Weekend Reading — The tiger is out

hegemony snickett "...I think about how good this poem is at least twice a day."

Design Objective

meg "So here’s a thing I still have to remind myself basically every time I make an icon"

Matt Adereth Pro tip:

Radia Perlman told the perfect story about how engineers come up with solutions before understanding the problem:

"When my son was 3, he came to me crying 'my hand! my hand!'

I started kissing it. mwah mwah mwah 'Tell me what happened...'

'I got pee on it.'"

Scott Kerr "SPACE INVADERS (1978) concept art by its creator, Toshihiro Nishikado"

Tools of the Trade

Michael Feathers That would be a good default setting:

I wonder whether the path forward is to have git randomly reject commits with the polite message: “please think more about this.”

TablePlus Native Mac app for querying relational databases. Upcoming plugin for Redis.

automerge An implementation of CRDT for JSON-like data structures: automatically merge changes made concurrently by different users (also great for apps that run offline).

Davide Ciacco "I made a simple "evaporating" shader!"

Tet "Tet is a dumb thing that deletes all your tasks at the end of the day." Goldfish todo list.

Repairing the card reader for a 1960s mainframe: cams, relays and a clutch Throwback to when computers were mostly mechanical devices.

Web-end

💘chriseppstein This:

Reminder that the olds in web development will always think it’s bad that you don’t know the things they had to learn and consider important.

Your path can be different. Build cool things and you’ll learn how they work along the way as it becomes relevant. 🤙

Amelia Bellamy-Royds Yes:

I want to live in the world where this is the real reason for web browser's convoluted user-agent strings.

“Dearest server, I am Chrome, the 64th of that name, child of WebKit, grandchild of KHTML, a disciple of Gecko, follower of the great Mozilla/5.0, running on Windows NT 10”

Lines of Code

Pablo Antonio Taking the opportunity to post this again, so important:

The Four Rules of Simple Design (in order of importance):

1. Passes the tests
2. Reveals intention
3. No duplication
4. Fewest elements
   And, yes, "fewest elements" is last, which means you only minimize classes and methods if everything else satisfied

tony hawk's pro skater 3 When you have a bug in the code, but that’s ok because it masks another, more sinister bug.

Architectural

“Guys, we’re doing pagination wrong…” Using cursors to avoid leaky abstractions in pagination.

Steven Sinofsky Fantastic thread about software development, constraints, and the long view:

38/ Big projects, well-run are going to look across all systems and a long-term POV and develop a portfolio of what to do where/when. That’s how you get something like a new file system years in making to show. Or killer FaceID. Or all of a sudden have tons of cloud features.

Steven Sinofsky Also from the same thread:

39/ Ultimately at MS used to have Conversation 37:
• Eng wants to do nothing but fix code // BUG BUG
• Sales wants new product every year w/new quotas
• Press would like a new thing each month
• Techies —revisit core UI, add options on demand
• IT—no change, ever :-)

Phil Calçado Somewhere, someone must be doing this:

Someone just told me about a project that "goes beyond monorepos and squashes everything into a monocommit" and I can't even tell if they're joking...

Devoops

Developers On Call More ideas on how to manage on-call rotations without burn out.

Erik Haddad "I don't see anything about this in the manual ✈️#ua1175"

Peopleware

Your Cortex Contains 17 Billion Computers TIL Each pyramidal neuron is a two layer neural network. All by itself.

Nick Stenning My view as well:

Flat organisational structures do not exist. There are only organisations with visible structure and organisations with invisible structure.

Locked Doors

CryptoAUSTRALIA "Top tier social engineering"

Mac Privacy: Sandboxed Mac apps can record your screen at any time without you knowing TL;DR Any Mac app can take screenshots of your Mac silently, and use basic OCR software to read all text on the screen.

Plasma Desktop: Arbitrary command execution in the removable device notifier USB thumb drive naming vulnerability:

When a vfat thumbdrive which contains `` or $() in its volume label is plugged and mounted trough the device notifier, it's interpreted as a shell command, leaving a possibility of arbitrary commands execution. an example of offending volume label is "$(touch b)" which will create a file called b in the home folder.

Mark Burnett "cat in the middle" (via):

I caught my cat running out of my office with my yubikey in his mouth--a threat model I hadn't considered.

@helenvholmes "Yes, let's"

Techtopia

Tech’s Ethical ‘Dark Side’: Harvard, Stanford and Others Want to Address It Ethic classes should be part of Computer Science curriculum:

We need to at least teach people that there’s a dark side to the idea that you should move fast and break things,

John Hamill "What could possibly go wrong, Scronfinkle?"

None of the Above

Paul Bronks "And I looked, and behold, a pale horse. And its rider’s name was Death."

cheinsaw 😭

black cats are wonderful because you can stare into the void and not only does the void stare back, sometimes it trots up to you happily and begs for pats

the void is loud and wants chicken

Ellen Huet 😭

opportunity: two of your housemates take a trip

battle plan: rest of house bands together to convert their bedroom into an error-filled anthropological exhibit from the future

The White Darkness A solitary journey across Antarctica. Captivating, long read.

HUMOROUS ANIMALS "When your cat has a pet of its own"