Published
Weekend Reading — Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0
Julien Kirch "When you discuss user stories points"
Design Objective
Bobby Laurie: PEOPLE: Listen to your flight attendants! ALMOST EVERYONE in this photo from @SouthwestAir #SWA1380 today is wearing their mask WRONG. Put down the phone, stop with the selfies.. and LISTEN. **Cover your NOSE & MOUTH. #crewlife #psa #listen #travel #news #wn1380
Ok so maybe if panicking people can't put on your weirdly-shaped cup thing right, ITS BEEN BADLY DESIGNED.
There's no nose notch, or elongated side, or anything that would suggest to a (currently scared shitless) person that it goes over your nose.
Tools of the Trade
I made a VGP (very good program) that makes it so it looks like I’m typing on slack whenever anyone else is typing, and stops when they stop.
Everyone loves it so far and doesn’t find it annoying at all!
11 Tips for Working on the iPad From which I learned things you can do with drag & drop, how to install custom fonts, type to Siri, and more. Related, Working on an iPad Pro as my main computer.
John Arundel On the nose:
Technical writing is 10% typing and 90% trying to think of good examples.
Clemens Vasters Blockchain are great at solving a problem you may not have, thread number 49824:
The specific combination of well-understood architectural building blocks that make up "blockchain" is very well applicable, but nearly exclusively applicable to all-around trustless global ledger accounting problem (e.g. "coins").
Rethinking GPS: Engineering Next-Gen Location at Uber Interesting read: why GPS location is so inaccurate in city centers, and how to improve accuracy using particle filters.
what idiot called it "YAML Parser Error" and not "A Series of Unfortunate Indents"
F A T A L - T λ C O "Firefox and Firefox Nightly"
Web-end
Unexpected token < in JSON at position 0 Ever wondered what this error message means?
🏎 Mario Kart: CSS 🏁 You can turn left and right, even switch drivers, all made with CSS and without a single line of JavaScript.
Lingua Scripta
Node v10.0.0 Major new release, with major support for promises: in the file system API, await for reading input streams, finally, and more. Time-travel debugging looks cool. See also.
Announcing npm@6 Another major release, and npm@6 will audit your dependencies:
Soon, every user of the npm Registry will begin receiving automatic warnings if you try to use code with a known security issue. npm will automatically review install requests against the NSP database and return a warning if the code contains a vulnerability.
Lines of Code
abstractionscon "What five words best describe programming?"
Nora Jones: "I can do this in five words"
Cassidy Williams:console.log('did this work?');
Sarah Mei: "Probably take about two weeks"
Clay Caviness: "Small change; no tests needed"
Joe Beda: "How did this ever work?"
type error: "error: expectedurl::Urlfoundurl::Url"
Assaf Re: timezones and failing tests:
Our servers run on Kiritimati time (UTC+14) …
Specifically to make tests fail. It’s the furtherest time zone we could find (from the US), and every new team member breaks the build at least once because of this.
Adam Bell “Excuse me, code quality check time”
Architectural
FoundationDB is Open Source FoundationDB is a distributed scalable transactional (ACID) key-value database. Very interesting, how it was developed to be testable:
FoundationDB team developed the database inside a deterministic simulation. They abstracted away IO operations like network and disk, which allowed injecting all kinds of faults while running clusters under the load inside an accelerated time.
Simon Brown Or as they say, weeks of code changes can save you an hour of architecture design:
A humble suggestion to anybody contemplating a greenfield microservices architecture, especially if you're replacing a monolithic "big ball of mud" that has become hard to work with ... draw some diagrams showing your proposed design.
Josh Butts 🙏 CTO’s Prayer:
God, grant me engineers to build the things I can’t buy, budget to buy the things I can’t build, and the wisdom to know the difference.
trcull Sales will continue until morale improves:
Not once in my 20 year career have I seen a sales person held accountable for selling something that doesn’t exist. And yet I’ve seen countless engineers held accountable for not delivering something that was sold that didn’t exist. My single biggest frustration with our industry
Adil Aijaz "My take: If you do one thing, do CI. If you do two things, do CI and trunk based development. If you do 3 things, do CI, trunk based dev, and feature flags."
Devoops
Dylan Tack Me. All the time.
Despite using AWS for a decade, I never get over that heart-stopping feeling when your console is inexplicably empty, and then you realize you're in the wrong region
Changelog "And you thought your production deploys were tricky..."
Peopleware
If you just message “hi” and nothing else I assume I’m getting fired We need to agree on how to use messaging/chat in a work enviornment:
She did this the other day and my heart immediately began racing. Why? I’m not sure. All she did was say hi, a perfectly legal and normal thing for anyone to say to anyone else …
It has at least partly to do with the fact that conversations online never really end or begin, so it’s immediately alarming that she is not just saying the thing she ostensibly intends to tell or ask me.
Valerie Woolard Srinivasan This as well:
My computer science professor in college had all of his TAs take the exams in half the allotted time.
If the didn't get 100% he changed the questions.
There's a lesson there for tech interviews.
Locked Doors
Kushagra Check your Trello board now, because:
Search for public Trello boards of companies, to find login credentials, API keys, etc. or if you aren't lucky enough, then you may find companies' Team Boards sometimes with tasks to fix security vulnerabilities
PranavDixit Thieving then phishing:
Remember how my iPhone got stolen by bikers who snatched it from my hand last week? I have reason to believe that the thieves are now trying to get me to reveal my iCloud password to reset it using an ingenious scam. It's useless to them without the iCloud password (thread)
CIA: Collect It All For the spy-curious, a card game based on the CIA's training game: Collection Deck.
Techtopia
Palantir Knows Everything About You Bonkers:
“Nefarious ideas became trivial to implement; everyone’s a suspect, so we monitored everything. It was a pretty terrible feeling.”
Todd Palino Related:
"Data is the new oil" is a phrase often heard in our world of late. Repeated again by Audi just now. This is a loaded statement, and those who use it don't seem to understand the implications.
GEDmatch, a tiny DNA analysis firm, was key for Golden State Killer case Police in California arrested a serial killer after 40 years, by matching crime-scene DNA to that of relatives, who uploaded their own DNA to a genealogy website:
"biggest tool was GEDmatch, a Florida-based website that pools raw genetic profiles that people share publicly. No court order was needed to access that site’s large database of genetic blueprints."
Seen at a Harbin restaurant: swinging cradle for your phone, I'm told to cheat the "10k steps/day" test & qualify for health insurance discounts, presumably while you relax, eat & drink more, or have another cigarette.
None of the Above
mike angiulo Well, that works:
Everyone at home kept watching Netflix using my profile. Messed up all my lists and history... so I renamed “Dad” to “Install Windows Updates Now.” Problem solved.
My therapist taught me to interrupt my anxious thinking with thoughts like: "What if things work out" and "What if all my hard work pays off?"
So, I'm passing that onto you wherever you are, whatever you're leaving, or whomever you're becoming.
Mark Constantine "A classic good news/bad news situation"
Neil Cremins Same here:
Current state of my inbox:
We’ve updated our privacy policy.
We’ve updated our privacy policy.
We’ve updated our privacy policy.
We’ve updated our privacy policy.
We’ve updated our privacy policy.
We’ve updated our privacy policy.
We’ve updated our privacy policy.
…
Frank Pallotta "This is like a painting from the Renaissance."
I keep asking kids what they want to do when they grow up and none have said 'answer emails' there's going to be a ton of disappointment when they find out
Sarah Rose "soooo, I no longer feel like a crazy person for losing random socks..."
The ethics of experimenting with human brain tissue Sounds like science fiction: scientists grow little brains in a dish, transplant human brain cells into lab animals.
omarcito "the weirdest and most satisfying video on earth"