Things I Like
-
Years later, a wise friend said he found the more interesting people tend to be ones who can’t exactly describe what they do day to day. Instead, of forcing prescription, let’s embrace 'and.'
-
I want to defend it not because it’s a particularly beautiful tower, but because of the idea it represents. Parisians panicked when they saw it, and when they abandoned the tower they also abandoned the idea of a high-density sustainable city. Because they exiled all future high rises to some far neighborhood like La Défense, they were segregating growth.
I saved this link because I love the way the architect talks about the building in Paris. We are going through a huge building boom in Portland, and because we limit sprawl and growth, it means lots of new buildings in old neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods, like mine, are changing, but I'm not sure it's for the worse. It's just change. And I, for one, would rather encourage density and deal with the change.
-
Digital devices are not eating away at our brains. They are, however, luring us toward near constant outwardly directed thought, a situation that’s probably unique in human experience. A flat cap on time with devices — the restriction we first think of for ourselves and our kids — might help. So would parking devices in another room for a while. But it would be more effective if we could learn to recognize in ourselves when escape from our thoughts is O.K. and when reflection is in order. As a bonus, judgments like that require inwardly directed attention, a mental habit that in our smartphone era, we’d be dumb to lose.
I've been going through a bit of a step away from devices and from the internet in general when I'm not working. What I've found, my mind has time for rest and ideas form. It's been good, and it's been my choice. I don't think the devices are doing anything to us, they are just pointing out that we lack the will power to step away from them.
-
I think the biggest policy is to assume a remote stance by default: that is, assume everyone is remote all the time and behave accordingly, accommodating people in offices as need be, rather than the reverse. In practice that primarily means leveraging written communication (whether asynchronous, like email or shared docs, or synchronous, such as chat) over oral, since writing is easier to transmit, archive, and reference later.
-
He then gave an example of what this narrative can do to people. At the University of Kansas's geographic information system (GIS) day a few years ago, he sat in on a "fantastic presentation" about predicting seasonal floods on the Kansas River. The student had used tools that should be familiar to many of those at PyCon: Amazon Web Services, Linux, PostgreSQL, Python, Django, GeoDjango, and so on. Kaplan-Moss was hiring at the time, and she (the student) had just written thousands of lines of Python, so he asked if she wanted to interview for his company. Her response was that she couldn't do that, because she "was not really a programmer". That came from a woman who had just invented her own distributed GIS data processing pipeline, he said—but she's not really a programmer. That's because "programming is something you are in this myth, not something you do".
Really interesting read on how we talk about programming, and how we should be talking about it.
-
The weird thing about removing a chunk of time from our weekly calendar is that, as far as I can tell, we do the same amount in a week as everyone else. Work gets done, deliverables get delivered. No client has ever cared that we’re not available for calls on Tuesday mornings.
I adore this idea. When I freelanced, Fridays were my day. I usually did admin in the morning and generally caught up on little things so I could start on Mondays with things squared away. But the afternoons, they were mine. I would read, write, relax, explore Portland, or whatever else I wanted to do. I think it's beneficial to have this time and would love to work out a way to do this in my current job, even if just for a couple of hours to recharge.
-
I am frightened sometimes by the thought that a student would complain again like he did in 2009. Only this time it would be a student accusing me not of saying something too ideologically extreme — be it communism or racism or whatever — but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that's considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, "Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated." Hurting a student's feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.
-
That's the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip — but it is the future of software. When you're ready to take the next step — when you have to write perfect software instead of software that's just good enough — then it's time to grow up.
This whole article is fantastic and I am grateful to Rob for the link. I had a hard time picking out a quote, so picked the above, but there is also a fantastic section on mistakes and how a mistake isn't owned by one person since the team reviewed code and it was allowed to get to the point of error. I really like that idea, the idea of things being a team effort, truly. And the rise of Gitblame, in my opinion, can be harmful for the team attitude when it comes to writing software.
-
It’s routine from the cockpit to see storms form in real time, and from them the fall of new rain on the roof of the ocean, or to overfly the endpoints of glaciers, where shards of the ancient snow-glass tumble into the police-light blue of northern seas. When, after long hours over desert or sparsely inhabited land a city appears, the water we see near it — lakes, dams, rivers locked in their rolling green frames of vegetation — looks holy as blood.
I really love this piece and the way the pilot describes his point of view on flying. So very different from what we experience in our seats. I've started to be much more nervous about flying lately and it coincides with having to do it more than ever, so it was nice to be reminded of the amazing parts of it all.
-
This is a great podcast on how tech was used in the 2012 US Presidential election. But more than that, I really love the way Harper Reed talks about how we talk about tech. He makes so many great points, so much to think about.
-
The "web" is not a part of nature. It was not discovered; we don't have to just accept it. The "web" is an infrastructural system that was built by people, and it was built very recently and very sloppily. It currently has the property that it forgets what must be remembered, and remembers what must be forgotten. It manages to screw up both the sacredness of the common record and the sacredness of private interaction.
-
Whereas the mega-machine operated by violent means—forcibly divorcing the human-cogs of identity and absorbing their productive and creative energies through wage or slave labor—the mega-algorithm doubles back and promises you reunification with this alienated self through “authentic” (or “creative” or “social”) work completed on your own time. We are sold a desirable narrative about the wealth of networks, decentralized production, cognitive surplus, collaborative consumption, social engagement, and instant convenience. The techno-utopic discourses of emancipation and community that surround the technologies and sociopolitics that make up the mega-algorithm serve as an effective ideological veil, which shrouds the practices of exploitation and control. Don’t think of yourself as an overworked, underpaid laborer trying to hustle for a paycheck. No, you’re actually an entrepreneurial individual, building your personal brand and finding (or making) your niche in the marketplace.
-
You want some advice: stop reading advice articles. Advice from someone you do not know is not advice at all it’s just another opinion (yes I realize the irony of that sentence). Do you really need more opinions in your life? Formulate your opinions from doing, not from reading how others do.
I wish two things: one, that people would write articles with more caring and not as if they are law and two, that we would be able to read them that way instead of feeling like we are doing something wrong.
-
It’s time to recognise that this is the wrong approach. We shouldn’t try to compete with native apps in terms set by the native apps. Instead, we should concentrate on the unique web selling points: its reach, which, more or less by definition, encompasses all native platforms, URLs, which are fantastically useful and don’t work in a native environment, and its hassle-free quality.
YES! This is the key part of that quote for me “concentrate on the unique web selling points”—let's start concentrating on the parts of the web that are unique. As my friend Jason Grigsby has said time and time again, you can't link into a native app, but you can link to the web
-
There needs to be a cultural change in how we approach building for the web. Yes, some of the tools we choose are part of the problem, but the bigger problem is that performance still isn’t being recognised as the most important factor in how people feel about websites (and by extension, the web). This isn’t just a developer issue. It’s a design issue. It’s a UX issue. It’s a business issue. Performance is everybody’s collective responsibility.
I've been thinking a lot about the topic of performance on the web and how to change culture. I hear a lot of people talk about the need for culture change, but I hear very little about how the developer who cares goes about doing that. So, while I'm grateful people are talking about performance so much, I wish a little bit of that conversation focused more on the how of culture change.