2021#02 Readings
5 minutes read | 1041 words by Ruben BerenguelAnother week gone by, with a long list of readings seen pass.
This was a neat week: The 6th is a national holiday in Spain, so I took the 7th off. A 3-day week to come back from Christmas holidays is nice.
Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen
This is a long-form excerpt for a book appearing the 6th of Jauary. It has the classic mention of (the author interviewed him for the book) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and flow. Nothing ground-breaking, but the writing is good, the book might, too.
Assembly Nights
The author is focusing in very specific and deep ways. I’d probably dream of code if I followed his regime. Has happened before.
Building good habits in your life (and ditching bad ones)
It’s a solid summary of techniques to build habits. You can skip it if you have read James Clear’s Atomic Habits or B.J. Fogg’s Tiny Habits but it won’t hurt hearing how to strengthen habits one more time.
Curved Line Jellyfish
Amy Goodchild is an excellent generative artist. I was impressed by her curved line jellyfish (I always get strange artifacts when working with extremely low alpha in p5js) and wanted to see the trick. There is none! Just use the largest possible canvas, or so it seems from the write-up.
Wordle: The wildly popular word game explained
Probably you have played Wordle and in that case there is not much new in this article except why it exploded in popularity. Hint: the same Hotmail did.
Know how your org works
I find it very hard to put into words how important the information in this article is. If you are an individual contributor or manager in any kind of knowledge work position (doesn’t matter if it’s development, although it’s the underlying theme in the article) you have to read this.
🔈 Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
This is another book by Liz Wiseman (by the end of last year I listened to Impact Players), and is certainly one of the modern classics in management. I had started it in print and found it somewhat repetitive. Found it ideal as audiobook though.
Know your “One Job” and do it first
This was linked in the article above, and is worth your time as well. You are hired to do one job: anything else great you do at work doesn’t count at all if you are not performing the first one well.
Data to engineers ratio: A deep dive into 50 top European tech companies
This is a fascinating analysis of LinkedIn data (not sure how the author got it, though). Probably more so because Typeform appears prominently in the analysis, sitting in a comfortable position of having a similar ratio of engineers, data and design.
The Pacenotes Edition - Why is this interesting?
This comes from a daily newsletter I subscribe to, Why is this interesting?. Pacenotes are the notes copilots in rally cars use to get the driver to go fast. Very interesting indeed!
The Wardley Graph: A Non-Euclidean Wardley Map Embedding In Semantic Spacetime
I’m still not sure if this is great or bonkers yet, which means it’s very interesting for now.
🐦 I’ve been managing people remotely for 8 years. Here’s how to be a better manager in a remote (distributed) team - Thread by @Jobvo
A good thread, although weekly 30-60 minutes 1-1s may be too much in many cases, both for the manager and the report. I have always had them biweekly (as lead and as report).
Scan of the month: Gameboy original
Not only the GB, but the GB Color, GB Advance, DS and Switch are shown in this impressive scanning. Still not sure if they want to sell me something later, but last month’s Airpods were great and this is very good too.
Sonoma County farm finds first truffle
When it’s in season, we can find fresh truffles at the local farmer’s market. Once every so often we get one (last one just 3 weeks ago). It can be an acquired taste but a well-prepared dish can blow your mind. The best truffle dish I’ve ever had was white truffle pasta at Il Cinghiale Bianco in Florence.
Let a 1,000 flowers bloom. Then rip 999 of them out by the roots.
This is an essay-form of a talk from around mid-2015. A tweet by Gwen Shapira got me to read it, because it includes the line Soon we had three kinds of Scala written at Twitter: Scala written by people who wished it was Ruby, Scala written by people who wished it was Java, and Scala written by people who wished it was Haskell.
Wordle Is a Love Story
More on the origins of Wordle.
🐦 Thread by @cyber-cox about why logs are called logs
I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll just leave it at the title.
Why Scala Is Seeing A Renewed Interest For Developing Enterprise Software
I was drawn to the title of the article, but it is very poor; particularly for being in Forbes. TL;DR: The author owns a training company and has seen more requests for Scala training. Re-checked the language (last time was in 2008) and found it cool with its functional/OOP freedom.
My Favorite Liar - A Shrewd and Cunning Teacher
This is a wonderful story. A teacher, to focus their students in each session told them there would be a lie in each lecture. Then it was their goal to find it before the lecture ended…
