assume you've been given a task that uses psql and you want to learn the absolute minimum to get the job done. This is both a brief tutorial and a quick reference for the absolute least you need to know about psql.

tomcam.github.io

Postgres continues to only get better with age

Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

I have a small side project: digital gift cards for hackers. It uses Shopify for all the store-related stuff: frontend, payments, refunds, reports, etc. But unlike regular digital products (ebooks, videos) I wanted each card that the user purchases from the store to be unique.

frantic.im

Moving my serverless project to Ruby on Rails

Another serverless horror story

Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data

I gave a talk yesterday about personal data warehouses for GitHub's OCTO Speaker Series, focusing on my Datasette and Dogsheep projects. The video of the talk is now available, and I'm presenting that here along with an annotated summary of the talk, including links to demos and further information.

simonwillison.net

Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data

I need one of these

Doomsday prepping for less crazy folk

The prepper culture begs to be taken with a grain of salt. In a sense, it has all the makings of a doomsday cult: a tribe of unkempt misfits who hoard gold bullion, study herbalism, and preach about the imminent collapse of our society. Today, we see such worries as absurd.

lcamtuf.coredump.cx

Just some light reading

Geek Blight

As you may know, as of the time this text is being written youtube-dl's repository at GitHub is blocked due to a DMCA takedown letter received by GitHub on behalf of the RIAA.

rg3.name

History of another OSS project put to rest by powers out of the authors' control

How to Recalculate a Spreadsheet

Let's say I'm ordering burritos for my two friends while they quar up in Jersey City, and want to calculate the total price of my order: It's a little confusing to follow the flow of data in a spreadsheet when it's written like that, so I hope you don't mind this equivalent diagram that represents it as a graph: We're rounding the cost of an El Farolito super vegi burrito to $8, so assuming the per-burrito delivery toll remains at just $2 per burrito, it looks like the total for our two burritos will be $20.

lord.io

For anyone who wants to reimplement Excel

Architecture Playbook

nocomplexity.com

Need to read this!

Understanding Statistical Power and Significance Testing

Type I and Type II errors, β, α, p-values, power and effect sizes - the ritual of null hypothesis significance testing contains many strange concepts. Much has been said about significance testing - most of it negative. Methodologists constantly point out that researchers misinterpret p-values.

rpsychologist.com

Understanding Statistical Power and Significance Testing

Someone please explain this to me slowly

How to Identify Destructive Leadership Patterns

In many aspects of our lives, we rely on those in positions of power to lead us. The role of leaders becomes especially salient in times of uncertainty. Throughout your life, you've probably seen several ways leaders can respond to challenging and ambiguous situations.

articles.tilt365.com

How to Identify Destructive Leadership Patterns

Comic sans aside, a good alignment chart

A Spectre is Haunting Unicode

In 1978 Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced.

www.dampfkraft.com

幽霊文字!

October 2020

Why Are the Noses Broken on Egyptian Statues?

Edward Bleiberg's essay first appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt at the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri. The exhibition is based on objects from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. * * * "Why are the noses broken?"

hyperallergic.com

Why Are the Noses Broken on Egyptian Statues?

Russia's Retro Lenin Museum Still Runs on Decades-Old Apple II Computers

The versatility of the Apple II made it one of the most widespread personal computers of the 1970s and 80s. In schools, labs, and even command centers, these classic American computers kept a foothold even after the advent of more advanced machines.

www.atlasobscura.com

Russia's Retro Lenin Museum Still Runs on Decades-Old Apple II Computers

Radio Spectrum

Summary A new investigation argues that the politics is delaying much-needed electric grid unification Show Notes Electricity is the key to modern life as we know it, and yet, universal, reliable service remains an unsolved problem. By one estimate, a billion people still do without it.

share.transistor.fm

Ruby one-liners cookbook

This chapter will give an overview of ruby syntax for command line usage and some examples to show what kind of problems are typically suited for one-liners. I assume you are already familiar with use cases where command line is more productive compared to GUI. See also this series of articles titled Unix as IDE.

learnbyexample.github.io

The failed promise of Web Components

Web Components had so much potential to empower HTML to do more, and make web development more accessible to non-programmers and easier for programmers. Remember how exciting it was every time we got new shiny HTML elements that actually do stuff?

lea.verou.me

Understanding How UUIDs Are Generated

You've likely used UUIDs in projects before and assumed them to be unique. Today, we'll take a look at the main aspects of the implementation and understand why UUIDs are practically unique, though an incredibly small potential for duplication exists.

digitalbunker.dev

Knolling

Software development is a craft. We tend to call it "engineering", but most of the time, it feels more like plumbing or carpentry. Most of the time, completing a task does not require any inventiveness.

andri.yngvason.is

Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet

In 1989, David Bailey, a researcher in the field of clinical pharmacology (the study of how drugs affect humans), accidentally stumbled on perhaps the biggest discovery of his career, in his lab in London, Ontario. Follow-up testing confirmed his findings, and today there is not really any doubt that he was correct.

www.atlasobscura.com

Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet

An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

Mockapetris considers the current state of the DNS and its future in a world where countries are seeking to build their own intranets.

www.welcometothejungle.com

An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

September 2020

How I operated as a Staff engineer at Heroku

I was incredibly lucky to spend 5 amazing years at Heroku. By the end of my time, I was operating in a Staff capacity, although I'm honestly completely unclear which titles at Salesforce actually map to Staff. Because titles are unclear and because my role was a little amorphous, I chose not to submit a story to Will Lethain's great collection at StaffEng.com.

amyunger.com

The surprising traits of good remote leaders

Fifteen years ago, Steven Charlier, chair of management at Georgia Southern University in the US, had a hunch that in-person charisma and leadership skills don't translate virtually. "Before I became an academic, I worked for IBM for a number of years on a lot of virtual teams," he says.

www.bbc.com

The surprising traits of good remote leaders

Jugaad takes agile to the extreme

Introduction Jugaad is an attitude towards delivery which originated in India and consists of three simple tenets: Humility: use whatever works without prejudiceOpenness: keep your options openFrugality: small expenses keep regrets small Jugaad is agility taken to the extreme and most suitable for projects with a high degree of change, risk and uncertainty.

blog.georgovassilis.com

Disrespectful Design-Users aren't stupid or lazy

It's a common narrative in tech to design products with the assumption that users are stupid and lazy. I think that is both disrespectful and wrong. The idea is rooted in a lot of research around product usability, but it has been bastardized. Think of it as a perversion of the Don't Make Me Think...

somehowmanage.com

Disrespectful Design-Users aren't stupid or lazy

Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent Two years ago, Microsoft sank a data centre off the coast of Orkney in a wild experiment. That data centre has now been retrieved from the ocean floor, and Microsoft researchers are assessing how it has performed, and what they can learn from it about energy efficiency.

www.bbc.com

Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years

How HTTPS works

🙀 A cat explains how HTTPS works...in a comic! 😻

howhttps.works

199: Toxicity in Tech with Amy Newell

04:31 - Amy's Superpower: Search Algorithms and Finding Things Finding Things in Code Visual vs Spacial Awareness 08:39 - Toxic Masculinity and Hierarchies in Engineering Roles 14:22 - Measuring Skill Advancement The Individual Contributor (IC) vs Manager Track Management vs Mentorship 21:02 - Congressive vs Ingressive 22:43 - Ways Toxicity Shows Up in The Workplace 29:07 - Unlearning and Psychological Safety 37:07 - The Word "Nontechnical" Respecting Expertise Skilled/Unskilled Labor: All Labor is Skilled Labor!

www.greaterthancode.com

Internet: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

Every morning at 7am when the second hand TV was switched on, the village internet went down.

www.bbc.com

Internet: Old TV caused village broadband outages for 18 months

Harassers are nice to me, and probably to you

In any organization, there will be people who behave inappropriately, sometimes grievously so. Here's the paradox: the more senior the role you're in, and the more power you have to help coworkers who are facing awful behavior like harassment or bullying, the less likely you are to see those things.

leaddev.com

Harassers are nice to me, and probably to you

Increment: APIs

This issue explores all things APIs-from their prehistory to their future, their design and development to their opportunities and impacts.

increment.com

Ruby adds experimental support for Rightward assignments

This blog post discusses the support for Rightward assignments in ruby. Historically, all of the early programming languages were designed by Mathematicians. It's a common practice in mathematics to say let x = 4y + z, which is read as let x be equal to 4y + z.

blog.saeloun.com

Alien signals

I have memories of long-ago Sunday nights on the road, my sister and I drowsing in the back seat, our parents driving us home from a visit to our grandparents, all ears turned in the darkness toward a public radio show called Hearts of Space.

www.robinsloan.com